Hello! Nat and Joe here, we’re starting to get back into the swing of actually catching up with all the stuff we’re doing so we can be transparent about it. Also we just got back from Edinburgh Fringe 2022 and are frankly *in recovery* because that was A Lot™.
(scroll down to bottom for tl;dr)
So. We broke even.
We did the unexciting sequel to Breaking Bad and managed to not lose money in a year that a lot of people (aka theatre twitter) have said was a tough year to Fringe, as the first one ‘properly’ back. By back we mean the first fringe that bore resemblance to 2019 - we’re glossing over whatever 2021 Fringe happened because we were
not there, way too cautious about travelling to Edinburgh itself, and
also got a Fringe Recovery Grant to run a digital venue - Insanity Point - in Nottingham, instead.
BUT we arguably threw that caution out of the window this year by deciding to actually fulfil our contract with ZOO venues (leftover from 2020, rip) and go on the whole hog, do 52 Souls, live between the two of us. Something Nat actually hadn’t done in about 3 years and Joe was still a little rusty on.
So we’re gonna give you a lovely little budget breakdown because doing the Edinburgh Fringe is stupidly spennyyyyyy and shouldn’t be - but this year, this is how we did it.
Registration: £295.20 (inc. VAT)
Every year people get aggy about this and don’t get us wrong, this year the contract was not fulfilled (app, anyone??). But every year, early bird registration to the Fringe Society for your official inclusion in the Fringe, your place in the physical programme and online, is about £300 - this year, £295.20.
The deadline for early bird registration is usually late March to Early April so in fairness, not helpful if you’re still umming and aahhing about coming up like Nat was in May. The Fringe Society extended the deadline to late April for this year but late registration still came to £393.60 - nearly 400 quid for your upper limit. Bagging that early bird registration saved us £98.40.
Rent: £1,800
Rent on the spaces is often your biggest expense and this year was no exception. Coming to a painful £1,800, we had the 20 seat venue of Playground 3 in ZOO Playground.
Pick your location wisely to ensure it pays for itself - ZOO playground is situated just off the Royal Mile, on the way to Pleasance Courtyard and just beyond Assembly Roxy and Greenside Infirmary street - aka slap bang in the middle of A LOT. Anyone coming and going round there can stumble across you and voilá, book a ticket.
Size, in this case, sadly also matters. A capacity of 20 meant selling out wasn’t the ballache it usually is. We refused to physically flyer directly to people this year on a matter of principle, environmental ethics, and also because we couldn’t be arsed. Flyering is exhausting. We’ve done it too many times before and we’ve barely seen a difference in ticket sales so this year we tried without. But, we would’ve been very unlikely to be successful with that if we’d tried a 50, 60, 100 seat venue. Go big or go home is not the game here if no one knows who you are - we’ll leave that to comedians on the telly, whose faces sell their shows for them regardless of how many flyerers they hire.
Total stats for us this month was 60% of our performances selling out (95% capacity, so 19 or 20 tickets sold per show), pushing our audiences across the month to a very comfy 16/17 people per show on average.
Marketing: £779.20
The second big expense - and honestly, often a shot in the dark. We did a whole variety of options this year, partially because of our aforementioned reluctance to flyer, partially to see what worked and what didn’t. Still honestly not sure what did.
Permanent poster hoardings - £354
No idea if these worked. We had some A4 sizes in the clumps of 10 tied to lampposts and the larger A1/A0 sizes dotted about a reasonable number of locations around Bristo Square, The Meadows, and Princes Street/New Town. However, and tbh, amongst the maelstrom of advertising that is the Fringe, idk if anyone came to see the show off the back of seeing the poster. Maybe off the back of seeing the poster 6 or 7 times over the course of 1 day? Unlikely. It's a weird psychology trick of a background hum that we’re unsure works for the Fringe - aforementioned telly comedians are already selling because people know who they are. Even if your poster was award winning, there’s no telling it’ll get people to come. I don’t think I saw a poster for Good Grief the entire month and they sold out like crazy - so frankly, who knows.
Printed Posters - £41.20
Tricky one this because it could’ve gone either way. We arrived this year expecting those giant red columns on the mile to be dominating the skyline as per usual, but they appeared to have all flown back to their home planet.
With no hoardings, fly-postering (as in postering anything that’ll stand still for long enough) was rampant. We’ve never seen the posters on bins last long enough to have their stars put on them but this was a fringe of firsts. The bin strike almost certainly contributed to the lengthy stay of this fly-postering (power to the WORKERS good GOD they need a pay rise) but the lack of hoardings meant we’d spent ££ for essentially 100 too many souvenirs. Sure Nat’s framed their poster, because they drew the damn thing, but in the future? Not sure we’ll bother getting those printed on top of doing the permanent poster hoardings. It seems like a lot to throw in the recycling come September.
Digital Marketing - £384
Hiring someone to do roughly an hour a day (£20 an hour) of essentially digital flyering seems to have made a difference. Paying someone to search for ‘fringe recs’ from July onwards and then comment on every single post seems to have developed the show at least somewhat in people’s periphery. You can absolutely do it yourself but I personally like to scroll mindlessly on twitter, rather than also do work, so it is definitely worthwhile to give someone else a job for a month.
On the environmental note in terms of energy production of physical marketing versus energy production of digital marketing - we haven’t sat down and worked that out yet and we probably won’t. We’re looking into carbon offsetting if the theatre gods will let us, but take what you can, Twitter and Insta are (still currently) free to use.
Flyers - £4.99
We flip-flopped on this. We didn’t want death-by-over-flyering but we also knew that having some kind of flyer is useful for trading them with other shows, leaving them in cafes, at the venue for audience’s to take as souvenirs.
So as a compromise, we bought a blank pack of playing cards for £4.99 (the show had playing cards in it, cool link bla bla bla) and wrote the essential info in black and red sharpie on those cards. Now, whilst Nat sometimes calls themselves an artist, and Joe can hold a pen, we can’t splurge out a nice doodle in 20 seconds. We leaned into the homemade, lo-fi, 1-of-104-flyers-only angle but after someone specifically came to the box office to ask for a flyer, we gave them one of these, and they GAVE IT BACK, we kind of lost the mojo for it.
Another benefit of supporting other shows or expanding ourselves as a production company was piggy-backing our marketing onto Some Other Mirror. Laurie was only up for preview week and week 1 and was getting a lot out of personal, specific in-person flyering and felt having paper flyers would help. SO we piggy-backed by printing 52 Souls on the back of Laurie’s £50 for 100 flyers order, so we could keep using them once he’d headed home. Technically this meant we saved money for the 52 Souls budget but we still have way too many flyers lying around the house. Insert pithy statement here.
Rehearsing the Show - £120.00
We’re Nottingham-based, and that pays dividends in terms of the price of rehearsal space being well below the insane London average. Technically, this is the third version of 52 Souls and so we were learning scripts we had either written ourselves (Nat) or had already memorised the previous year (Joe). The team was us, the tech was us, the whole thing we split between the two of us. When one of us was performing a monologue, the other would direct or do the sound from the onstage laptop. All in all, that meant we really didn’t need much rehearsal time, even when you account for Joe’s rehearsal technique of ‘fuck it, that’s good enough’.
If you’re devising, starting a show from complete scratch to debut at Edinburgh - all of that will increase the cost. Cutting down on that or reassigning that labour to the budget of other projects helps massively.
The Actual Show - £109.64
Props & Costume - £74.99
When you take a show up to Edinburgh, consider what you’re getting into. Get in/get out time will be 10-20 minutes if you're lucky. We’ve never had time to rustle up some scenery and carefully plan a domino-cascade of perfectly placed props - so don’t bother. Unless you’re somewhere like the Traverse, where they’ve got paid SMs standing by for turnaround, you’ll need to get in and out of there as quickly as you can.
We had about 25 props, all of which we could fit in 1 sports bag, which we laid about at the back of the stage before the show started. Costumes were white jeans and school polo shirts because you don’t pay VAT on kids clothes. Just make your life easier. There’s a reason the fringe formula thrives on a 1-person show - 1 performer and a microphone that already belongs to the venue? Easy profit.
Ferrying around said props - £34.65
No expensive props or set means fewer costs to bring them up - you cut a whole load out by shrinking it all down. Carrying the sports bag on the train up was enough of a pain that we managed to stick it in a friend’s van for the way back down (thank you sm New Perspectives and team Great Almighty Gill ) but therefore costs were reduced from the possible expense of hiring a van ourselves (neither of us can legally drive) to merely the extra Uber required to ferrying ourselves and the props about. Our insurance plan covers us for the full 12 months of events we put on rather than Edinburgh in particular, which circumvented that possible issue. An added bonus of using a ukulele and a tiny keyboard as props - no insurance or extra room for instruments was necessary.
We didn’t buy a whole load of props either. 90% of our props were from previous shows and random shit we had lying around the house (we’re looking at you, fidget cube). Make the show bearing in mind what you already have. Shoot for the stars if you want but you might as well make your rocket from all the cardboard in your attic.
Total Budget spent:
Here’s a sexy lil pie chart for you guys breaking it all down:
However, there’s other things that are less quantifiable that still contribute to the general expense.
Miscellaneous £££££ to consider:
Money is sort of everything. So considering that, there’s other elements of the Fringe that pull the price higher
Edinburgh be £££ anyway
As one of the Most Expensive cities in Europe, nevermind Britain, Edinburgh as a city is as pricey as it comes - forget rent, a coffee up here is £4 even before everyone hiked their prices up for the festival. So it ain’t cheap being up here for the month anyway. Try and get your accommodation within walking distance of your venue if you want to save on travel but that goes both ways. We met people who had calculated it was cheaper to rent in Glasgow and pay for the train across every day - don’t get us started on the accommodation prices up here or we’ll never finish this blog post!
There’s absolutely ways around the general high prices every fringe-goer gets familiar with (god bless Lidl Southside’s bakery for a reasonably priced lunch) but Why Oh Why the food trucks don’t have a blanket 20% discount for everyone with a fringe lanyard… hmph. It could be better. Plenty of people have written and are writing far more eloquent points about the cities relation to the festival but that’s something that will likely be fluctuating for a long time.
The Fringe be £££ anyway
We know we spent £100s on show tickets. You might as well see Sap when it’s down the road at Roundabout rather than for however much it’ll cost off-Broadway but those costs add up. Personally (Nat speaking here), whatever nonsense is happening with venue passes and who can get into what venue when there’s space available should really be cleared up but as per (Joe now here), keeping that kind of advertising as an ask-only policy probably comes to the benefit of some venues. The standard policy seems to be free access to non-sold out shows at whatever venue you are at - so all the more reason for picking your venue wisely. Comedy fan? Go for Pleasance or Gilded Balloon etc etc. A lovely benefit of ZOO is the variety of venues they have and therefore the variety they can programme - seeing Cirk la Putyka’s Runners on a pass is insane to think about.
Selling the damn show
Ofc, the hard part. Marketing does some of that but word of mouth still plays a part. And honestly, some of it is luck. Tit for tat those tickets with fellow companies, whether they’re from your venue, your hometown, or you met them on Tinder. Do all the usual tricks with showcasing reviews, invite your entire extended family, 241 Mondays - do everything you can to sell the damn show.
We happened to hit the zeitgeist this year talking about death and mortality - and there were so many shows following that theme of grief, but doing it in their own idiosyncratic ways. We won’t hit that every year but it’s a nice sprinkling of luck if it does happen.
Totalling:
If you calculate everything above, the show comes to £3109.03
Our ticket sales (minus fees) reached about £3130.20 and we overall sold 395 tickets.
That was enough to cover costs of the show, the marketing, the rent on the space and the registration fee, with a profit of £21.17.
Here’s another sexy lil pie chart for you breaking all of that down:
So. We broke even. Sort of. But not really.
Our personal accommodation was £4000.
For, admittedly, a nice, well-located airbnb, but for 2 people and another rotating 2 (thank you to the various flatmates who lightened the financial load this month), that’s still a lot.
Our travel was £150.01 (ubers & train tickets with 30% railcard discount) but we’re minus the train ticket up*, and therefore it comes to £97.41
*Disclaimer for this year only - we were reimbursed for a cancelled train, so we knocked it off the total. So if you really want to save money at the Fringe, pay someone to steal the wires off the tracks at Crewe.
Paying ourselves: £££
We didn’t pay ourselves for rehearsing, for performing the show, for doing any of it. Which is partially how we knew it would work this year. We always pay artists who are not ourselves industry minimums but for us two, we’re following the doctrine of this-is-my-hobby-until-someone-pays-me. Combined, we’re pretty damn middle-class and privileged enough to be working other jobs that don’t run us into the ground whilst also trying to do this as a hobby/ultimate profession.
So really, even when you only consider the numbers we have, we only hit about halfway what we could have. Consider the much less sexy lil pie chart now:
For those unfamiliar with pie charts like Nat who spent half an hour working this out, you want your Money Earnt and your Budget to match 50/50 like Pie Chart 2 - not your budget to be ⅔ and your Money Earnt ⅓.
Edinburgh Fringe is a financial loss. It’s hard. We’re saying we’ve broken even because from a business perspective (and only that), we sort of have. But also because it makes us feel better about doing it if we say we have. Combined, we’ve ‘done’ Edinburgh about 7 times now. For the whole month, 4 times.
But we like it. The Edinburgh Fringe is fucking cool. It’s one of the few festivals with the largest international pull, the variety of stuff you get to see and experience is insane. If you’d told us 10 years ago ‘hey there’s a place where live performance is happening at pretty much every hour of every day’ we wouldn’t have believed we could be so lucky as to experience that melting pot of art, let alone be a part of it.
It shouldn’t be so expensive. It shouldn’t.
The economics intertwining art and finances are currently pretty gross and we’re currently lucky we can afford to lose the money we lose in order to do it. It’s work and pleasure combined and we (for now) accept that loss.
Too Long Didn’t Read (tl;dr):
We explain our budget breakdown, the most expensive is the rent of the space, then marketing, then registration, then rehearsal, then the actual show. We tweaked various things to make that work.
There’s other things that make the whole trip expensive - it’s a capital city & it’s the Fringe
The money we made & how that looks against the budget - a tidy 50/50, just about breaking even with a negligible profit.
We didn’t break even, that was a lie - if you include our accommodation and travel expenses, the pie chart bulges out into an uncomfortable ⅔ spent versus ⅓ earnt
Why? Many reasons, too many to list in the tldr section.
We like the fringe, we’re lucky atm and for now we accept the loss we make.