I’m a big believer in submitting your script to many companies and doing it often. My post How to Sell Your Screenplay (in a nutshell) pretty much explains how to do it.
Over the years I’ve been building my own database of industry contacts. I now have nearly 500 agents and managers and nearly 1500 production companies in my database. Recently I’ve been submitting to my database of contacts and I have been getting a pretty good response rate. To make submitting easier I’ve built some tools to help automate the process so I can now send out snail mail, fax, and email queries to my database with relative ease.
So… I was thinking I might be able to use my submission tools to help readers of SellingYourScreenplay.com.
It’s not going to be free but I’m not sure how much to charge. There are some hard costs (i.e. postage on the letters, the fax service charges 6 cents per page) and I would want to make sure that every query letter that was sent to my database of contacts was up to industry standards so I don’t burn out my list, so I would want to work with each writer to get their query letter up to par.
I’m thinking I would offer two different variations of the service:
#1 An agents/mangers campaign. My agents/managers list has around 500 contacts in it.
#2 A production company campaign. My list of production companies is well over 1500 companies.
With a good query letter, I’ve been able to get around a 3% response rate from the agents/managers list and around 5% from the production company list so you could expect to get around 15 requests for your script from the agents/managers campaign and probably around 75 requests for your script from the production company campaign. These numbers will obviously change a bit depending on your query letter, your particular story, and a little luck, but I won’t let a sub-par query letter be sent through my system so I would think most people could expect this sort of response rate.
Whether they option or purchase your script will depend a lot on the quality of your script and luck, but the first step is getting your material into the hands of agents, managers, and producers.
One thing I want to make clear about this service; all I’m offering is an easy way to make the submissions. While my list is a little more developed than the one you’ll find in the The Hollywood Creative Directory (HCD) since I’ve been building my list for a few years, the real magic in what I’m offering is my expertise in helping you with your query letter and the ease of submitting (you’ll just send me your query letter and I’ll take care of the rest). But you could easily do this on your own by building your own list and submitting to it, my tools just make it a whole lot easier.
If anyone has any interest in this please drop me an email (info@sellingyourscreenplay.com) or leave comments at the bottom of this post and tell me how much you would be willing to pay for the agents/managers campaign and the production company campaign. I’m trying to gauge interest to see if it would be worth me rolling my tools out to the readers of SellingYourScreenplay.com.
This would be an awesome resource! I’m not sure how to gauge the price of such a service but I’d be definitely willing to pay $25-$50 dollars just for you to send out the letter. As for editing the letter that would probably be more like $70-$100. That could be a lower estimate then what you might have been thinking but.. If I were to purchase this service I’d feel comfortable paying that amount not just for one query letter for a specific script, but more as well.
I’m a little curious. How much of your contact list is email, snail mail, fax, etc.? That could change the price drastically with 2000 contacts. If I had to venture a guess at a price, I’d say add at least 25% to whatever it costs you and give yourself a good hourly rate for your time to do it.
Off Topic, I just found this website today. I immediately recognized your name from the AZ forum. I checked out Dish Dogs a couple months ago after reading some of your posts there. I liked it a lot.
Thanks for checking out the site.
For the producers list I have mostly mailing addresses, probably around 1800. I’d say I have over 1000 faxes and probably a little less than that for emails.
For the agents and mangers list I have around 400 mailing addresses, 300 faxes and 200 email addresses.
I’ve been doing some beta testing on the lists and so far it seems to be working well and getting a nice response for writers.
Also, what is the AZ forum?