Who books your gigs?

Emp_Fab

Are you mostly with agencies or do you hawk your wares in person / cold calling ?

simonk

I do, mostly. Private functions tend to come through recommendations and having seen us at a public gig. We are on the books for one agency that gets us the occasional holiday park gig.

simonk

Lemonrock is worth looking at too. As much as I don’t really care for the design and implementation of it, it does work at pulling the gigs in as venues tend to look at who’s playing at their local ‘competition’, and it gives a rough idea of when you’re available or not. It also keeps a handy list of your gigs which can be output to a shared calendar and widgets for embedding in websites.
For example:
http://www.thesupernatural.band/

not_the_dj

A mixture. A few via an agent, but’s it a frustrating blanket e-mail he sends to loads of bands “who’s available for xyz”. Still the gigs we do get from him are usually at places we wouldn’t have known about otherwise. 

Mostly our gigs are repeat bookings. We have enough regular venues to keep us gigging at the rate we want (average 2 a month). Plus a couple of new places from cold calling. 

EricTheWeary

In the end most of ours where with an agency that booked on behalf of a pub chain - so we did the circuit of their pubs. Before that cold calling.
I had spoken to agencies but they either weren't interested or were only interested if we could be as flexible as they wanted. We could have played a lot of gigs but often short notice and/ or long distances and we weren't interested. 
If you are a weekend warrior type band as we were it's just calling around. Probably more useful than that some venues like to be active on Facebook so if you PM through there you get to the right person which almost never happens over the phone. 

Roland

We book our own. A lot of them are repeat bookings. We’ve tried “agents”, but it took as much effort dealing with them as it takes to make the bookings ourselves.

p90fool

People message us on our Facebook page or ask us in person at gigs.

We haven't asked anyone for a gig for three years, in fact we turn down quite a few because of existing bookings.

It did take a couple of year's worth of hard work to get to that point though, almost exclusively done by me and the singer. 

We have two members of our five piece who've never got us a gig and don't seem interested.