Getting 'It' Out There

In the comments section of Lucy’s post on MyVisualPitch here, Piers serves up a brilliantly cost effective and reliable method of promoting yourself and your screenplay to the world at large – which got me thinking (never a pleasant sight at the best of times). All the little baby steps I’ve made with my own scripts have mostly down to my own efforts – and by that I mean that I haven’t paid anyone or any website a single penny to promote my work. I tried Inktip last summer (see here for a summary) and got absolutely nowhere. I have no opinion as to why this was – perhaps my loglines didn’t inspire people to find out more, who knows? – and of course, you pays your money, you takes your choice (i.e., caveat emptor). But I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that if you - the writer - are in control, that’s got to be a good thing. And to be in control means doing it yourself.

Don’t get me wrong – I have absolutely nothing against sites like Inktip or MyVisualPitch (there’s no doubt that they work for some people). It’s just that – like Piers – I think there are far more cost effective ways of promoting your work and also retaining a degree of control regarding the process. Like most people I dislike cold calling, so I tend to lead with either a letter or an e-mail. If you come across as reasonably sane and intelligent, you’ll be pleasantly surprised as to who responds. You could do worse than start off with this list (on the bottom of the same post there’s also a link to a post on Danny Stack’s blog with similar information regarding different companies). Send ‘em an e-mail and see what happens! After all, it’s free. Add in a few script calls (the recent Sharps, for example) and the odd competition (if that’s your bag), and you should have enough to keep the promotions subsidiary of your screenwriting ‘business’ busy without bankrupting yourself. And if you really have a hankering to try and promote your work in the United States, try this website – it has more free information on it than you can shake an oversized stick at.

Absolutely 100% of all the opportunities I’ve gone for over the last couple of years have been pursued using purely traditional means: letters, e-mails (yeah, OK, ‘traditional’ in the sense that it’s still a letter per se) and phone calls. Judging from the very limited amount of marketing I’ve done, I’ve had many close calls, a few meetings and have been on a fair few shortlists – all for a minimum outlay. I’m working on a collaboration right now, which cost me absolutely nothing to establish. Besides, I don’t have the money to throw at things like Inktip, and what’s more, I’m a control freak. I want to know who might be interested in my work and who might want to read it.

In this regard, I find the internet a little disingenuous, as it seemingly offers up the prospect of instant success for a minimum investment of time. The problem here as I see it is twofold -cost: as the price of a lot of online services is often prohibitive, and lack of visibility: once your work is out there, you have very little idea how it’s doing, or how it compares to everything else in an already overcrowded market.

Piers’ idea of buying a copy of the Writers & Artists Yearbook is still a good one – go through it and make a list of everyone who accepts unsolicited submissions. Send them a letter, an e-mail, or even a script. It really is that simple.

Down and Dirty with Inktip

I put a couple of scripts up on Inktip a little while back – and all I can say is that the site’s popularity is frightening. In the period January to July this year, the loglines for two of my scripts were viewed approximately 400 times! However, in the grand scheme of Inktip, this means absolutely bugger all – the exceedingly broad brush way in which interested parties can interrogate the Inktip database means that your logline will get thrown up with literally hundreds of others all jockeying for position in what I’m sure is one of the biggest online markets of its kind. It didn’t work for me, but I suspect that’s down to the quality of my loglines – out of these 400 ‘hits’, my scripts were viewed three times! I get a better hit rate hassling UK agents. Ah well.

There was a debate on Trigger Street a little while back that revolved around the fact that a lot of the companies using Inktip are looking for scripts that can be produced for a relatively small budget – that’s absolutely fine by me, but something to bear in mind when you’re uploading your new sword n’ sorcery epic with added CGI dragons. The site is also pretty Ameri-centric as you might expect - however, I did have a few small British prodcos stop by and eye up my CV, but no bites unfortunately (curses to my rubbish loglines).

For info, here are a few of the companies that came up in my profile:

Skeleton Factory
Scar Tissue Films
Graceland Film Company AS
Intrinsic Value Films
Ministry of Film
Spare Change Productions
Thunderball Films
Strangeland Films
Twisted Pictures
Bonsai Entertainment
Indiewood Pictures
Diesel Movie Werks

Loads more where these came from! Other than low budget American indies, for some reason there are a lot of small Dutch outfits searching for material as well.

It also appears that my CV was viewed by someone who was busted back in 2003 by the Plaintiff Securities and Exchange Commission in the US for being an “unlicensed dealer-broker” (i.e., the guy purchased shares from two US companies, then sold them on at considerable profit to investors with the promise that these companies were going public, which never happened). Naughty boy! Which all goes to show that we’ve got to be careful out there – you never know who might be eyeing up your on-line wares (so to speak).