The New Business of Acting

In an expanded and updated follow up to his popular first book, The Business of Acting: Learn the Skills You Need to Build the Career You Want, talent manager Brad Lemack offers both young, new-to-the-business and “working” actors a vital perspective on the changing landscape in which they seek to launch and grow (or to reinvent) their professional careers. The New Business of Acting: How to Build a Career in a Changing Landscape teaches actors how to be smart, proactive and strategic throughout their career journeys. Lemack teaches actors the critical, non-performance skills they need to build the careers they want and how to apply those skills in positive, professional and productive ways. The New Business of Acting, with a foreword by Isabel Sanford, the Emmy Award-winning star of the long running television series The Jeffersons, explores the revolution taking place in how business is conducted and how those dramatic changes impact how actors must conduct the business of their careers. This empowering new book builds on the lessons taught in The Business of Acting, while addressing how to apply those lessons to the digital and economic landscape that is the “new” business of acting. Key chapters explore the changing roles of agents and managers, the new demands on casting directors in the new landscape, the importance of creating, protecting and honoring your “brand,” emotional, physical and fiscal fitness in a challenging economy, and guidelines for seeking out and getting a head shot that fits the frame of the new business. Readers will learn the art of managing expectations, a required skill in knowing how to act (and when not to) on the global Internet stage of self-submission opportunities, and, perhaps most important for the young actor, those about to or just entering the business will discover what they must know to make a healthy, happy and empowered transition from student of the performing arts to wanting-to-be-working, professional actor. Readers will also learn how to create and launch both their "brand" and an Action Plan for career success that teaches them how to effectively and strategically use the tools introduced in the book, and how to be a smart actor implementing their plan all along their journey. It’s not about talent and performance; it’s about perspective, planning and process.