How To Book Your Own Tour

Local Openers
Most venues will want you to put the bill together, but sometimes they will happily place a proven local act similar to your style on the bill. It’s best, though, if you can take a complete bill to the venue.

When Myspace was around, it was very easy to find bands similar to your style in any city and quickly listen to them and see what kind of buzz they had. Now that Myspace is virtually extinct, the closest service that can be used for this purpose is ReverbNation. However, 100% of bands are not on this site (contrary to Myspace) so you may have to do a little bit more digging, but it’s a good place to start. Consider doing “show trades” in a few cities you’ve never been to before.

Payment
Most original music clubs will not offer guarantees. They will give you a cut of the door (most likely after expenses ranging from $50 – $350 for smaller clubs). A typical deal for clubs these days is a 70%-100% cut for 21+ venues, 70-85% for 18+ venues and expect around 50-70% cut for all age venues with most likely higher off the top expenses. You don’t have much negotiating power if it’s your first time through and aren’t proven, so you’re going to basically take what you can get. But these are good guidelines to stick to so you know when you should be moving on to another venue in that town. Expect to set (or pitch) your ticket price as what most shows on their calendar are. Meaning, if you contact a club and every show’s cover is $15-25, don’t expect to charge $6 for your show. Most clubs will allow you to set your cover (within reason). I always recommend up and coming touring acts to set their covers around $10-12. Fans understand that you’re on the road and they will pay a little more for touring acts.
+Should You Pay To Play
+What Do You Mean We Don’t Get Paid? (The Confirmation Email)

If you have a large cover repertoire, it’s a completely different ballgame. I don’t play cover bars so I don’t know this circuit, but I know it exists and that you can get guarantees. Most likely they will book their local cover bands first, but you could get lucky.
+Free Bird! (Covers vs. Originals)

Promotion
You can see why I start this process 5 months out. Once you are about 2 months out you should start promotion. At a bare minimum you should send posters to each venue (ask them how many they’d like). Make sure you budget for this. So, you need to have posters printed up at least 2 months out. Have a blank space at the bottom of the promo poster to fill in the show’s details.

Promoting shows is another post in it of itself, but make sure you get creative with your promo and make sure you budget for it. If you don’t promote the show no one will come. Simple as that. Don’t expect the venue to do anything more than including your name in their weekly newspaper ad, listing you on their website and putting up the posters you send them in their club.

Tour Duties
Only bring people on the road who are absolutely necessary for your operation to work while still making a profit. Meaning, if you’re just starting out, you’re probably not going to have the luxury of bringing a tour manager, sound guy, merch manager, photographer, road documentarian (videographer), or lighting tech for a few years. These duties are extremely important and you can’t just ignore them because you don’t have the people to do these jobs. If you’re a solo artist then most likely you’re going to have to cover all of these jobs yourself (or find people in each city to help out). If you’re in a band, you MUST allocate these duties.
+Allocating the Duties

There are important duties that you should do the day of the show as well.

Merch
When you’re on tour, merch is your #1 income generator. So if you want your tour to be financially successful, make sure you have lots of merch and a credit card swiper (Square is free and hooks up to an iPhone/Droid). Also, make sure you have someone running your merch every night. If you don’t have a merch person on the road with you, then find someone in each city, every night to cover this.