Evaluating Your Creative Stockpile: It is not only your vocal talent that is important. Writing (lyrics, music, poetry, and letters), reading music, playing musical instruments, speech (including vocabulary and diction), poise, and demeanor are important to be a well-rounded individual. While it is not necessary to excel in all of these areas, it is helpful to be as well rounded as possible. Weak areas can be developed or compensated for, within reason. Too many week areas will work against you in many ways.

Inventorying Your Resources: It isn't just the performance. You will need costume, transportation, music, lodging, and meals. In many cases you will have to provide your own sound system and lighting. You will need publicity, advertising, business and legal assistance. There will be photography, printing, recording studio time and Staff, post-production, publishing, and duplication.

What you can't do yourself will have to be begged, bartered, or paid for in cash. You may be surprised at how much goodwill assistance there is. Family and friends can be a big help in many of these areas. The more you can beg and barter, the less front money you will need. It is inevitable though, that you will have to spend some money before you start making it.

Formulating an Improvement Plan. No one (at least no one that I have ever known of) has good strength in all the areas you will be dealing with. Again, most of these areas can be developed or compensated for. However, you have to gain at least a basic understanding of each. In many cases, "compensating" for a weak area will require you to compensate someone else to do the job. You should know enough about that job to realize when they are doing it properly or when you are being taken for a ride. We will work on a plan to develop or compensate for your weaker areas in both talents and resources.

Outlining a Career Plan. This will be a preliminary roadmap to your success.

• What do you want to do with your talents?
• How soon do you expect to get there?
• Are these goals and expectations practical and sensible?
• How do we start toward getting you there?
• What can you expect along the way?

Taking the First Steps. Preparation! That is the key to getting off to a good start. It takes a lot of hard work to be at all successful in this industry. It is, largely, the people who are impressed by your talent, who will help you to the next stage of advancement. For that reason, you will want to take care to be well prepared for your first outings. You want to impress in a favorable way.

Self-Promotion: There are a number of ways you can promote yourself, without investing much money in it. Some don't even take much time. We will discuss general methods and outlets and can investigate specific possibilities in your area.

Developing a Web Site is a good method of self-promotion. It can also be much more. It can be a marketing tool for your recordings, a convenient way of making your performance schedule available to your public, and a way of communicating with your fan base.

A relatively simple web site can serve your purposes nicely. Such a site is not expensive to set up and you can often find a friend or family member who would be happy to build and maintain it for you.

Publicity and Promotion: The paid for kinds, will become more necessary as you expand your territory beyond the area you live in. The farther from home the desired geographic area, the harder it will be to deal with it yourself. Again, the general concepts will be discussed and then we can investigate specific outlets within desired geographical areas.

Auditions and Personal Appearances are different critters, but are dealt with in a similar manner. With both, you are trying to impress people. Both will entail agreements, scheduling, and preparation. What to say, what to wear, and what to sing are just a few of the questions common to both situations.

Personal appearances may or may not include the opportunity to demonstrate your talent but they are, when prepared for and executed well, a very good form of publicity. The biggest difference between auditions and personal appearances is that you can be picky about what auditions you agree to. It is not a good idea to turn down too many personal appearance offers.

We will discuss what to expect in, and how to prepare for both auditions and appearances. We will look at how to get the auditions you want, and how to gracefully turn down the appearances you don't want.

Getting Local Gigs is paramount to getting started. You are not going to get to play big venues in faraway places until you pay your dues and build a reputation and a following at the local level.

Starting out close to home has a lot of benefits. There will be little travel and no lodging expenses, your friends will come to support you, and it will be much more comfortable for you than being in "unfamiliar" territory. Seedy bars and county fairs are often the staples of starting out. Nailing a spot in the odd music festival will be a real coupe, until you build that reputation and fan base.

Your Development Force. No matter how talented you are, or how diverse your talents, you will eventually need "people". There will be areas you need experts in and some things you just won't have the time to deal with. Some of your best support will often come from family and friends. I will help you to determine what you need, where to look for someone to take care of it, and how to deal with them.

Professional Referrals are inevitable. Your development Force will have to include some professionals. You will have to pay for their services. Legal, accounting, and other business services are available on an as-needed basis with hourly fees. We will evaluate the needs as we go and I will make recommendations on finding the proper people and beginning to establish a long-term business relationship with them.

Business and Legal Issues I will try to watch out for you along the way. I am, however, not an expert in legal or accounting matters. You can deal with a lot of it yourself. Perhaps a family member or close friend will be able and willing to assist you. I will give you guidance where I can but I will be referring you to those professionals long before we get in over our heads.

Retaining Your Income, at least some of it, is something you would probably, eventually, like to accomplish. As you become more famous and successful, everyone will be trying to divert a share of your cash flow in his direction. I will try to help you spend what you have to wisely and keep most of your income for yourself. Hint: You don't really need to pay a forty-five-person entourage to follow you around.