If you are an independent musician, contacting presenters is a part of your daily life. Apparently, it sounds as easy as calling someone and introducing yourself. But in fact, it is much more complicated than it looks. Contacting an institution or a festival to book a concert is often an obstacle course we, musicians, are not accustomed to. I will try here to give you some tips to improve your approach with presenters.

1. Know your “customer”. Since you can not contact everyone, you have to make a choice. Gather information about your potential prospects and evaluate whether or not you could fit their plans. Contacting an opera festival to book a violin-piano duo is a non-sense. With a good targeting, you will avoid plenty of rejection and loss of time and money.

2. Contact the right person at the right time. All the festivals or seasons have their own schedule. For each potential organizer you need to know who handles the booking of artists and when are the good times to contact him/her. Sending a promotional kit to the wrong contact or after the deadlines often lead to the same result: At best your kit will be forgotten in a drawer somewhere, at worst it will be immediately discarded.

3. Have something to sell. Put yourself in the presenter’s shoes: Why should they book me and not someone else? What are the benefits for him/her? What am I offering? Would my proposal be really interesting for a presenter?

4. Prepare your pitch call. Write down what you have to say in order to not babble on the phone and stay understandable. Moreover, you will not forget anything. Practice with a friend to be comfortable with your pitch calls. This seems unnecessary, you do know your product well, but believe me, you can easily be disturbed and lose the thread.

5. Be persistent without becoming boring. You’ll rarely reach the person you want at you first call. You can leave messages, but most presenters get far too many cold calls and are far too busy to return them. 3 calls are enough: if after 3 attempts to interest them you still get nothing, move on. Keep the presenter on your mailing list and invite him/her to performances in his/her area and send information about the major events of your career. I call this the passive prospection.

Booking concerts is an exhausting process. We musicians have not been trained for it and we must learn to introduce and sell ourselves. This is far from easy, and for some of us became a full time job. But some have achieved great carrers while being self-managed, so why not you?