Self-releasing an album takes up a lot of time and also a good bit of money. However, it does also give you the freedom to do some interesting things and in the end it is very satisfying when you can say “Yeah, we did all that ourselves”. It also means that when that little bit of money starts coming back in it goes back into your own pocket!
To promote the album we organised a tour around Ireland in the weeks following the launch. To get the word out for this I knocked up a nice little poster using a visual that my friend Neil Hanratty created based on the album cover. I also used some of the primary colours that have become somewhat of a Bouts trademark in the last few months.
To make sure the albums weren’t lonely on the merch stand we decided to do a run of t-shirts which again used the image Neil created for us. The guys at Merch Zombies produced these for us and did a brilliant job.
The final piece of the promotional jigsaw was the creation of a limited edition zine to go with our first 50 records. The idea was to fill it full of pictures we had taken over the preceding months along with doodles, sketches, random thoughts and also all the lyrics to the songs. We all agree that getting to read through the lyrics is a great insight into an album so we thought it was important to include these for the first few, possibly hardcore, fans. I collected material from all the members of the band and then pieced together the final zine. We then printed them out ourselves and hand stapled them as we didn’t have a stapler long enough to reach the middle of an A4 page. Multiple finger stabbings later and we had ourselves a sweet little zine which you can view here – Bouts Zine.
Daniel Flynn - Creative 