Psst, you! The one Googling me at Ticketing Professionals!

Hello! Nice to see you! Thanks for being curious enough to continue down the search results past my LinkedIn profile. Now you can enjoy some really substantive content instead of just looking at that hastily selected profile picture, the one I had to crop my wife out of, because photographs of the two of us together at weddings are the only way these days you can capture me with product in my hair and a professional-looking wardrobe.

So anyway, about that substantive content:

1. I recently wrote an article for the Ten4 website about our work building an interactive, self-guided tour for Durham Cathedral. It's not strictly ticketing content, I guess, but Durham is a world-class visitor attraction and they do sell tickets, so you'll probably still find it interesting what they're doing with digital. We built the whole tour in two weeks, that has to be worth at least a click, right? Besides, it's a quick read.

2. Something that is not a quick read, but is definitely ticketing content and definitely worth your time, is Joe Shellard's new book, How to Sell Out. Joe really kindly put his faith in me as an editorial consultant for the book — I also write professionally — so I've been working on it with him since last summer. I spent much of that time thinking, gosh, I wish I'd had this book when I worked in ticketing. You'll love it.

3. If you're reading this before Thursday 21 March 2024 at 4:15pm, I'm moderating a panel at this year's Ticketing Professionals Conference called "What is a ticketing system?" The background is: last year I did a different session at which a bunch of reasonable people (myself included) disagreed over what a ticketing system actually does. So this year I've convened some carefully selected experts to debate and decide it once for all. Those experts include Robin Cantrill-Fenwick from the arts and visitor attraction consultancy Baker Richards; Nina Primeraki from the ticketing system Spektrix; Emma Young from the ticketing system Ticketsolve; and... Joe Shellard. (This page is beginning to feel more like promotion for Joe than promotion for myself.)

4. If you're reading this after Thursday 21 March 2024 at 4:15pm, but before the end of this year's conference, come find me and say hello! If you need to know what I look like, you can find a hastily selected picture of me (with my wife cropped out) on my LinkedIn profile.

5. If you're reading this after Ticketing Professionals 2024 has finished, fear not! I'll be putting up a summary of the panel in due course. (I do realise of course that I could edit this page after the fact to account for all these possibilities, or even be really clever and use a ternary operator to check the current date and time and show you the right paragraph. But then you'd miss out on this charming window into my personality.)

Thanks for reading! Hopefully I'll get to meet you soon.