‘Starving in a garret may be traditional for writers but these days it’s no good unless you’re broadcasting it on the web’ according to PR and Marketing guru K D Adamson. We have managed to get her to come to the Screenwriters’ Festival in Cheltenham at the end of the month to explain why any ambitious writer needs to establish three key things: their positioning, motivation and objective.
Sounds miles from anything in Sid Field or McKee et al. But when she grilled me on my lack of profile-raising sense, I realized there was another game out there being played by some writers (and possibly agents) which the rest of us were simply not aware of.
What does it mean to ‘create your brand as authentically as you would a character and learn how to leverage that across the most cost‐effective medium ever invented: the world wide web’?
Is it not enough to struggle to write better, find an agent (or find out how to operate well without one)? Isn’t it mainly – as Gene Fowler is supposed to have said: ‘Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.’
Many writers write because they don’t like the social networking aspect of showbiz (as opposed to those who write only in order to legitimize their access to showbiz, which usually means that they are not really good writers).
This is why we have scheduled several networking, negotiating skills, PR and marketing sessions at Cheltenham. I need to know this stuff for the benefit of my clients. Do you know about ‘Expert Sources’? I didn’t but I wish I had learned about it much earlier. It is a website journalists use to find experts on any subject that they want to write about. Many of you will be expert in something, whether it is Romantic Comedy (because you have studied it and written several and can talk about it endlessly, or whatever).
Being a successful writer means embracing the business of being a writer, that is the professionalizing of your chosen career, which is where TwelvePoint and Cheltenham come in. Many quite successful writers still behave like amateurs and could make lots more money if they were more businesslike about the career.
If I need to learn how top marketers approach the creation of brands, why the phrase ‘summers in Rangoon, luge lessons’ is a shortcut to PR gold and how you can use that to make your approaches to production companies, broadcasters and (if you are a writer) to agents far more effective, then I suspect that we all do.
I also suspect that this session alone could be worth the full delegate fee to the Screenwriters’ Festival.
