I’m a gigging musician. It takes a lot of effort to get gigs and keep my gigging calendar full. I spend hours each week calling venues, researching gigging opportunities, sending out emails, following up with people I’ve reached out to and advancing shows. People don’t realize that gigging is not just showing up at your show and putting on a spectacular performance. Performing is only a small percentage of being a musician. A larger percentage of your time goes to doing administrative work, marketing and promoting, maintaining your website, scouting for yourself, and keeping your network engaged.
It can be a full-time job.
When I’m heavy in booking mode, I typically spend up to 2 hours a day completing various booking tasks. Two hours is actually on the low end. It could be more. A lot more. Doing booking 5 days a week at that pace amounts to 10 hours per week. If you’re a gigging musician, I’m sure you don’t have to imagine the amount of information and details you can typically uncover in just one week of booking work.
Needless to say, keeping track of your booking efforts can be a challenge.
Over the years, I’ve used several methods but there is one way to track my efforts I’ve found the most helpful.
The Booking Call Logbook for Musicians!
This book helps you keep a convenient record of all activities associated with booking gigs. It is specifically created for performing musicians and helps keep track of calls, emails, conversations, and any outreach made related to booking gigs. I use it to keep all my booking efforts in one place. There is a space for details such as name of venue, venue location, how you first made contact, name of person/contact, phone number, email address, compensation details, how the venue responded or if they responded at all, when you should follow up and more.
There is ample space to jot down the status of each call you make or email sent and what your next steps are. I have highlighters that I use to help me organize priority venues, or contacts I need to follow up with so I can quickly address those at a glance.
In organizing my booking efforts, the main details I like to keep track of are as follows…
- Venue location and contact information.
- Calls and when they are made.
- Emails and when they were sent.
- When I need to follow up with a contact
- All previous follow up attempts and what transpired.
- Venue response (if any).
- Requirements and details such as ‘does shows on Sundays and Thursdays’, etc.
The Booking Call Log for Musicians does all that and more! I love it because it is clean and makes me feel organized. I used to have sheets of paper with details scribbled down in a not-so-organized fashion. Then I moved to spreadsheets in the cloud. The spreadsheet was better, but having the details physically written down in the book gives me more of a sense of accomplishment and I find that I can access it quicker because it’s right on my desk as opposed to a file I’ve got to search for on my computer.
I highly recommend this book because in addition to helping you stay organized in your booking efforts, it…
- provides accountability. Just having it lay around in my office makes me want to fill it out and feel accomplished.
- keeps you motivated. After filling out some pages, I feel accomplished. It inspires me to keep going because like I said earlier, I don’t have a lot of motivation to do it. But I know it needs to be done if I want to keep gigs on my calendar.
- helps you keep track of small wins and accomplishments. There is a space at the bottom of each entry asking if you booked the gig and the date of your gig. I like to highlight that in pink if I was able to book the gig. Seeing pink marks throughout the book just makes me feel really good. 🙂
Get the Booking Call Log for Musicians
- Plenty of space to jot down notes from booking calls
- Special section under each entry dedicated to tracking booked gigs
- 150 pages
- Appealing musically-inspired cover design
- A large size (8.5” x 11”) notebook that can be kept in your office or carried on the go
Overall the Booking Call Logbook for Musicians has changed the way I do booking. It’s helped me stay organized, become more efficient, and work through my booking tasks more quickly. Booking is not something I am enthused about doing every day. But having this book makes it a lot more manageable. If you’d like a copy of the book, you can get yours here.
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