Rookie Me.
Today I sent the
following email to few friends and people I know in the industry:
…and the first
response I received was this, from a fellow comic:
Don’t you just love humanity?
I actually wasn’t contacting them in their unnecessarily overstated capacity as a promoter, but as a fellow human being - and one who knows what it's like to try to pull together an audience. I didn’t break any rules and wasn’t pestering or being pushy; I’d just dropped
them a line in the hope they'd show
interest; they were the ones being unprofessional by being so blunt.
It’s
disheartening when you try to generate interest in what you do to feel like
you’re shouting into silence. It’s not like I’m giving it the hard-sell. it can
be difficult to keep faith in the worth of my work at the best of times,
without being hit by such unpleasantness; I wouldn’t speak to anyone like that,
however right I thought I might be; if my email was that annoying, he could have ignored me.
...and if we have to play
that game - and I'm trying to avoid it - I’m a promoter myself, who runs a successful gig that pulls some of
the biggest names in comedy, and from that standpoint I didn’t commit
any faux pas - but I don’t want to go explore that road for long as it starts
to sound like a competitive smug-fest and that’s not the point. Was there a need to shout me down within minutes of receiving my message other than to
attempt to put me in my place? And who uses the word 'rookie' in real life anyway?