Press releases for Broadway Baby should be emailed to pressreleases@broadwaybaby.com.

This email account is accessed by all of our editors and reviewers to find press releases. Press releases sent to other Broadway Baby email addresses are likely to be deleted. Do not send press releases to multiple Broadway Baby addresses in case the pressreleases@broadwaybaby.com copy is deleted automatically along with the others. We'd don't monitor Twitter DM or Facebook private messages - so our email is the best, and only, way to get in touch with us.

The guidelines below help are designed to help us find the press releases we need and extract the information we need from them. We receive thousands of press releases every year, so your help in making working with them easier is much appreciated.

There are long-standing rules about how to write a press release, although it seems even the best PRs have forgotten them. Your release should be written in a pyramid structure, so your first paragraph should summarise the whole story, and each further paragraph add more detail - but the release could cut paragraphs from the bottom and lose none of the meaning. So don't try to tell a narrative or be mysterious in an attempt to make your release more interesting. Always imagine the journalist reading your release has another 2,000 to skim through, so if the first line hasn't told them what they need to know, the release isn't doing its job.

Do some research on the publications you're sending your release to. There really aren't that many normally active on the fringe, and you can at the very least categorise them into local news, listings, reviewers, nationals, TV and Radio. Each category will be looking for different stories, and won't thank you for sending them irrelevant info. In a festival such as Edinburgh your release will be one of 2,500. Spamming will quickly get you a reputation that means your release may not even be opened.

Don't send your release as an attachment, or - even worse - as a link to Facebook, et al. Any click you put between your press release and the journalist you want to read it is another chance that it won't be read. Don't litter your release with pull-quotes or other information that is unlikely to be published by your target media. Have the mindset that the person receiving it needs to copy / paste from top to bottom and paste next to your listing. What in your release would stop them doing that? Quotes from other publications between every paragraph probably would.

General Guidelines

• Include full listings information at the top of the email.
• Include full contact details for your press contact at the top of the email.
• Format your press releases in plain text, without overly large headings or other attention-grabbing formatting tricks.
• The text of your press release should be in the body of the email.
• Don't send us any text as an attachment. Don't send us PDFs, word documents or any attachments other than images we request. If your release isn't in the body of your email, we're unlikely to read it.
• Do keep us updated about awards and accolades your show receives. Don't duplicate your general press release when you do this - we already have it.

Notes on Images

• Please send us production/promotional images in web-ready formats smaller than 1 MB.
• We prefer production images to promotional images. A production image is a photo of the show in action, not a posed image or a poster.
• Please don't send us images of your venue's logo or any other redundant images. The only images we use from press releases are production/promotional images.

Tips

• Don’t send newsletters or similar material intended for a general audience to the press. We often get auto-subscribed to your mailing lists, and to be honest this causes us more hassle weeding out the actual press information. We will unsubscribe. It's nothing personal, but we just don't want those emails.
• Sell your show, but make sure you don’t say anything which could be construed as a lie. Many bad reviews result from misleading press releases.
• Do make sure all the information in your press release is correct, and that it is well spelt. Needing to send corrections would make you look very unprofessional.
• You should be targeting every press release individually. If a contact isn’t appropriate for your show, then wasting their time with a press release will not help you very much. Check the press release guidelines of every single publication you contact and follow them exactly.
• Address all of the recipients of your press release with the "To" field. BCCing is unnecessary, messes up email filtering systems, and is a little rude. And if you're bulk emailing, you're probably doing it wrong.
• We are unlikely to reply, but if you've followed the instructions above, rest assured we have your press release. If we add your show to our schedule for a festival, we nearly always organise our tickets direct with the Fringe press office, so you probably won't get an email from us even if we are planning to cover your show. Outside of festivals, please do include press night and contact info, as with those we are more likely to put you in our calendar.