The Complete Handbook of Arts & Entertainment
The Professional's Guide to Production, Performance, and Revenue in Visual and Performing Arts
by Marcus Whitfield
non-fiction
The practical reference for arts professionals: equipment specs, production workflows, revenue models, and real-world troubleshooting.
Arts and entertainment professionals operate in a sector with unique technical requirements, economic pressures, and operational challenges. Whether you're producing theater, managing a venue, booking talent, running a recording studio, curating exhibitions, or building a sustainable creative business, you need concrete, non-aspirational knowledge about how the work actually gets done.
This handbook covers the decisions that matter: how to specify and evaluate performance spaces and equipment, how production budgets and revenue models work in practice, what constitutes realistic staffing and timeline structures, how to troubleshoot common technical and operational failures, and where genuine market and technology shifts are creating new opportunities and constraints. Each chapter is grounded in real-world examples and measurable standards rather than generic advice or marketing narratives.
Written by and for working professionals, this is the reference you keep at hand when you need to make a decision, solve a problem, or understand whether a proposal makes financial or technical sense.
Reader Reviews
Gary Rivera
★★★★★This is exactly what I needed when I took over our theater's operations. The chapter on specifications and standards alone saved us thousands on a lighting equipment purchase—I finally understood what the sales specs actually meant instead of just trusting the vendor. The troubleshooting section helped me diagnose why our HVAC was failing before summer, and the revenue model frameworks gave me real numbers to work with when we restructured our ticket pricing. Not inspirational, not fluff—just practical knowledge from someone who clearly understands how this sector actually works.