Word Count 84: BBC and Female Pilot Club script calls, Black List moves in on books

Plus Who Killed Comedy?, new Australian and German versions of Ghosts in the works, Clarkesworld AI slop update, and a bunch of interesting links.

Hi there 

After a frantic time in the run up to Ada Lovelace Day (which was an absolute triumph), a wedding in Dallas and a week in New Mexico, I’m happy to be home and slowly getting back into the swing of things. The jetlag is fierce this time round so I’m going to disclaim any typos or errors right now! 

Opportunities: Open calls at the BBC and Female Pilot Club

The Female Pilot Club comedy script competition is open now and closes on 15 November. They are looking for working class women to submit 10 pages of a comedy script and a description of their series idea.  Winners will be paired with a mentor to finish their script “in preparation for a live read-through by top flight comedy talent at a London showcase event in 2025”. 

The BBC has its annual Open Call for scripts in the drama or comedy-drama genres, for film, TV, radio, stage or children’s TV/radio coming up very soon. The call opens at 12 noon on Tuesday 5 November, and closes at 12 noon on Tuesday 3 December, so you have plenty of time to get your scripts polished up. It’s open to residents of the UK who are over 18, for original scripts that have not been submitted to a BBC call before, and that are at least 30 pages long. 

Read this: The Black List moves in on novels

The New York Times had a piece on moves by the Black List, a script competition and hosting website, into publishing, which caused a bit of a reaction from publishing industry.  

The NYT describes the Black List as “an annual survey of Hollywood’s best unproduced screenplays” which has “hosted tens of thousands of scripts, TV pilots and plays, and became an indispensable tool for studios and producers” and goes on to say that now novelists can join up too. 

The goal, Leonard said, is to create a new avenue for authors whose work may have gone overlooked because they lack a literary agent or the right industry connections.

Reaction has not been entirely positive, not least because the publishing industry is not as opaque as the film/TV industry — here’s literally a regularly updated book and website, the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook, that lists literary agents for you to submit to, and most agents/agencies have websites where you can find out how to submit. 

Vera Kurian put it well: 

I think this is playing into a particular view of the literary world, and playing a particular tune that works well with generating revenue from people who are upset because they feel they are “industry outsiders.” […] 

the other half of this assumption--that you can’t make it if you don’t have “the right industry connections” is something that is often said by people who aren’t particularly informed or who are trying to sell you something.

The Black List has always given me the ick, as does nearly everything that’s pay-to-play. Money should flow toward the writer, not from the writer, (unless you are paying for an editorial service or some form of useful training). It exploits the opacity of the film industry, in which almost nothing you write on spec will ever be produced and where it’s nigh on impossible to find a route in. 

Even in the UK, conflicting advice on how to break through is the norm, film/TV agents don’t exist to get your work produced but to get you work once you’ve already had some, and the entire industry is gatekept as if they’re guarding the gates to heaven. (They are not. Writers, especially, still get paid like shit.) 

The Author’s Guild had an info session that might be worth watching (I haven’t yet), but honestly, I’d run away from this very, very fast. 

(All that said, I do believe that the book submissions system is largely broken, but I don’t think that the Black List is the way to fix it. More on that another time.)

What I’m watching: Who Killed Comedy? 

This mini-documentary/opinion piece by TomSka about the decline of comedy in the UK and the impact of short form online video on sketch shows is well worth 25 minutes of your time. 

What I will be watching: Ghosts Australia and Ghosts Germany 

Ghosts is one of the best sitcoms to come out of the UK in a long time and soon we’ll be able to enjoy two more versions out of Australia and Germany. The German version is in production already, and its counterpart characters include the Neanderthal Urs, Roman legionnaire Claudius, “feminist maid” Griet, and “love-hungry poet” Friedrich Dorn, amongst others. 

I’m really hoping that these will be streamed on the BBC, as Ghosts US is, so that I can watch there. 

Tweet of the week: Clarkesworld update on AI submissions

OK, so this is on Bluesky, so not technically a tweet, but it was good to see Neil Clarke, editor of Clarkesworld, give an update into the situation with AI submissions, and the conversation that his post sparked.

I first covered this in March 2023, when Clarkesworld was forced to close submissions due to an influx of LLM-generated slop. Thing have not gotten appreciably better, with a lot of slop coming via “side-hustle videos”, and some even coming from established authors using LLMs to write. Though the idea that you can make a killing writing short stories is just so delusional I don’t even know where to start. 

Read these: A selection of interesting links

• Facebook post from Jane Friedman on whether you need a huge social media following in order to land your debut book deal. Her analysis says not, but being part of a literary or university community helps. 

• Cynthia Swanson on how she went from being a New York Times bestseller to self-publishing, largely because of how challenging it is to maintain a traditionally published career when the industry is so volatile. 

• Interesting thread from Alex Goldman on the economics of podcasts. He’s calculated that he needs 200k listeners to run his podcast as a business and pay everyone properly. That’s a lot of listeners. 

• The Bookseller’s piece on how the publishing industry is slowly deserting a now largely toxic Twitter. Pan Macmillan announced that it has not just suspended advertising on the platform but is pausing “all activity” whilst Bloomsbury “putting more energy into Instagram and TikTok”. That has some authors worried about a shift away from text towards video. I’m not really an Insta/TikTok user, not because I couldn’t do it if I really wanted to, but because I really don’t want to. I’m a text person, hence my move to Bluesky instead of any one of a number of video platforms. Publishers are making a mistake if they think authors are suddenly going to pivot to video. 

• TV is fucked. “Sky’s full-year losses double to £224m as revenue flatlines”. And for the overall production sector, revenues are down £392m.  

Obligatory cat picture

I’ve been mobbed since getting back from New Mexico as they cats both want all the attention they didn’t get whilst we were both away for ten days. Here’s a picture of Copurrnicus in earoplane mode, before I headed off to the States. Whatever it was I was doing, he was not impressed. 

That’s it for now! See you again in a couple of weeks! 

Cheers, 

Suw