Creating a Weekly Action Plan for Selling Your Screenplay

Creating a Weekly Action Plan for Selling Your Screenplay
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Freelance

Selling your spec script is a difficult proposition even for those with professional connections and agencies. If you are without this you have a lot of work together getting contacts and reaching out to the industry. One way that people in this post-creative freelance field try to address this, especially with selling their screenplay, is to create a Weekly Action Plan. A Weekly Action Plan is a form that is used on a targeted weekly basis to get things done. There are a variety of Weekly Action Plans for different goals, but a specific one has been worked out for those trying to sell a screenplay.

Main Goal

Start out your Weekly Action Plan with a spot labeled Main Goal. This is likely to sell you script, but it can also be to get a picture contract, get a full film sold, or have even more specific things.

Below this you list the Key Milestones, which are the markers along the way to your Main Goal. This can be thing like sending out your script, getting representation, and then making a sale. Only do three or four of these and keep them realistic. To do this you need to make sure you research the more conventional business processes for your industry.

Directly below this you should list your Time Commitment, which should be relative to how much work you have ahead of you.

To Do List

The second section you have in your Weekly Action Plan is to list the things you have to do in the current week to achieve the goals. This goes in a few different sections. The first one can be Market Research, which involves figuring out what market your script is for.

The next would be networking and meetings so that you can get public awareness amongst the industry. After this should be Cold Calls, which is unsolicited pitching and contacting of different related areas. This is usually much more difficult than any other part of the Weekly Action Plan and rarely successful.

Query Letter comes next and these are specially prepared documents that you send to agencies, studios, or other industry institutions that are meant to pitch your project. These are similar to the ones you would use to pitch a freelance article to a text publication.

After these you are going to list your Follow Ups, which could be either phone or email. You finish the Weekly Action Plan by listing all the contest or festivals that you have to submit to.

This post is part of the series: Selling Your Screenplay

So you’ve written a screenplay? You may think it will be a big hit, but the many producers you encounter may not agree with you. Get some tips and organization tools to making contacts, gaining exposure and eventually being able to sell your screenplay!

  1. Creating an Identifying Prospect Form for Selling Your Screenplay
  2. Creating a Weekly Action Plan for Selling Your Screenplay
  3. Using a Meeting and Telephone Log to Help Sell Your Screenplay
  4. Creating a Correspondence Log for Selling Your Screenplay