Kenneth Atchity's Blog, page 139

Turn your book into a movie: 16 treatment tips by Kenneth Atchity

Turn your book into a movie: 16 treatment tips By Kenneth Atchity

Making a book into a film can cost producers anymore $1 million to $200 million, so this is clearly a major investment.

Talk to a story editor from any production company, studio, or agency “story department,” and they will tell you the weaknesses they see in novels submitted for film or television.

The story department’s report on the book’s potential for translation to film, referred to as “coverage,” is their feedback to the decision-making exec. It can make or break it for you — and it kills countless submissions.

The sad thing is, most writers will almost never even get as far as a coverage of their novel.

That’s often because of the book’s “treatment.”
What’s a treatment?A treatment is a relatively short, written pitch of a story intended for production as a motion picture or television program. Written in user-friendly, informal language and focused on action and events, it presents the story’s overall structure and primary characters. It presents three clear acts and shows how the characters change from beginning to end.

You can write a better treatment if you know about the typical weaknesses story editors find as they prepare each option’s “coverage” (see my book, Writing Treatments that Sell). When you address these common weaknesses, you give your story a much better chance in the rooms where people decide whether, and how much, to spend on putting your story onto the screen.

Then you can use that treatment to market your story to Hollywood.

16 treatment tips that will help you turn your book into a movieHere are 16 things to know about what your treatment needs to include.

1. Make sure your primary characters are relatable (that’s also called sympathetic).

If we can’t relate to them, we don’t feel for them. This addresses the comment: “I can’t relate to anyone in the book.”

2. Trim the number of characters way back so the treatment’s reader isn’t boggled by the immensity of the cast. 

Also, keep the treatment focused as much as possible on the protagonist (and his or her love interest and/or ally) and antagonist. Comment: “There are way too many characters, and it’s not clear till page 200 who the protagonist is.”

3. Build a strong protagonist in the 20 to 50 star age range, one we want to root for. 

Comment: “We don’t know who to root for.”

4. Make sure your hero or heroine takes action based on his or her motivation and mission, and forces others in your story to react.

Comment: “The protagonist is reactive, instead of proactive.”

5. Offer a new twist in your story even if it’s a familiar story to avoid the comment: “There’s nothing new here.”

6. Write it so the story editor reading your treatment can see three well-defined acts: act one (the setup), act two (rhythmic development, rising and falling action), and act three (climax, leading to conclusive ending).

Comment: “I can’t see three acts here.”

7. Make sure the turning point into the third act of your story is well-marked with a major twist that takes us there.

Comment: “There’s no Third Act…it just trickles out.”

8. Create a well-pronounced theme for your story (sometimes called “the premise”) in the treatment, so that the reader (audience) walks away with the feeling they’ve learned something important.

Comment: “At the end of the day, I have no idea what this story is about.”

9. Be sure there’s plenty of action in your story. 

Action means dramatic action, of which there are two kinds: action and dialogue. Action is obvious:

She slams the door in his face.The bullets find their target, and he slumps in his chair.The second plane crashes into the Pentagon.But good dialogue is also action:“Would you do something for me now?”“I’d do anything for you.”“Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?” (Hemingway, “Hills like White Elephants”)
10. Sprinkle character-revealing dialogue throughout, enough to let the reader know what your characters sound like—and that they all sound different.

Comment: “There’s no dialogue, so we don’t know what the characters sound like.”

11. Make sure the plot is hidden not overt, dropping clues act by act so the audience can foresee its possible outcomes.

Comment: “At the end, the antagonist lays out the entire plot to the protagonist before he’s killed.”

12. Ruthlessly go through your treatment and remove anything that even hints of contrivance.

The audience will allow any story one gimme, but rarely two, and never three, before they lose their belief. Everything needs to be grounded in the story’s integrity.

Comment: “The whole thing is overly contrived.”

13. Make it well-paced, with rising and falling action, twists and turns, cliffhangers ending every act, etc.

Comment: “There is no real pacing.”

14. Be able to pitch your story  in a single punch line (aka “logline”), and put that line at the beginning of your treatment in bold face:

She’s a fish out of water—but she’s a mermaid (“The Little Mermaid,” “Splash”).He’s left behind alone. On Mars (“The Martian”).An inventor creates an artificial woman who’s so real she turns the table on her creator, locks him up, and escapes (“Ex Machina”).
This is also called “the high concept,” which means it can be pitched simply—on a poster or to a friend on the phone.

Comment: “How do we pitch it? There’s no high concept.”

15. Make sure your story feels like a movie, which includes taking us to places we’ve probably never been, or rarely been.

A movie transports us to locations we want to feel, like Antarctica, or the Amazon jungle, or a moon of Saturn, or, in movies I’ve done, a brothel in New Orleans (The Madams Family), the experimental lab of the inventor of the vibrator in Victorian England (Hysteria), a mountain cabin during a blizzard (Angels in the Snow), or the Amityville house in Long Island (Amityville: The Evil Returns).

Comment: “There are no set pieces, so it doesn’t feel like a movie.”

16. Get someone who knows the industry well to read your treatment and give you dramatic feedback on it before you send it out.

Comment: “The writer shows no knowledge of movies!”

Of course anyone with the mind of a sleuth can list films that got made despite one or more of these comments being evident. But for novelists frustrated at not getting their books made into films, that’s small consolation.

If you regard your career as a business instead of a quixotic crusade, plan your novel’s treatment to make it appealing to filmmakers–and to avoid the story department’s buzz-killing comments.

Read more

Story Merchant Books May Amazon eBook Deals!

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Karling Abbeygate​'s Debut Horror Novel The Fly King
 
Deft of wit and wicked as hell, Karling Abbeygate's The Fly King is a seductive and sinister debut.
--Richard Christian Matheson

Rachel lives a mundane life in Chicago. She doesn't know she has a murderous brother living in the slums of East London who is coming for her. She doesn't know about the ancient curse of the Fly King or the unthinkable events about to take place. What she does know is that she's being inexplicably drawn clear across country to a desolate little town in the wooded mountains of Washington and that her boyfriend Gavin is not happy about it.

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Assassins Don't Die In Bed by Michael Avallone, An Ed Noon Mystery



Ed Noon is the detective who reports directly to the President. He's got a dead man's job - play body shield to the VIP who mustn't know he's marked for murder!
 
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Second Chances by Jeffrey Schiller

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Set against the backdrop of a sport awash in billion dollar television contracts, multi-million dollar salaries for coaches and professional players, and kickbacks to agents and boosters, Second Chances explores the consequences of a corrupt and secretive culture where everyone is susceptible to the lure of fame and fortune…and also to the threat that their secrets and machinations will be revealed.

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There is a scrap of a boy who dreams of riding a dragon, but he feels his dreams are far away, especially in the land of Drumnonia where there are dragons, riders, AND demons, gods, and elves. In the end, he becomes a dragon rider, and not just an ordinary rider either: he is the Dragonheart!
 
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What is “Coverage” and How Does It Affect Whether My Book Sells to Hollywood? by Kenneth Atchity

I read part of it all the way through.—Samuel Goldwyn


The Hollywood decision-maker who receives your story submission rarely has time to read it him- or herself. They assign it “for coverage” to the story department, and receive back a coverage. “Coverage” is the term used in Hollywood for the document that determines the fate of most story submissions. It’s a document, created by a story editor, in the story department of an agency, production company, studio, or broadcaster that analyzes your story’s film-worthiness.  A typical coverage includes a “grading system” something like the following that suggests that the submission (screenplay, novel, nonfiction book, or treatment) is:

PASS— Nothing to spend more time on. So the executive who receives this recommendation returns the submission.

RECOMMEND— The grade you’re looking for. The executive reads at least part of the submission and, if he agrees with his story editor, contacts the writer to ask about its rights status.

RECOMMEND, W/DEVELOPMENT— Don’t let this one go, but it’s not perfect and needs fixing.

CONSIDER— The story editor isn’t sure. Usually this grade leads to a “second read,” from a different story editor.

CONSIDER, WITH DEVELOPMENT— Meaning it’s worth taking on for development, but not yet ready for production. In many cases this will lead to a pass because most companies are so swamped with production and development projects that they simply have no bandwidth for developing another one.
Sometimes an additional category might be included:

KEEP AN EYE ON THE WRITER? That’s a Yes, or No.

The coverage typically contains a number of analytical sections to make sure all aspects of the project are addressed:

TITLE and GENRE: The title of the submission is followed by a statement of what genre it falls into: Fantasy/Adventure, Action, Romance, Drama, Horror, Thriller, Comedy, True Story, etc.

TYPE: Screenplay? Manuscript? Nonfiction? Novel? Treatment?

LOGLINE: This is a one- or two-sentence summary of the story, sometimes referred to as the pitch-line. The best are the shortest: “A man is mistakenly left behind when his ships leaves in a hurry. On Mars.”

SYNOPSIS— This is a straightforward outline of your story, to give the executive an overview of what happens in it. It describes all main plot points and details necessary to understand the story. The preferred length of a synopsis is a page or two. When it’s longer, it’s usually a sign to the executive that the story is too complicated to make a good film.

MARKET POTENTIAL— This section is a comment on the audience the project is aimed at, and whether the story editor feels it fits that market or departs from its needs or expectations, whether it’s a fresh approach to an important story, whether the story is “elevated” by its theme to make it a worthy film or series. Often names successful films that resemble this one.

STRUCTURE— This is an overall comment on how well the structure of the story holds together and accomplishes its purpose, but also where it falters in doing so. Do events unfold cohesively? Are plot points used effectively? Does the story reveal a three-act structure? A typical comment, “There seems to be repetition of the same events over and over again throughout the story.”

CONFLICT— This crucial section indicates whether there is sufficient conflict, both external (in the events of the story) and internal (within the characters).  Is the main external conflict of sufficient formidable force to hold audiences? Is it supported by smaller external conflicts, as well as by internal conflict on the part of the characters, especially protagonist and antagonist?

CHARACTER— Is the protagonist fully formed? Do we care about Does he or she have a back story, a mission, and does he or she experience change by the end? Are the supporting characters strong?

DIALOGUE— Is the dialogue unique to each character or do they all sound the same? Does the dialogue move the story along, providing information and containing subtext without being on-the-nose or unbelievable?

PACING— Are scenes or events an appropriate length for their purpose? Is there a sense of build-up, a balance between tension and release, mystery and discovery? Sufficient twists and turns, cliffhangers and surprises? Does each scene or event depend on what came before?

LOGIC— This section talks about plot holes or points lacking sufficient clarity? Do events make sense within the world of the story? For example, do science fiction and fantasy worlds remain consistent with their own set of rules?

CRAFT— Is the writing itself clear, concise, and descriptive? Is there an even balance of action and dialogue? Is proper formatting employed? Are there spelling or grammatical errors?

Yeah, it’s pretty thorough, isn’t it? And here’s the catch: the writer who submitted the story will rarely see the coverage that determines its fate. It’s a real philosophical dilemma. Given that the coverage is so important, and that you won’t see it, how should you behave?

The answer is to know that the coverage, like the troll under the bridge, is there lurking in wait for you–and to disarm it in advance by making sure your story addresses all the categories of expectation.

If, in its current form, it does not, write a treatment of your story and submit that instead.



About Sell Your Story to Hollywood:

Through the expanding influence of the Internet and the corporatization of both publishing and entertainment, the process of getting your book to the big screen has gotten more complicated, more eccentric, and more exciting.

This little book aims to help you figure out how to get your story told on big screens or small. It’s not going to give you rules and regulations, because they simply don’t exist today. Any rule that could be promulgated has and will be broken. What this book offers instead is nearly thirty years of observation of how things happen in show business, the business of entertainment (better known around the world as Hollywood). Dr. Ken Atchity’s Hollywood experience ranges from writing to managing writers to producing their movies for television and theaters. He’s seen the Hollywood story market from nearly every angle, including legal and business affairs.

Ken Atchity spent his first career as a professor, a career he embarked upon innocently because he wanted to focus his efforts on understanding stories and helping writers get their stories told—and here he is thirty years later still pursuing the same goal—because it’s a worthy and never-ending goal.
He’s made films based on nonfiction books, and made deals for a number of nonfiction stories. But most of his experience lies in turning novels into films. As a lifelong story merchant, what Dr. Atchity develops and sells are “stories,” because he believes stories rule the world. Many of the observations outlined in this book are simply about selling stories to Hollywood.

This pocket guide will help you expedite the transformation of your show business dreams into realities.

Order your copy online here.

FREE TELESEMINAR May 18th!! “Selling Your Story to Hollywood: A Conversation with a Movie Producer”

THURSDAY, MAY 18 at 7pm ET, 6pm CT, 5pm MT and 4pm PT 




Register below. You'll receive a confirmation e-mail with the information you need to participate.



“Selling Your Story to Hollywood: A Conversation with a Movie Producer”Hollywood producer Ken Atchity will talk with Sandra Beckwith of Build Book Buzz about the book-to-screen process...What's involved?How can you increase the odds that you'll sell your story to Hollywood?What is Hollywood buying from authors and why?Plus much more!
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Three Important DetailsIt will last no more than an hourWe'll record it and send the replay link to everyone who registersYou'll be able to ask questions


About Your Host, Sandra BeckwithSandra Beckwith is an award-winning former publicist who now teaches authors how to market their books. Three groups have recognized her BuildBookBuzz.com site as an outstanding resource for authors, so you know her advice is author-tested. 








© 2016 | Build Book Buzz

Dennis Palumbo on Between the Lines

Barry Kibrick talks with Dennis Palumbo, renowned psycologist and oscar nominated screen writer, about his new book, . Now, with his new book, "Phantom Limb", and delve deep into the psychology of life through his writing. 

Curious Hart Reviews Kenneth Atchity's The Messiah Matrix

The Messiah Matrix is similar in genre and plot to The Da Vinci Code.
The main themes involve question~answer and problem~solution on a local level because they are resolved within the context of the story. However, they do touch on global issues.
The characters are interesting and only slightly clichéd. The best thing about the protagonists is that they display a sense of humor.
The language varies between fresh and formulaic, but that is probably due to the technical information necessary to understand the plot and the conflict.
The narrative is brisk and engaging, and there is no graphic or gratuitous sex, violence, or profanity. There are no noticeable or distracting grammatical or typographical errors.
The conflict of the story is based on a social compact that demands community participation and obedience from its members, those communities being the Roman Catholic Church and the Society of the Jesuits. Both are bound by rules and secrets that set them in opposition to one another.
Overall, I found Messiah Matrix a satisfying read and recommend it to fans of The Da Vince Code.
One thing I noticed in the unfavorable reviews was that some of the reviewers were offended by the subject matter; they responded to it as if the book were non-fiction. They disagreed with its basic premise; one reviewer, in his ire, revealed the whole plot of the book. (I don’t think the author appreciated that.)
H.L. Mencken wrote: “I believe that an artist, fashioning his imaginary worlds out of his own agony and ecstasy, is a benefactor to all of us, but the worst error we can commit is to mistake his imaginary worlds for the real one.” What I Believe
Despite Mr. Atchity’s careful documentation of facts and evidence, I did not mistake Matrix Messiah for the real world, and that is most likely why I enjoyed reading it.
Read more 
 

Story Merchant Books May Amazon eBook Deals

Us, a Duography by Benedict Freedman 

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Karling Abbeygate​'s Debut Horror Novel The Fly King 

FREE May 18 - 22!
Deft of wit and wicked as hell, Karling Abbeygate's The Fly King is a seductive and sinister debut.
--Richard Christian Matheson

Rachel lives a mundane life in Chicago. She doesn't know she has a murderous brother living in the slums of East London who is coming for her. She doesn't know about the ancient curse of the Fly King or the unthinkable events about to take place. What she does know is that she's being inexplicably drawn clear across country to a desolate little town in the wooded mountains of Washington and that her boyfriend Gavin is not happy about it.

www.amzn.com/B01N2MM3DO



‎Second Chances by Jeffrey Schiller 

FREE May 25 - 29!

Set against the backdrop of a sport awash in billion dollar television contracts, multi-million dollar salaries for coaches and professional players, and kickbacks to agents and boosters, Second Chances explores the consequences of a corrupt and secretive culture where everyone is susceptible to the lure of fame and fortune…and also to the threat that their secrets and machinations will be revealed.

‪https://amzn.com/B015DFZ6ZA

Why authors shouldn’t obsess over one-star reviews

Authors, prepare yourself for the inevitable one-star review. In the publishing industry, one-star reviews are practically a rite of passage.

And no one is immune. Whether you’ve got 10 best-sellers to your credit or it’s your first book, you can expect at least a single one-star review.

There are the one-star Amazon reviews that make you roll your eyes.

“If possible, I’d give this pile of garbage zero stars.”

“Not really of much use for me. Seems like just a lot of useless information to fill up a book.”

“The best part of this book is the cover photo.”

Then there are the one-star Amazon reviews that have a little more substance.

“If you know nothing at all and are not good at Googling this might be a good choice.”

“I really didn’t like this book. I don’t understand why it’s so highly rated. I found the characters to be either overly dramatic, willfully ignorant, or utterly apathetic. They were just too extreme.”

“I was expecting a great deal of sociological analysis that relate to the author’s personal experiences but instead got a 272 rambling, inconsistent, humble brag of a memoir sprinkled with a few facts and statistics for good measure.”
What’s the difference between the two?

You can’t learn anything from the bad reviews that seem nonsensical or just plain mean.

But if one-star reviewers consistently comment that they were disappointed because your book didn’t include information they expected — and each bad review refers to the same missing information — you should update the description to forewarn readers: “This book is not about ‘X.’ ” (And perhaps add that missing information to a revised edition.)

Or, if reviewers repeatedly comment that the book is poorly written, is so riddled with typos that they couldn’t finish reading it, or that the dialogue was stilted, it’s time to take note.

Sometimes the feedback is useless, sometimes it’s helpful, right? The challenge is to be objective enough to see it for what it is.
3 reasons to embrace one-star reviews

But even useless or mean-spirited one-star reviews serve a purpose. Here are three reasons to embrace the lowly one-star review:

1. Readers aren’t stupid.

When you see a one-star review that says, “I bought this as a gift but it arrived too late,” what’s your reaction?

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you probably don’t think any less of the book or its author. Perhaps you think less of the reviewer for reviewing the delivery schedule, not the book’s contents.

Readers can see past silliness as easily as authors can.

2. They make the four- and five-star reviews believable.

Be honest: When you see a book with 60 reviews and they’re all five stars, does a quiet little voice in your head say, “Really? Not even one four-star comment? Or a couple of threes?”

That’s because you’re smart enough to know that this is a subjective business. You might hate what I love, and vice versa. So it seems kind of odd when everybody agrees that it’s a great book.

A 4.6, review average, especially when there are lots of reviews, is more credible than 5.0. (Because, as noted in point 1, readers aren’t stupid.)

3. They can provide feedback that helps you improve the book or its description.

As noted already, if you get the same negative feedback from several people, pay attention. Consider taking action on it.

For example, if you’re charging $14.99 for a 90-page paperback and you’ve got a slew of one-star reviews saying the book isn’t worth $14.99, it’s time to evaluate price versus perceived value.

Look for patterns in those negative reviews to see what you can learn from them. Sometimes, it’s nothing. But sometimes it’s something — even a big something. You can use that feedback to your advantage.
Read more 

Dornsife Dialogues: Civility in Public Discourse

The inaugural Dornsife Dialogues event offers students, faculty and staff a conversation on the tenor and evolution of political discourse.
As the nation witnesses a serious erosion of respect in political discussion, students, faculty and staff gathered to hear USC Dornsife Dean Amber D. Miller and Robert Shrum, Carmen H. and Louis Warschaw Chair in Practical Politics and director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics, address the question: “How has public discourse on critical topics come to be so combative and is a return to civility possible?”

How Traditional Publishing Has Changed and What That Means to a Writer Starting Out

 “Traditional” (aka “legacy”) publishing is a relatively recent term to describe the powerful, primarily New York-based publishers that are still the object of most new writers’ aspirations. The term is used today in opposition to “self-“ or “direct” publishing, which is what happens when a book is published without the intervention of the companies that have served as literary and commercial gatekeepers for decades.

Then and Now

Twenty years ago, there were three dozen independent “major publishers,” which meant an author’s representative like myself could submit a writer’s work to any or all of them. Should more than one or two be interested, you would start a bidding war that could be very lucrative for the author. Today, though a few companies like Grove-Atlantic and W. W. Norton manage to survive independently, most of those three dozen majors are owned by the Big Five trade book publishers. They were known as the “Big Six” until Random House merged with Penguin in 2013.

Today’s Big Five are:

News Corporation, owned by Australian-born Rupert Murdoch, includes Avon Books, Broadside Books, Ecco Books, HarperCollins, Harper Business, Harper Perennial, Newmarket Press, and William Morrow, among others.

Hachette Book Group (HBG), which is in turn part of the French conglomerate Lagardère. HBG is home to Center Street, Faith Words, Forever, Grand Central, Little, Brown, and Orbit, among others.

Holtzbrinck, the German multinational, owns Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Henry Holt; Macmillan; Picador; St. Martin’s Press; and Tor/Forge—along with many others.

Penguin Random House, itself owned by another German company, Bertelsmann, owns hundreds of imprints and formerly independent publishing houses like Ballantine, Berkley, Broadway, Crown, Dutton, Knopf, Penguin, Putnam, and Random House, to name only a few.

CBS Corporation (formerly Viacom) owns Simon & Schuster, as well as sister companies Atria, Free Press, Gallery Books, Pocket Books, Scribner, Threshold, and Touchstone, as well as the Folger Shakespeare Library.

This massive consolidation means that publishers no longer make decisions the way they used to.

Author Opportunities

In the old days, less than 10 years ago, most major publishers were driven by highly literary, visionary editors who made gut decisions to give starts to new voices who are “name writers” today—Stephen King, Anne Rice, Michael Crichton, Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., etc.

Back then, the author’s representative submitted a manuscript to editors, usually simultaneously to more than one (and as many as 20). If an editor fell in love with the book, they fought to acquire it by pitching it to a board made up of other editors. If the board approved (meaning that one or two other editors read the manuscript, too, and also liked it), they authorized an offer to the author’s rep.

If several editors from the different houses responded with an offer, you had yourself an auction—and potentially quite a payday for the author.

After they acquired the book, a publishing house worked with its marketing department to make it visible, helping to build an author’s career and providing them with a literary “home,” hopefully for years to come.

Marketing Takes Over

Of course, the editors are still there today—but whether they admit it or not, they’re now more or less under the thumb of the marketing department. They must present P&Ls (“profit and loss statements”) to the acquisitions committee, which is dominated by marketing people, before a book can be taken on, no matter how wonderful they think it is.

Our new author must already have a national track record and “platform” (network of likely buyers within proven reach). Otherwise, his or her book has little chance with the marketing folks whose focus is not on the future of reading but on this year’s bottom line.

What makes it worse is the ever-expanding use of Nielsen BookScan, which tracks actual point-of-sale transactions using bar codes. It’s hard to fudge how many copies of the author’s previous book sold when faced with hard mechanical evidence of actual sales. And a lack of sales means no new book deals.

Sure, once in a while an outstanding manuscript can slip by the marketing department if the editor is courageous enough to bet his or her job on the book. One or two misses a year may be allowed, but if an editor has too many books that don’t “earn out,” or make back what was paid to produce them, including the advance, he or she is in serious jeopardy.

Because of the massive consolidation of imprints under the Big Five, auctions are increasingly rare for new authors—unless you happen to be a nationally or internationally known politician, celebrity, or Nobel Prize laureate. Those folk have platforms—existing admirers who might very well buy their books.

Authors’ reps spend more and more time and effort on helping their clients develop a platform, and focus on making a strong marketing presentation to increase the likelihood of their books selling more than enough copies to break even.

What’s an Author to Do?

Given this situation, what’s an upcoming platform-weak writer to do? More and more, writers are turning to direct publishing. As an author’s representative for 25 years, I was so disturbed by the increasing difficulty of getting new authors accepted in New York that, four years ago, I started my own imprint for voices that I believed demanded an audience.

That way, as a producer, I had good books in hand to take to Hollywood agents, fellow producers, studios, broadcasters, and financers. I make sure that our books look every bit as good as “traditional” books. Take that as a warning to proceed to direct publishing with care, lest you put a book into the market that doesn’t look like a good book, that isn’t edited like a good book, and that isn’t marketed like a good book.

Yet when all is said and done, it’s an exciting new frontier for authors. You don’t have to let your fate be determined by traditional publishers. If you direct publish your book and promote it well, guess what?

The traditional publishers will come a’ knockin’.

Go for it!

About the Author

Story Merchant Ken Atchity is a Yale PhD writer, literary manager, and producer who’s written more than 20 books, sold hundreds of clients’ books to major publishers, and produced more than 30 films for television and cinema. His most recent book, Sell Your Story to Hollywood: Writer’s Pocket Guide to the Business of Show Business, just appeared from his imprint Story Merchant Books. He’s also partnered with Daniel Hall to produce an in-depth webinar on the subject, Real Fast Hollywood Deal. He can be reached at atchity@storymerchant.com.