You wrote for six hours.
Then spent forty seconds
on the post.
The post is what decides whether anybody turns up. It is not laziness — a blank compose box with no format is genuinely harder than writing a joke.
So it is already written. Eight platforms, sized right, pointing at a link that plans the whole evening.
Fill in the gig →The gig
Fill this in once. Everything below rewrites itself — every post names you and the room, and points at a link that answers the whole evening rather than just selling a seat.
Fill in the venue and the posts link to that room's own Plan a Night page — the date and start time ride along. Have a different page for the night? Paste its address in the last box.
Run the room? The weekly lineup posts are on List a Room.
The three names in every post
Platform by platform
What each one is actually for, the size that stops it being cropped, and the mistake that wastes the post.
“Add me to your D.O.C.”
Every other post here asks somebody to buy a ticket. This one asks for ten seconds: add you to the twelve comics they follow on D.O.C., so your next date shows up for them. It works for a comic with a SUCDb record; a new comic's record opens when D.O.C. opens submissions — keep these posts for that day, and write your record now on Your SUCDb record.It works once you have a SUCDb record — if yours isn't there yet, write it on Your SUCDb record.
Your list
A post reaches whoever a platform decides to show it to. A list reaches the people who already laughed at you, wherever you play next — the posts above fill a room once; the list fills the next one.
Want to meet some of them? The Twelve, on Make the Trip Pay, sells a drink with twelve people who already follow you — at a bar and an hour you pick.
Your Pinterest pin
Pinterest is an image platform, so a text template is only half of it. This is a real 1000 × 1500 pin built from the gig you filled in on The posts — right-click and save it (press and hold on a phone), or use the download button. A pin can keep turning up in searches long after a feed post has scrolled away.
When to post
Too many gig posts go up on the afternoon of the show. These are the ones that come before it — and the one after.
Five ways this normally goes wrong
A perfect post on the wrong schedule still plays to an empty room.
Filming the show
you put on yourself.
A club has cameras, a board and somebody whose job it is — there, the move is to ask them for the file. This is the other night: a restaurant back room on a Tuesday, a brewery, a hall. Nobody is handing you a feed, because you are the board.
Light, the frame, the crop, how long and how often. The kit, the room test and the whole signal chain are already worked out in Stage Time, so they are linked rather than repeated.
Light
Unlike the sound, there is no version of this you can fix afterwards.
Fixtures and stands are in the kit tiers under Bootstrap a Room, priced as planning bands and linked to searches rather than to single listings.
The frame
Which angles to cover is answered on Stage Time's Tech tab. This is how to point whichever camera you brought.
From file to clip
Shoot horizontal, crop vertical. You can always crop in; you can never crop back out.
How long
How often
Somebody who actually did it
On the night
Interleaved with the load-in, because the person setting up the PA and the person setting up the camera are the same person.
The kit, the room and the sound
All of it is worked through under Comic's Corner → Stage Time, in more depth than a summary here could manage. Each row names the tab it lives on.
Where these numbers came from
Camera height and matched color temperature have been true for twenty years. Clip lengths are a reading of this moment, which is why they carry a date.