This guide walks you through the three pieces of copy you'll write as part of your Fringe registration: your Website Lead Sentence, your Website Blurb, and your Printed Short Blurb. Each section explains what to write, why it works, and how to actually do it, including frameworks, examples, and the traps most artists fall into.
Whether this is your first Melbourne Fringe or your fifteenth, there's something here for you.
You might have spent years making this work. You might still be making it. Either way, you should know something true about what you want an audience to feel when they experience, and that's exactly what good copy is built from.
When someone browses the What's On page of the Fringe website, they have your title, your image, your genre, and your Lead Sentence to go on. Copy and image working together, that's what earns the click. This isn't a reason to panic. It's a reason to take the writing seriously. Your event copy, along with your image, is how you find your people and make it unmistakably clear that this is the show for them.
There's a concept in marketing which you may already be familiar with, called the attention economy: your potential audience isn't short on options, they're short on time. The shows that cut through are the ones that make it easiest to say yes. Good copy does that. It removes friction. It answers the questions someone is silently asking as they scroll: What is this? Is it for me? Why should I care right now?
Three fields, three jobs
Here's where your Melbourne Fringe Event Listing copy appears and what it's doing at each touchpoint:
| Field | Limit | Where it appears | Its job |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website Lead Sentence | 100 characters | Browse and search pages, alongside your title and image, and on your individual event page. | Stop the scroll. Create curiosity. |
| Website Blurb | 2,000 characters | Your individual Event Page | Build confidence. Sell the experience. |
| Printed Short Blurb | 250 characters | The printed Fringe Magazine | Compress your best pitch to its absolute essence. |
Think of these as a funnel. The Lead Sentence earns the click. The Blurb turns that click into a booking. The Short Blurb's job is slightly different — in print, it's getting someone curious enough to find your show on the website, where the Lead Sentence and Blurb can do the rest of the work.
They work together, so you should consider all three as a set, not as three separate tasks.
100 characters · Browse and search pages
What it is
Your Lead Sentence sits beside your event title and main image when someone is browsing or searching Melbourne Fringe Festival events. Apart from your title, it's the first piece of writing they encounter.
One hundred characters. It's not much, but it's enough, if you use it deliberately.
Some examples to get a feel for it: