Creating a Correspondence Log for Selling Your Screenplay

When you are working on trying to sell your screenplay you need a long term organized strategy. This can take the form of many moves, including checklists and Weekly Action Plans. The main feature that is common amongst all attempts to sell an original screenplay, or get an agent through the process, is making contact. This contact can be with anybody useful in the industry, from agencies to producers to financiers.

If you are going to do this you are going to have to work in quantity rather than a few good leads. The more contacts you make the better chance you have of making a professional deal for your screenplay. If you want to keep this organized the best way is to put together a Correspondence Log, which keeps a detailed record of your contacts. Here is a good format for your screenplay Correspondence Log.

Begin the Correspondence Log by creating a table, which can be done easily in Microsoft Word or Excel. You are going to want to make six columns and a large number of rows, ranging from fifty to one hundred or more. At the top you are going to label each column something differently as each row will be a single contact.

The first row will be the date of the contact. This is so that you can keep a good timetable of your correspondence. The next one will be labeled Queries and Submissions, and this will indicate what you have sent. This could either be a full submission of your screenplay to that person or entity, or just a query letter. After this will be Script Title, which will likely be the same for all rows unless you are working with multiple scripts. To the right of this will be the technical details of the script, such as the author’s name and script length. Like the one before it, this will be the same for most rows. After this you will list the person and/or company that you contacted.

The final one, and maybe the most detailed, is for comments and responses. This is where you should put a short one sentence synopsis of the result of the contact. You may even want to create a seventh column strictly for follow-up information, but that depends on how large you want the page to be. Since you want it to print out cleanly you are going to have to keep the columns fairly narrow.