One of the really cool things about NERFA is that people from all areas of the folk world offer their services as mentors. This time participants were allowed to sign up in advance for two mentoring session, and I’ve now had both of mine. The first person I met with was someone who works in artist management and booking. She looked at my promo material and we talked through where I was in my music career and where I wanted to get to. She had some words of encouragement – things I played down when talking to her that she said I should be proud of. For instance, having just shared showcases at the conference with people whose CDs had gotten to number 2 or 3 on the folk radio charts, I felt a little reluctant about my honor of having gotten to number 22, but she pointed out that that was actually a really impressive thing and I shouldn’t feel reluctant about trumpeting it. She also noted that I had a quotation from Sing Out! on my publicity material, and that it was a big accomplishment to have a review there. And when we talked about publicity she pointed out that my NERFA poster did a lot of things extremely well (which are therefore worth keeping in mind as I think about publicity in other contexts). First, it represents me well. She said she knows what I look like, but, more importantly, what my style and approach is, by looking at my poster, and that’s something a lot of music publicity doesn’t do well. Second, they have (almost) all the necessary ingredients (the missing piece being that I didn’t have my website listed) on it – photo, one brief quotation, clear info on all the showcases – and nothing else, which makes it useful and easy to read. Third, it’s visually striking and different from the publicity others have – it’s a black background with white writing (with a photo of me running along the left): people will notice it among a sea of posters on a big board (which is how things are at NERFA, with 700+ performers trying to get noticed). She also gave me advice about how to do promotions stuff – getting media coverage, showing venues that you’re doing your part of the job in getting the word out, and gave some advices on how to get some CD reviews in places I hadn’t talked about. So it was both reassuring and useful. The second mentoring session was with someone who does booking for a nationally-known folk venue in the Club Passim league. We spent most of the time talking about where I am in my music career, where I want to be, and how to get from one to the other place. We talked about my interest in getting out of what we called “sandwich shop gigs” – the ones where I’m in a corner playing for people who aren’t primarily there to see me. Or, at least, that transitioning out of those in my area – in other areas those can be a way to break into a new part of the country, start to build a little bit of an audience and show venue owners in that new area that you’ve done your due diligence. (She had some good suggestions about how to find those in a new area, including communicating with the venues that you’d eventually like to play in but aren’t yet asking to play in.) She did confirm, what I had already suspected, that it is better to have a full schedule, even if some of that filling is “sandwich shop gigs,” then to have a sparser schedule with only quality shows on it – she said that people booking shows really do want to know that you’re playing regularly. I don’t feel like I gained dramatic new insight from either of the mentoring sessions (although I also didn’t hear anything radically at odds with how I want to present myself, which I have in some previous year’s sessions), but it felt like they were a good reminder that I have a pretty good idea of what I’m doing and just have to keep plugging away at it, and learning nuances and details along the way. And both in that, and in imparting some of those nuances and details, it was helpful.