The press kit mistakes that quietly lose bookings
None of these are about taste. Every one of them is something that made somebody’s job harder, so they stopped and moved to the next email.
Written from the receiving end, in rough order of how often it happens.
The link that has expired
File-sharing links die. Yours will be opened weeks after you send it, by which point a temporary transfer has gone and a shared folder has quietly reset its permissions. This is the single most common way a good approach ends, and the sender never finds out.
Music that will not play
A login, a download, a request-access screen, a 40MB file on mobile data. Every one of these is a decision point where the reader can stop, and some of them will.
A biography that is out of date
Still describing a project you left, a residency that ended, or a forthcoming record that came out two years ago. It reads as neglect, and the person reading it starts wondering what else is stale.
One photograph, vertical, low resolution
A designer needs a horizontal crop for a banner, a square for social, and something above 2000 pixels for print. Give them one small vertical shot and you have made them ask — and asking is exactly what they were trying to avoid.
No photographer credit
Less obvious and more serious. The photographer usually owns the copyright, not you, so a promoter who publishes an uncredited image is exposed. A careful one simply will not use it.
Everything in the third person
"ShyMan is a Miami-based artist whose sound transcends…" — everybody knows you wrote it. It is right for the published bio, where a stranger will paste it into a listing. It is strange in an email, where you are visibly talking about yourself as somebody else.
Adjectives where evidence should be
Unique, boundary-pushing, uncompromising. Nobody has ever been booked on those. Rooms you have played, records you have released, labels that have released you, a mix somebody can hear — those, and nothing else, are what the reader is scanning for.
Five links instead of one
SoundCloud, Spotify, Instagram, a file share, a link-in-bio page. Each additional link is a decision, and a reader in a hurry resolves it by closing the email. One link that contains the rest.
No dates at all
An empty calendar makes a booker guess, and they guess low. Past dates are evidence too: a page showing the last six months is worth more than one showing nothing until you are confirmed somewhere.
No fee, no rider, no availability
Not necessarily to publish, but to have ready. A promoter who has to open a second conversation to learn what you need is a promoter deciding between you and someone who already answered it.
Almost every item on this list is fixed in under an hour. That is what makes them expensive — they cost bookings for years, and they were never hard.
Common questions
- What is the most common press kit mistake?
- A dead link. Kits are opened weeks after they are sent, by which point temporary transfers have expired and shared folders have reset their permissions — and the sender never learns it happened.
- Should a press kit bio be in first or third person?
- Third person for the version you publish, because strangers paste it into listings. First person in the email itself, where writing about yourself as somebody else just reads oddly.
- How many photos should a press kit have?
- At least three usable crops — one horizontal, one square, one vertical — at print resolution, with the photographer credited so a promoter can publish them without risk.