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[dazmann]

I live in the UK and often see Jeff when he's on tour with the band, but I often find that the shows are not that well advertised.

For example, I work very near a university campus, and Jeff, often plays in the city centre nearby, but the venue promoter doesn't stick up any posters at the Uni. I would have thought this was missing an opportunity to let the students know about the gig. (A loss for them...)

It got me thinking.. Jeff, why don't you upload the relevant gig poster alongside the dates on your tour schedule on the website.

I'm sure some of your loyal fans (in each particular area) wouldn't mind printing off a few posters and putting them at the local uni campus, main record shop, live music venue etc.

It would also be nice to see the gig posters - which are often great designs too,

What do you think?

[silverwood]

This seems like a really good idea to me.
I'd be more than willing to print off a few copies here in the UK and post them around!
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[jefflewis]

Hi guys!
I do a lot more of this sort of thing in the USA, which is much worse at promoting shows than the UK is, at least for me... what I do is I'll send a message to my email list before a tour and ask if anybody would be willing to put up posters in their town (whatever towns/cities I'm playing in on the tour), and whoever says yes I mail them a pack of about 30-50 posters for them to hang up in that area, and I put them on the guest list to thank them for their work. Of course I am only ASSUMING that they actually put the posters up! And it's a lot of work and some money, for me to make all these copies of the posters and mail them out to all the people, and keep a list of who to send to, and a list of who to put on the guest lists each night during the tour! Some cities it ends up being sort of a lot, like in Chicago on my last tour, there were about 8 people who had volunteered to do postering, so that was a lot of posters to send to CHicago and a lot of people to put on the guest list! But I think it's always a good thing to do, I think it really helps. For my show in Brooklyn last week with Seth Faergolzia and LA Boobs I put up about 170 posters in the neighborhood where the show was happening, and I think it helped.
I've never tried doing this for shows overseas because it would be too expensive to mail out posters to foreign countries. And it seems like a lot to ask of people to put up posters AND print the posters, that's not just asking for their time but asking for their money too, the printing costs!

[dazman]

Jeff - my idea was that you'd upload a PDF of the poster to you website, and the volunteers would print some off themselves.

My thinking is that your fans probably know your target audience better than the promoters, so shouldn't need to print off many.

These posters would just supplement what the promoter does anyway - they would just be better positioned..

It wouldn't take much effort on your side - just scan and upload the poster. If it doesn't work there's no great loss.

[jefflewis]

That's true, that would be the easiest way for me to do it... just have a downloadable poster... but would people really just take it upon themselves to download it and make copies and hang them up? I feel that's asking such a big favor! And not even directly asking, just hoping that people will do it, without me even emailing with them personally! Well, maybe some people would do it. And every little thing is a big help!
The other thing is that each person would have to write in the individual show info themselves... because if I'm sending the posters personally to people, I fill in the info myself, like the venue and the date and the price and the time and all that... but if there's just a general tour poster available for download each person downloading and printing would have to do the extra work to write in the specific show info for the area they'd be hanging in!