Hi all,

This is may sound like a pretentious question, but as someone who's self-releasing an EP, I want to make sure that I'm getting it out there in the wisest possible way. I'm already investing huge amounts of time and money into the project, but the last thing I want is to needlessly alienate people (e.g. JAGgers on these boards) or waste time / money on utterly pointless methods. I'm asking the question here as I know there are a number of people on these boards who have experience in this sort of area, so I figured there was no harm in asking. My bluntness may be a bit of a backfire from the start, but as everything's in such a state of flux at the moment, the only literature I can find on the subject at the moment just seems to be outdated (aside from in principle). I think my biggest problem at the moment is that a lot of the focus is online, just because that's more in line with my background.

For some context, we're based in London and make music you could describe as rock / electro / pop. Here's what we've done so far (not including the writing, rehearsing and recording of the tracks themselves):

Bought the .com & .co.uk
Set up profiles on many many websites with band portals (myspace, facebook, last.fm...).
Write an initial biography to give people an idea of what the music sounds like as there's not much history to date.
Prepared an unmastered promo CD of 3 tracks.
Spent a fair amount of time on Myspace finding out who the currently active promoters are who may like our music.
Sent CDs, mp3s or webstreams to promoters around London who put shows on of a similar sound.
Prepared a proper live show to give people reason to come see us.
Played a number of shows as a result of this.
Created remixes of the original tracks in different styles (to be fair this is because the other two in the band are also DJs, but it doesn't hurt).

Here's what we plan to do.
Get the EP mastered.
Make a run of 300 copies of the EP.
Create a relevant biography to be sent with the EP (worth putting more effort into more than just a CD, a biography and some background about the EP?).
Get some t-shirts printed.
Send "press packs" to as many reviewers as we know of, probably use the footprints of indie signed bands to know else who to send to aside from the places we're already familiar with.
Use hypem to find out about bloggers who may be interested in the track originals / remixes and contact them.
Use mailing list & merch table at shows to sell CDs & t-shirts.

Obviously there's more to each point than is described above, but we really want to hit the ground running when this EP is ready so any advice anyone can give, or maybe big things we've overlooked would be hugely appreciated.