Everybody in the theatre works to a 7.30 deadline: the moment when the curtain goes up. Mornings may be spent rehearsing but, as 7.30 approaches, the show takes over – the scenery gets built, lights are focussed, costumes ironed, performers begin to warm up and the orchestra changes into evening dress. Everybody is thinking about the stage, except Caroline Bailey, the Director of Marketing. As 7.30 approaches she's thinking about the auditorium. Will it be full of people?

Opera needs an audience. Singers and musicians want their performance to be heard (and clapped), and the Royal Opera House (ROH) needs money to pay the wages bill. The audience is the most important part of the operation, and its up to people like Caroline to find them.

Her basic strategy is to produce a huge, wonderfully illustrated, booklet called the Season Guide. It takes ages to produce. Caroline usually starts work on one two and half years before the season is due to begin. She looks at all the operas and ballets in that year and splits them into four chunks, four booking periods. These make the Guide manageable; nobody wants to pay for a whole year's worth of tickets at once.

Once the year is split up, Caroline thinks through each period. What sort of visual images should she use for the shows? This is very important because once she's chosen an image for (say) ‘Peter Grimes’, she will have 'branded it'. That image will appear in newspaper ads, on leaflets and stuck up round the Underground. It will become instantly recognisable as the ‘Peter Grimes’ image. If you look on the ROH web site you'll see Caroline has gone for a group image for this show. This tells you that the chorus in Grimes is as important as the soloists, and it highlights the director's idea that the opera is about a group ganging up on a misfit.

A year before the season starts the 'copy' (the text) for the Guide starts to fall into place, the casts and dates get sorted and, a few months before the season, it's sent off to the regular audience. Shortly afterwards it is available to the general public – and now things begin to hot up. In come the booking forms to the ticket office and Caroline has to work out which operas and ballets are selling.

She can guess, almost to the week, how well a performance should do and, as the first night approaches, she has to decide whether to give individual shows a further boost. ‘Peter Grimes’ is traditionally difficult to sell (Britten is thought to be modern and tough) but actually Grimes is doing rather well this season. If it needs some help, Caroline's department will start getting more pictures and ads into the press, or perhaps do a mail search on the ROH data bank and write letters to people who've booked for modern operas before. They might even consider ticket offers, which brings us to the other major part of Caroline's work – pricing.

Prices are a flash point at the ROH. The popular idea is that opera tickets are outrageously expensive and that opera is only for rich people. Actually, half the tickets at the Opera House are priced like a normal West End show, that is at £50 or under. 272 seats are under £10. The other tickets, it's true, do cost a bit more but that's because the ROH does rather more shows than the average West End theatre. It puts on about 22 operas and 16 ballets a year, and those shows have to use the best singers and dancers in the world. Then it has to pay for an opera company, a ballet company, an orchestra and an army of stage staff, voice coaches, lighting people and so on. The difficulty is to maintain accessible prices and pay the wages bill. It's an absolute tightrope.

When asked what qualities you needed to be a good Marketing person Caroline went at once for enthusiasm. A good salesman is supposed to be able to sell anything, from Grand Opera to dog food, but she thinks you can only do a job like hers if you really believe in the product. That and an ability to think two and half years in advance…

The Marketing department pay for their publicity. They're given a budget, which they use to take out adverts and print the Season Guide, but another department in the ROH manages to get free publicity. This is the Press Office. (Press is everything you see, hear or listen to in the media.)

The Press Office gets this publicity by interesting journalists in the work of the ROH. Of course the Press are already interested in the ROH; they send critics along to first nights and they love stories about disasters on stage or singers having rows with the management. The difficulty is steering journalists away from bad news stories and on to stories that are going to help the company.

The Press Office at the Opera House are brilliant at knowing what makes journalists tick. The word 'new' for example always gets a press person going. Newspapers invariably take stories about new productions, new singers, the first time this opera has ever been seen. 'New' is a great buzz word: another is 'controversial'. However, you have to be careful here. Journalists think that controversy is exciting, but the public (or at least the opera going public) often read controversial to mean violent, modern or unpleasant. So it can be risky.

Fortunately the Press team at the ROH are extremely knowledgeable people. They see the regular journalists often and know in advance what sort of story they're likely to take and how to pitch it to them. Opera critics are knowledgeable too, so the Press Office has to be incredibly diplomatic as they steer them towards useful stories. The Office also looks after the performers, helping them with their publicity and arranging their photo shoots – and always hoping they'll get a payback the next time they need somebody, in a hurry, for a celebrity interview.

Press stories usually need an angle, a peg to hang a story on. Newspapers prefer opera singers to be glamorous or temperamental, preferably both, and of course if you've got a good looking soprano, size 8, you're away – but what happens when the singers are just ordinary and nice?

For ‘Peter Grimes’ the Press have thought of several ways to pitch the show. It is, to start with, a new production to the UK, so that will go down well. Also Ben Heppner is singing the main part. Ben hasn't sung at the Opera House for a while, he's a big personable Canadian, so he ought to give some good interviews. And then, like the Marketing Department, the Press have gone for the fact that Grimes is a company show. That gives it a human interest appeal – particularly as it is the last show that Terry Edwards will be involved in as Chorus Director. Terry retires this season. During his time with the Opera House he has turned the chorus into one of the finest in the world, he is one of the greatest Chorus Directors around and, at 6' 7", far and away the biggest. There should be some good copy there.

The first requirement for working in a press office is to love the product. You don't have to be obsessive, but you must be enthusiastic. The people you deal with always respond to enthusiasm. The next thing is, you must be able to write good English. Although many journalists write their own stuff, lots of hard pressed editors on small newspapers and magazines haven't got the time. They expect the Press Officer to send them press releases; often whole paragraphs are lifted directly from the press release and printed. Press Offices like to employ people with experience so, if you want to be a Press Officer, you should start at once. Review the school or college play, write leaflets, publicity and programmes; get the local newspaper in. And keep a copy of everything you do!