Once you self-publish a play, how do you get it produced? That’s what we’re talking about with this question from the Mailbag. (In this series, I’m answering some of the questions I got in response to my big post about self-publishing a stage play.)
Great to read your blog on self-publishing plays. We’ve actually got a lot in common when it comes to self-publishing our plays. I’ve sort of put them out there and have just been waiting for the market to find me. I’m not sure how long it took for you to start seeing productions from the plays you self-published, but mine have been out there for almost year and I haven’t gotten any hits yet. I’m listed on a handful of playwriting sites (NPX and Dollee, for instance) and have my own pages up dedicated to each play. But, it appears to be a long game I’m playing (I actually sat on the plays for nearly a decade because I had no idea what to do with them after their first – local – production.) I’d love to know more about how you got theaters to notice (and, more importantly, PRODUCE) your work! Thanks! (Maybe a good blog post will come out of correspondence!)
I self-published my first play in response to demand so there were productions going on long before I put it up for sale in bookstores. As for my most recent titles, it depends. Some it took a few months before the first production but then had regular demand (such as a short play like Daddy Issues) while others (such as The Green Bird) were getting production requests before it was even available yet because it was anticipated. Then there is one 1-act that hasn’t had an official production yet, just a bunch of readings. There really is no magic formula.
While I too am a member of NPX and I love the idea of it, I’ve yet to get a single hit from the year I’ve been on there. The majority of my productions (not counting the ones that come in from the publisher through my traditionally published plays) come from my mailing list, which is just a simple email list of some directors and schools that have done my plays in the past and are thus usually interested in whatever I’ve got coming next. (If you don’t have a mailing list like that, you need to start creating one immediately as it’s your single most valuable promotional tool!)
The rest come in from browsers. This means people who find my plays on my website, stumble across the play on Amazon and other bookstores (I’m a vendor with the Drama Book Shop who stocks my plays in their store and their support is a huge boon). Though the vast majority of my productions come from my mailing list, it’s about 50/50 between people finding the plays through retailers and people finding them on my site from Google or similar.
How do you leverage those browsers? Network with bookstores, work your keywords everywhere and make sure your website is both SEO (search engine optimization) friendly AND optimized for mobile because that’s where the majority of your traffic is going to come from these days. In general, the easier it is for someone to stumble across your play, then the easier it is for them to purchase it (which means both the retail experience as well as finding the links and dealing with your website) and therefor produce it.
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Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer who loves writing of all kinds except for writing bios like this.
Great info, Hillary. How do you get those email addresses? I’ve gotten about 300 productions through my publisher over the last five years, mostly from schools and community theatres, but when I visit their websites, I can only rarely figure out who directed the production or what their email address is.
All my published plays are with Playscripts who gives us the emails for every production so I cannot speak to the others. But if your publisher isn’t offering that info, in the age of Twitter, Facebook, et al, my recommendation would be to reach out to them as soon as they book the production and offer something. (Also, sometimes you’ll have better luck asking excited actors you see chatting about your show online to put you in touch with a director or making the offer to them to pass on rather than tracking down the director yourself.) See, if you contact them just to contact them, they probably won’t reply because there’s nothing in it for them. But if you contact them and offer them something nifty and free, you’re more likely to get a reply back and make a connection with the right person. Examples would depend on your play but some general ideas would be a free video chat with their class (for a TYA play), a pack of graphics for the play to make their social media marketing easier (I actually have these for some of my plays) or a special production or teaching guide to share with their group.
It won’t always work but it certainly can’t hurt. The advantage of framing it as you offering them something free is that they’ll usually at least reply to say “No, thank you” and the connection has been made either way.
As for past productions, I would at least try to email the groups and ask them to put your in touch with the director who did your play back then because, say, you wanted to offer him/her the first chance to premiere your latest or something else that sounds equally cool, timely and urgent. Again, it won’t always work but it will give you something to start with and build on. A list has to start somewhere.
You don’t have to be sneaky about it, just be upfront about wanting to contact them with your new stuff. If people liked your plays in the past, chances are they are already interested in your next thing so they’re not going to object to you contacting them about it. And if they are? Well, that’s why you make sure your mailing list has a simple opt out and all the major ones do.
For my self-published plays, over the years I had luckily tagged every email related to a production within my email program (Gmail) and found a simple script that stripped all the emails from that tag into an CSV file so I could easily import them into my list as needed which was a huge time saver.