Letting the Game Come to You

I received an email today from the International Screenwriter's Association (ISA) asking me if I wanted the ad I put up weekly on Craigslist to spread the word about the Sages' blog to go out to 40,000 screenwriters. The site owner apparently culls ads such as ours on Craigslist and sends out mass email soliciting folks who might want to post to the ISA's exchange. It made me think about creating awareness and "buzz" around one's blog/website. In a similar vein, our webmaster approached Randy and me about the urgent need to starting "twittering" daily on our website in order to ramp up the traffic to the site/blog. We kind of had a senior moment about the whole thing. It was like deja vu all over again in that we had the same experience when deciding to start up this blog in the first place: Are we screenwriters or "tweeters?" Are we part of the literati or webheads? Are the two mutually exclusive? Complementary? Something in between?

A buddy from my high school days is crazy about potato chips. He's something of a gearhead and started a hobbyist website on all things related to chips and snacking. Someone at Yahoo really liked the website and promoted it on My Yahoo! It was recognized as an 'it' website and written up in industry publications. Long and the short of it is that in the heyday, my buddy's hobbyist website was so busy he needed to buy a dedicated server for his apartment because of bandwidth issues; most intriguing was the extra income the site created for him; he had so much traffic the Google ads on his site were working overtime generating revenue.

Make no mistake his "hobbyist" website was consuming his life and its "care and feeding" would easily take from 15-20 hours a week. This was above and beyond his day job in the tech industry.

Part of the initial strategy of the Script Sages in starting our blog was to let the game come to us. As screenwriters, you can be made to feel like a supplicant constantly knocking on doors to an entrenched, elitist film industry. The internet is the great leveler. By being an opinion leader with something worthwhile to say you can bypass the gatekeepers completely. The world is truly flat and we benefit from this with our a blog, in that we can directly dialogue with the everyday screenwriter and the media mogul alike.

The rub for me personally is that writing for a blog is not the same as writing creatively. Print journalists who are having to make the jump to digital and on-line platforms have much the same dilemma. If you signed on to be a journalist and suddenly find yourself writing the company's blog...is that going to be as fulfilling as what you originally bargained for? Change has come. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle. You can let the game come to you. But I, for one, still have to wonder what the hidden costs are.