One of the most common questions I’m asked by aspiring screenwriters is  How do I break into the business?  What I’m going to suggest you do is actually fairly easy.  But it does takes a degree of talent and a lot of persistence

 

Everybody knows that Moe Howard, as well as his fellow Stooges, were creative geniuses. But not so many know that Moe’s son-in-law, Norman Maurer, was a genius in his own right.

Characters Engage.com Interviews Jeffrey Scott on His Secret to Writing Characters

©Disney PIXAR

Write me the next “Toy Story”!

Oh, and did I mention there’s only $25,000 for the script?

Self promotion turned out to be the hottest topic yet on my blog.  My three posts on the subject are approaching 6,000 reads! 

I have received dozens of comments, both on the blog and at LinkedIn, over 95% of which were in agreement that self-promotion is vitally important. 

You get it!  That's good!  Here's what I got...

Does self-promotion really work? 

What happens when you promote your writing via blog, Facebook and LinkedIn? 

Over the past several weeks I've done just that. 

The results are in. 

Check out this post and find out exactly what happened with my experiment in self-promotion...

A funny thing happened on the way to my Facebook page.  A handful of professional contacts refused to be my friend, not because they didn’t like me, but because they weren’t on Facebook.  The interesting thing was that they seemed to take pride in not being on Facebook.  This reminded me of something I’ve noticed over my career, an odd anomaly about many writers and artists: They don’t like to promote themselves.  Not a good idea!  Here's why...

In my previous post, How to Turn Microsoft Word into a Terrific Screenwriting Program, I explained how to use Word’s “styles” to automatically create script formatting.

This review is for those who want to decide between using Word as a simple screenwriting program and a more robust program like Final Draft 8.

UPDATED

The book publishing industry, like the newspaper biz, is on a glide path to oblivion.  It's just too easy and cheap to download a book to your computer, iPad or Kindle.

And that was last year!

Now it takes less time to publish your own book than it does to write a query letter to publishers, let alone send it out and wait for the rejection letters.

Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing is so easy it's frightening (to the publishing industry). How easy?