10 THINGS I WISH I'D KNOWN BEFORE MY FIRST FRINGE

The Edinburgh Fringe has a way of occupying your imagination long before you actually get there. You picture full rooms, five-star reviews, interest from producers and programmers, late-night conversations with brilliant strangers and the slightly intoxicating feeling that anything might happen.

Some of that does happen. The Fringe can be extraordinary, but it can also be expensive, exhausting, confusing and occasionally heartbreaking. You can spend a whole year preparing for a show and then discover that one badly timed rainstorm, a missing box of flyers or a venue email you somehow missed has become the most important thing in your life.

Having now performed at Fringe a few times, there are some things I wish I’d understood properly the first time.

1. Work out what success means to you before you get there

This sounds obvious, but a surprising number of artists arrive in Edinburgh with no clearer objective than wanting the show to “do well”. The problem is that “doing well” can mean almost anything.

For one company, success might mean selling out. For another, it might be getting programmers into the room, finding a touring partner, improving the show, collecting reviews, building an audience or simply proving that they can get a production all the way to Edinburgh.

Those goals are not interchangeable, and they require different decisions.

If your real objective is touring, then twenty programmers seeing the show may matter more than twenty extra ticket sales. If you are developing new work, a mixed review might be less important than learning where the piece loses an audience. If your aim is simply to have the experience, you may not need to spend thousands chasing outcomes that don't actually matter to you.

2. Your venue is part of the production

A venue is not just a room with some lights and a temporary stage. It affects almost every part of your Fringe.

The size of the space, the location, the audience flow, technical support, accessibility, ticket price, atmosphere and relationship with the venue team all influence how the show performs and how the month feels.

It is very easy to be seduced by a prestigious venue or a larger room, but neither is automatically the right choice. A 150-seat space can look deeply depressing with twenty people in it, while a 40-seat room with the same audience can feel packed and exciting.

The right venue is the one that suits your show, your likely audience and what you are trying to achieve.

3. Nobody knows your show exists

You have been working on your show for perhaps years. You know the title, the concept, the characters, the artwork and hopefully the exact reason it deserves to be at Fringe.

Most people walking up the Royal Mile know none of that.

They're surrounded by thousands of other shows, posters, flyers, recommendations and performers trying to sell their work to them just as much as you are. Being in the Fringe programme is not enough. You need to be able to explain the work clearly. Who is it for? What kind of experience is it? Why might somebody choose this over everything else happening at the same time?

Artists are often frightened that clarity will make their work sound less sophisticated. In practice, clarity is usually what gives the audience enough confidence to take a chance on it.

4. Flyering is a conversation, not a sales pitch

There is a version of flyering where someone stands on the Royal Mile silently extending pieces of card towards passers-by like a mildly disappointed traffic warden. It's not very effective.

Good flyering is about identifying the people who might genuinely enjoy the show and having a short, human conversation with them. That means knowing your audience, knowing where they are likely to be, and being able to describe the show quickly without sounding as though you are reciting the back of the flyer. It also means accepting that lots of people are not interested. That's fine. They are not rejecting you personally. They may simply be looking for lunch before considering a show.

5. Reviews matter, but not as much as they feel like they do

Reviews are one of the easiest things to obsess over because they come with scores attached to them. Five stars feel wonderful. Three stars feel catastrophic. Waiting for a review that never appears can somehow be worse than either.

But reviews are only one measure of what happens at the Fringe. A glowing review does not guarantee audiences. A disappointing one does not mean the show has no future. Some excellent productions attract very little press attention at all.

If reviews are important to your objectives, pursue them properly, use them when they are useful and learn from them where there is something genuinely helpful to learn.

Just try not to let one stranger with a notebook become the final authority on whether the whole month was worthwhile.

Also, please do remember that three stars genuinely means your show is good.

6. You will almost certainly spend more than you expect

Edinburgh has an impressive ability to be expensive in a way that you couldn't imagine when you were making the original budget.

Accommodation, venue fees, registration, printing, travel, advertising, flyering, food, technical costs and the endless small purchases required to keep a production moving can add up frighteningly quickly.

Build contingency into the budget before you arrive. Then be honest with yourself about income.

Do not construct the financial plan around the assumption that every performance will sell out. It is lovely when that happens but it's not sensible financial planning.

A realistic budget may be less exciting than an optimistic one, but it's easier to live with in week three.

7. Rest is part of doing the Fringe properly

There is a strange temptation in Edinburgh to behave as though exhaustion is proof that you're somehow making the most of the festival.

You perform, you flyer, you see other shows, you meet people, and go to parties, you find time to answer emails, check ticket sales and somehow find yourself eating chips at one in the morning because you forgot to have dinner again.

You can do that for a while. Then your body eventually gives up on you.

Rest is not wasted Fringe time. Neither is eating properly, taking an afternoon off or deciding that you do not have to attend every social event you have been invited to.

Your show still needs you in the final week.

8. The people around you may matter more than the people you are trying to impress

It's easy to arrive thinking about reviewers, programmers, promoters and everyone else who might somehow advance the show. But some of the most valuable relationships you will make are with the artists standing beside you.

See other people’s work. Recommend it. Talk to performers after shows. Help someone carry something awkward. Share information. Ask for help when you need it.

The Fringe community can be enormously generous when people stop treating every interaction as networking. The artist you meet while flyering may become a collaborator, producer, director, friend or person who recommends your work years later.

That's worth more than collecting business cards from people you'll never speak to again.

9. Something will go wrong

Someone will get ill. Something will break. A poster will disappear. A printer will be late. Your sales figures will suddenly drop off. A prop will vanish. A venue will tell you something different from what you thought had been agreed.

The important skill is not anticipating every possible problem. It's learning to decide which problems genuinely matter. Some things need fixing immediately. Some need to be deferred until you have the space to deal. Some simply need accepting as one more mildly ridiculous part of Edinburgh. A calm producer is extremely useful here.

So is gaffer tape.

10. The Fringe does not end when the shows do

It's very tempting to finish the last performance, pack everything away and decide never to think about Edinburgh again. But you should give yourself a little time, then look back properly. What worked? What didn't? Who came to see the show? Who did you meet? What did audiences respond to? What opportunities came out of it? What should change before the next version of the production?

Sometimes the most valuable result of the Fringe appears months afterwards.

A programmer gets back in touch. A relationship turns into another project. A lesson learned in Edinburgh completely changes how you approach the next show.

The Fringe can be a showcase, a testing ground, a launch pad, a creative adventure or simply one extraordinary month in the life of a production.

It does not have to be all of those things at once.

Go with a reason for being there. Make a plan that gives you a chance of achieving it. Leave enough room for Edinburgh to completely ignore the plan from time to time.

That's usually where some of the interesting things happen.