Read 'Easy way to filter Craigslist posts for screenwriters' at http://www.SellingYourScreenplay.com.

I’ve written a few posts on submitting your query letter and screenplay to ads on sites like Craig’s List. I recommend it. I’ve optioned and sold scripts to exactly these types of ads.

Screenwriter and reader Jim Burtoft created a Yahoo Pipe to filter the Craig’s List pages that you would want to look at and has set up a keyword filter for “script” and “screenplay” – and the results are published to an RSS feed. RSS is a simple way to get content from publishers in an easy to read format that you can plug into your RSS reader of choice (Google Reader is free). Put this Yahoo Pipe link into your favorite RSS reader and you will see all the Craig’s List posts that have the word “script” or “screenplay” in them.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=1a6386d57432b95ec5ef2c522ea6989e

Jim also gave these instructions:

“Anyone can subscribe to it just like any other RSS feed.

If you are logged into Yahoo, you can “clone” it, then edit it to change what filters it uses, then subscribe to your own pipe!

Feel free to publish and/or share with anyone you want!”

Thanks Jim for this excellent resource.

Read 'How I optioned and sold my first screenplay Dish Dogs' at http://www.SellingYourScreenplay.com.

I’m sure many people reading this blog have looked at my IMDB link, but if you haven’t have a look at it. You’ll notice my first writing credit is a film called Dish Dogs starring Shannon Elizabeth, Sean Astin, Mathew Lillard, and Brian Dennehy.

Dish Dogs started out as an idea I had in college – a sort of modern day Easy Rider about two guys who would drive around the country washing dishes at local restaurants, never staying at one place for more than a few days. I washed dishes at a Chart House Restaurant in high school and I saw firsthand how easy it was to get a job as a dishwasher and thought this was a romantic and somewhat plausible premise for a script.

I had told my college buddy, Nathan Ives, about the idea and he liked it. After sitting on the idea for several years he asked if he could take a stab at writing it. After we talked about it for a while we decided to try and write it together – it became the first script we wrote together and has been an enduring writing partnership.

So Nathan and I wrote a draft of the script and we started to pass it around to our contacts. Nathan worked at Digital Domain (a special effects company) so he gave it to a few people down there. While no one wanted to buy the script, people seemed generally pretty positive about it.

At the time I was working on a master’s degree at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) in communications with a screenwriting emphasis. One of the other students, Stan Williamson, had recently optioned his script Just Write. I asked him how he had optioned it and he told me he submitted it to an ad in The Hollywood Reporter. I had occasionally seen these ads placed by producers looking for scripts and even submitted a few times, but I had never gotten a reply so I had never done it with any consistency. He told me that he had been submitting to them for 10 years and had optioned quite a few scripts that way. So I too began to submit with extreme consistency.

After 9 month of consistently submitting (probably hundreds of submissions or more) to every post in The Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety where someone was looking for a script I started to get a few replies from people. One guy was thinking about hiring me to re-write a project he was working on. One company was looking to hire writers to write their ideas. And finally a production company liked Dish Dogs and wanted to option it. They paid us $500 for a 6 month option and told us they were going to make the movie for around $2 million. Nathan and I were ecstatic.

It turned out to be quite lucky that I was able to sell the first script that I optioned and it ended up getting produced. Usually options don’t turn in to actual sales. Since then I’ve probably had 25 options that never went anywhere.

I’ll leave the actual process and the re-writes of the script for another post – it didn’t exactly go as planned. Hopefully there are some lessons in my experience for you. I still occasionally look in the trades for posts but it doesn’t seem like producers post there any more, most of the equivalent postings have gone online to places like Craig’s List. Check out my post about submitting to Craig’s List.

Read 'Submitting your screenplay to Craig’s List postings' at http://www.SellingYourScreenplay.com.

If you’re an experienced screenwriter there’s probably better ways for you to sell a script than submitting to postings on Craig’s List but if you’re trying to make your own breaks and get your scripts produced this is probably a pretty good place to start looking for producers to turn your script into a movie.

Craig’s List has two sections (in every city) where you can often find “job” posts by directors and producers looking for screenplays. You can find them under the “writing/editing jobs” section and the “writing gigs” section. I typically look in both sections for Los Angeles and New York.

The Los Angeles Writing section can be found here: http://losangeles.craigslist.org/wri/

The Los Angeles Writing Gigs section can be found here: http://losangeles.craigslist.org/wrg/

The New York Writing section can be found here: http://newyork.craigslist.org/wri/

The New York Writing Gigs section can be found here: http://newyork.craigslist.org/wrg/

I imported the RSS feeds into my MS Outlook RSS section so the new job posts come in like an email into the respective folder and I can quickly look at them. You’ll find the RSS link at the bottom of each page. This makes it very easy to quickly keep an eye on virtually every post that goes through the system. Most are not for screenplays but some are. And looking at them in Outlook using the RSS feed probably takes me less than 10 minutes per day to look at every single ad in all 4 sections. On average I would say I see 2-5 posts per week that I respond to.

I’ve heard a wide array of opinions about whether these posts are worth responding to. Many writers think they’re complete junk, and for the most part they’re right.

However, I personally see very little downside to responding to them. I never send a complete script (no production company would want you to). I send a 1 page query letter with usually 1 or 2 synopses (also usually about a page each). I have all my query letters saved in one file so it’s very easy to copy and paste the appropriate letter into an email – it takes me less than 5 minutes to respond to one of these posts.

But if you do decide to submit to these sorts of posts always use common sense and caution. Make sure you have a copy write on your work. If the post is poorly written and doesn’t seem legitimate it probably isn’t. If someone responds to your query and they sound like a jackass they probably are.

When you’re looking in the gigs section, the people who have posted the ads have done so for free. So there is literally no barrier to posting an ad in the gigs section and the quality of the posts reflects this. In all the major cities like Los Angeles and New York in order to post in the “writing/editing jobs” section a poster has to pay $25. While this isn’t a lot of money, it does seem to weed out most complete wanna-bes because the total losers simply post in the gigs section and are too cheap to spend the $25. So keep that in mind if you decide to respond to these posts and take the ones in the writing/editing jobs section a little more seriously than the ones in the gigs section.

One thing that definitely does happen is people who are trying to sell services to screenwriters will post a seemingly legitimate ad calling for screenplays and then add you to their mailing list and try and sell you all sorts of screenwriting services. I’ve never signed up for a single email list about screenwriting but I get several emails per day for various screenwriting services. I’m guessing most if not all got my email address by posting a fake ad. While this is annoying it’s certainly not the end of the world and I use Gmail which has a good spam filter so it’s not hard to get rid of their emails pretty quickly.

One thing I don’t understand is why other screenwriters get so annoyed at some of the obvious scams and wanna-bes. If someone posts an ad that’s clearly not legitimate why bother flagging it? If some newbie screenwriter is dumb enough to waste his time responding to it the better for me. In addition it often times seems like some legitimate posts are flagged (and removed) in an effort to prevent other screenwriters from submitting – that really is annoying.

I recently optioned my screenplay Irrefutable Evidence to a young producer who I found through Craig’s List. So there are people out there who are legitimately looking for scripts to produce. Just don’t expect any big time producers or any major production companies to be looking for scripts on Craig’s List, because they won’t be.

What has your experience been submitting your scripts to Craig’s List? Leave a comment below. I’d be interested in hearing other people’s thoughts.

Read 'How to Sell Your Screenplay (in a nutshell)' at http://www.SellingYourScreenplay.com.

Since the title of my blog is “Selling Your Screenplay,” and I want that to be the focus of my blog, I figured an obvious first post was to write a simple guide to getting your screenplay sold.

Keep in mind that this blog is not an exhaustive list of ways to get your script sold.  It’s just a few ways that I’ve tried and had good luck with.  Always be on the lookout for other ways to get your script sold and realize that some of the things I’ve done may not work for you.  Hopefully if you see exactly what I’ve done and how I did it you will be able learn from it and apply it to your own situation.

To sell a script the first thing you need to do is write a great screenplay.  I know this sounds obvious, but really, it’s got to be great to get noticed.

I would guess that for most of us to write a “great” screenplay you’re probably going to write a half dozen (or more) not-so-great ones.  I read once that Platoon was Oliver Stone’s 11th screenplay – but the first one that actually got him any recognition.  So don’t be ashamed about being a novice, everyone is at one time or another, just keep writing, and with each script you’ll get better and hopefully you’ll eventually start churning out scripts that are up to industry standards.  Just because your first one (or first ten) are terrible doesn’t mean you’re not capable of writing a great screenplay, it just means you’ve haven’t acquired the skill yet.

Once you’ve written a great script write two more so that you have at least three solid screenplays ready to go.  It’s very common for a producer or director to read one of your scripts and think it is well written but not quite right for them – that’s when you’ll want to pitch them one of your other “great” scripts.

Don’t be too eager to start sending out your first few scripts if they’re truly not up to industry standards – and if you haven’t written at least half dozen scripts or more they most likely are NOT!

There are lots of books on how to write a good script.  Ream them. I personally recomend Screenplay by Syd Field and The Art Of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri for starters.

You can learn more about Field’s Screenplay by checking out my post Syd Field’s Screenplay

So how do you know if your script is up to industry standards?  You’ll never know for sure.  But as a screenwriter you should be interacting with other screenwriters, reading their scripts, and reading scripts from produced screenwriters.  So by the time you’ve written a few solid scripts you should have some idea about where you stand compared to industry standards.  If you’re not doing any of these things your script probably isn’t ready and neither are you – so start reading other people’s scripts while you’re working on your writing.

Make sure you protect your work by getting a copyright on it or sending it to the WGA for registration. Check out my post How do you protect your work? Screenplay copyrights and WGA registration to learn how to protect yourself and your script.

Okay… so now you’ve written several great scripts and gotten them all copyrighted. Now what?

You’ve got to get your script to someone who can turn it into a movie. While this may seem obvious (and easier said than done) it’s all you have to do.

Who do you know that could turn your script into a movie?

Perhaps you have enough money to produce the movie yourself.  I’ve done this and it allows a lot of creative control over the final product.

Or perhaps you have a rich relative or friend who might be willing to invest in your project.

In this day and age you can produce a feature film for very little money and if you’re looking to get your first project off the ground this is going to be the easiest way to do it so seriously consider it.

But if you’re goal is to simply sell your script then you’ve got to find a producer who will raise the money and make your movie.  While this is very difficult this is precisely what most screenwriters are looking to do.

Many novice writers assume they need an agent to help them sell their script. While a good agent can help I recommend going straight to the produces themselves. In my experience when you have no credits finding an agent that can really help you is actually harder then finding a producer who will make your movie so you’re better off spending your time trying to find a producer than an agent. Check out my post How do you get an agent for your screenplay? (And why you don’t need one!) to learn more about finding an agent.

Many of the trade publications (The Hollywood reporter, Daily variety, Backstage West) will often  have ads in them placed by producers or directors seeking screenplays.  Over the last few years I’ve noticed that there are fewer and fewer of these sorts of ads in the trades as they have moved to Craig’s List.  Read my post about submitting to Craig’s List.  While you do have to be very careful, it is a great resource for writers, especially beginning writers. I recently optioned a script to a producer I met on Craig’s List so it can be done.

I actually began my screenwriter career by submitting to Reader’s Digest Writer’s Market.  They have a section for screenwriters and have filtered the list a bit so that most of the listed production companies will read scripts by unproduced writers.

The Hollywood Creative Directory (HCD) is a comprehensive list of every single production company in the United States with addresses, phone and fax numbers, and sometimes email addresses.  While this isn’t an easy road I have optioned screenplays through unsolicited submissions this way.  It’s going to require a lot of letter writing, faxing, emailing, and phone calls, but if you do it on a large enough scale you will eventually get some of these companies to read your material and hopefully option it from you.  There’s well over 2000 companies listed so you have plenty of places to submit.

Check out my post Getting your screenplay to producers and production companies for more information about exactly how to do this.

No matter who you submit to you’re going to need to write a good query letter and synopsis for your script.  A query letter introduces yourself to the producer.  You want to list any writing credits you have and a logline (one-sentence synopsis of your script) about your script in about half a page.  Then you’ll also include a 1 page synopsis about the script you mentioned in the query.

Read my full post about how to write a professional query letter by clicking here.

Read my post Writing a synopsis for your screenplay to learn exactly what you need to do to write a professional synopsis.

Read my post Writing A Screenplay Logline to learn how to write a great logline.

Make sure you include both your phone number and email address in the query letter so that they can contact you and have a choice about which method works best for them.

I would say as a rule if you get a response from any of these sources 5% of the time you’re doing pretty well.  On Craig’s List you should be higher than that.  Submitting to the companies in Writer’s Market you should be right around 5%.  Submitting unsolicited letters to companies in the HCD will probably result in less than 5% – maybe even as low as 2%.  If you’re response rate is significantly below these numbers you need to take a step back and really look at your query letter and synopsis, re-write them, improve them, and then try again.

I have never been a good talker so I’ve never tried cold calling companies but I’ve known other writers who used this method with great success.  I typically will send emails, faxes or letters through regular mail.  Try all 4 methods and see which one works best for you. The HCD lists all 4 bits of contact information for most production companies.

I’ll be expanding on all these ideas and more in future posts so check back often.  

Also, feel free to comment below if you’ve used some of these methods to submit our script or if you’ve used other methods.

Good luck.