I've just been directed to this page by Jason Bailey & have to say I'm really touched that you guys care so much to help out in this way. When PWEI took the totally independent route it felt nice to have all that freedom, but the amount of work is colossal, particularly on the promoting/marketing side of things. There are a lot of promotions companies out there and I can see why. They make a profit, the band's generally don't. From my experiments with promoting/advertising, I see that it has some effect but ends up with a negative balance sheet, so I've pretty much knocked paid promotions on the head. As bands we're always encouraged to 'widen our fanbase' and 'get to the next level' which I fully understand, but after years of going through that, I now understand it to be a euphemism for 'spend money' and 'get into debt'.
I look after my 2 daughters on a daily basis so consequently can't get anywhere near the amount of promo I would like to do for the album. Everything's a learning curve & I'm making a lot of mistakes but hopefully everyone understands the band is not a full-time paid job like it used to be, but we do our best. Jason does an enormous amount of work for me on the internet side of things and Paul Snell with artwork/design, particularly on my solo stuff. They're legends - and with you guys getting involved, it helps pull it up 'another level' or two - which is fantastic.
Video is undoubtedly an area we could do with tapping into - it has a huge audience. A proper video costs us at least £500 a time though. So like promotions and marketing you can soon be spending more money than you can expect back in sales. So what we can do is release some live footage of the new tracks and maybe do some lip synching etc & if anybody wants a pop at making their own vid, that would be absolutely ace. What I've got to look at now is where we can host all these ideas; remixes, videos. We'll need more storage space for sure.
But thanks for caring & wanting to help the band out. It's truly, truly appreciated, thanks all.
Graham.