Glenn...I've been in the publishing and business-to-business communications field for over 30 years.I teach business communication at the college level and am a consultant to Fortune 500 companies. Believe me, you can immediately tell a MS publisher job printed on a home computer. There are inexpensive ways to do what you need to do in a much more professional manner.

1. Send a text file of the copy to a local service bureau. That way, an operstor can flow copy in a way which is spaced correctly
and will be formatted with the right dpi for a professional look.

2. Go to a digital output house for production. These are Kinko type houses for the communications industry. They use very high quality (and expensive)printers and can justify images so they back-up correctly.
Cost is usually .75C a side, and you can use coated stock, which is necessary for acceptable reproduction of photographs.

I hate to see anyone spend the time learning a program when there is little or no chance that the final result will be a professional one. Even small churches use Pagemaker, instead of MS Publisher, and that's not even
a good enough program to do what you need to do.

I get 10 or more solicitations a week from
entertainers a week. The vast majority go in the trash. Unprofessional work tells me a lot about the level of professionalism of the entertainer.

A professional letter, customized to the decision maker, with an attached headshot and possibly a song list is much better.

If you'd like to talk about this, give me a call at 1-859-253-0390.

Just trying to help...

Russ