To be frank ... oh, wait, Frank’s my father. To be honest, I don’t like this method for afew of reasons. First, it’s time consuming. Second, stuff tends to fall out of pocket fold-
ers. Third, you’re asking the journalist to re-key all your copious copy. I mentioned doing
what you can to make things easier for them. So, it seems hard copies are somewhat
counter-productive.
Digital Form
Perhaps it’s because I’m a certifiable geek who sits in front of a computer for 16 or so
hours each day, but I like digital. It’s just plain ‘ole easier and usually less costly.
Create a folder and call it “My Band Press Kit,” (where “My Band,” is your band’sname. Duh!) mostly because that’s what it’s for and put it on your desktop. Depending on
how much content you have, you may want to create sub folders for your images, graph-
ics, pdfs of flyers and other printed material such as posters and ads, along with various
content sections.
Take all the content that you created digitally in the first place and save it to the
proper spot within your press kit folder. Although Word is the standard, you might con-
sider something more generic like RTF format, just in case. PDFs are handy to and pretty
much a standard these days. You don’t want to lose a press opportunity because a writer is
on some whiz-bang proprietary publishing software and couldn’t open your files or copy
and paste your brilliant content.
You’re going to burn the folder contents to a disk, so you want to give some quality
thought to a disk label and a jewel case cover. If you have stellar graphic design skills,
that others will agree with, do it yourself. If not, you really should hire a designer. Sure,
it’s cost you some clams, but hey, we’re talking image here. This isn’t a place to skimp.