Please welcome novelist and screenwriter (TV, film) Dale Kutzera to Writer Unboxed today!
Dale grew up in the Pacific Northwest and worked as a screenwriter for over ten years. Among his credits are the VH-1 series “Strange Frequency,” the CBS drama “Without a Trace,” and the independent film “Military Intelligence And You!” He is a recipient of the Carl Sautter Screenwriting Award, and the Environmental Media Award.
His novels include the “Andy McBean” middle-grade adventures.
He has recently released a plotting guidebook for novelists called “The Plot Machine.”
Dale’s “The Plot Machine: Design Better Stories Faster” is a book spot-on for the WU audience; it’s for intermediate writers, not beginners, and proposes a fresh way to think about story — through the design of the plot itself.
You can learn more about Dale and The Plot Machine on his website, and by following him on LinkedIn and Facebook.
It’s a (Mad, Mad) Marketing World
Now more than ever, writing has become a matter of quantity as much as quality. You can blame the 500 channels on your television, the game machine below it, and the millions of books just a click away on your phone or tablet.
That’s a lot of options for story-consumers and a lot of competition for story-producers.
Standing out in this crowd is either impossible or insanely expensive. Television networks, movie studios, and traditional publishers can no longer rely on old-media to reach a wide audience. The top concern of every agent, editor, development executive, and producer is marketing. The first question asked of every manuscript, screenplay, and television pilot is, “How would this be marketed?”
Genre, plot, characters, setting—the traditional elements on which a work is judged—all take a back seat to marketing. This isn’t to say that leaders in the story-industry are blind to quality, just that ease-of-marketing is the first hurdle a project must clear.
1. Branding
If given a choice, would you market a stand-alone story, or the first in a series? Assuming both are of equal quality, the smart choice is the series, because the marketing dollars spent on story #1 would build an audience for story #2.
Franchise or branding potential is the second hurdle a story must clear. A major decision for writers today is whether their property can become a series (the same characters in many stand-alone stories) or a serial (one story spanning several episodes). Star Trek is a series. Harry Potter is a serial.
This pressure to brand has lead to the decline of stand-alone stories, whether individual novels, anthology TV series, Movies of the Week, or the sort of high-minded theatrical films that win Oscars.
2. Name Recognition
The impact of marketing and branding are all around us. These days, it is hard to find a theatrical film that isn’t a sequel, a reboot, or an adaptation of some pre-existing, pre-marketed property.
Stand-alone books or films are typically the work of name creators who have become a brand unto themselves—for example, the comedies of Judd Apatow, or the horror novels of Stephen King. Traditional-media is like a popular nightclub. Only the hipsters with name recognition get past the velvet rope.
3. Changing Distribution [Read more…]
