Every seat in your festival is perishable inventory. A restaurant can recover from a slow Tuesday; a software company can fix a landing page next month. A half-empty Saturday-night screening cannot be sold on Monday. Stream & Screen is the working playbook for indie festival teams who must sell tickets, satisfy sponsors, and grow a lasting audience against deadlines that will not move.
This is not a collection of channel tips built on hope. Leon Mercer starts where effective promotion actually begins: with outcomes. Before asking whether you need more Reels or TikTok, you'll learn to assign every activity one of four jobs—discovery, interest, conversion, retention—so channels become tools rather than habits. From there, the book maps the full arc real festival buyers travel: a credibility phase before the lineup drops, a reveal phase that turns programming into weeks of stories, a conversion phase with clear routes to purchase, an urgency phase driven by visible attendance patterns, a live phase that turns full rooms into proof, and a retention phase that keeps subscribers long after the final credits.
Inside, you'll find answers to the problems that quietly sink festivals:
Why announcing your lineup in one blast throws away most of your marketing material—and how repeatable content packets, multiple angles per title, and staged reveal sequences turn a program spreadsheet into a content engine without exhausting your team two weeks before opening night.
How to stop treating every screening equally. Some films carry recognizable talent, passionate niches, or visually irresistible footage. You'll learn to concentrate budget where inventory remains, pull support from events that sell themselves, and use honest scarcity—"selling fast" only when it's true.
How to recover abandoned intent with plan-your-weekend emails, retargeting matched to actual intent stages, and checkout pages that settle currency, time-zone, fee, refund, and accessibility questions before doubt ends the sale.
How to diagnose funnel leaks instead of concluding that "marketing didn't work"—reading click-through, landing-page engagement, checkout starts, and sales by screening to pinpoint exactly where buyers drop off.
How to turn filmmakers into a distribution network. Replace the desperate "please promote your screening" with phone-ready launch kits, request the material only they can make (one sharp question outperforms five generic biography prompts), and run a promotion rhythm that hands them fresh assets at every milestone—then keep alumni engaged for future editions.
And how to run everything on a backward calendar: what to lock ninety to sixty days out, when to reveal and educate, when to convert, when to reallocate aggressively across the final fortnight, how to become a live publisher during the event itself, and what to capture in the seventy-two hours after closing while audience attention still lingers.
The practical tools alone justify the read: a screening promotion brief, a sponsor prospect brief, a seven-question daily review for the last two weeks, and a post-festival campaign record that converts this year's chaos into next year's competitive edge.
Whether you run a single-screen weekend showcase or a multi-venue destination festival, if your team is small and your dates are fixed, this book shows you how to promote with calm instead of panic—and fill the rooms you cannot afford to leave empty.
Get Stream & Screen today and start building your campaign backward from opening night.
