 I know. If you guys want to scoot forward, I feel like we're not using mics and we're all seated, so it may be better to try to get it close just because I feel like I talk really loud but I'm not sure about everyone. Great. Yeah, there's a lot of empty seats. Like I put this table, I put this table, there's some up here. So yeah, just getting closer. Let's get cozy. You can put your notebook in your lap. Yeah, that's fine. So I'm Amy Marsh and I am the literary director at Samuel French. So a lot of you probably spoke into me via email or on the phone at some point. I have a great group of artists up here and people that have been associated with us and what we do at Samuel French. So I'd like really quickly for them to take a kind of a brief introduction, maybe talk about their plays or how they work with us. One sentence. Go. I'm Matt Obermann and I was one of the winners of the, was it 2008? 2009? 2009. 2009, Samuel French of Broadway Festival. And we play the student, which is the one that's being done here. And then from that, that's actually part of a collection of plays that wound up getting published by Samuel French and it's done all around the country. Great. My name is Robert Kaseley. I run the playwriting program at the University of Idaho. And Sam French published my play Front last year and will be publishing my play Happy later this year. Yeah. It's very close. I'm Steve Yaki. I had a, I guess I was one of the winners of the Sam French short play festival in 2008. Yeah. And actually in 2000. And then since then I've had a really great relationship with them, but I think I have six publications right now with you guys. Yes. It's quite a few. I'm Debrae Archon. I participated in the Sam French press last October. Make up these names. Great. And so in addition to these guys, I just want to point out that there's actually more of our playwrights in this room. We're also people doing OOB or done OOB or going to be published. So can I just get a quick show of hands? So many people have a book with Samuel French or are doing the Sam French festival or have done. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Be proud. Be proud. That's awesome. For city theater, I'm raising my hand. Yes. And then in addition to that, I will also point out that we have this year's festival, which I'll talk about kind of at the end of a little presentation. We've actually used four plays. I think that have come out of, we came to city theater or city rights last year, talked to a lot of playwrights, read a lot of plays, and four plays from this upcoming festival originated with city rights. That's how we got to know the playwrights. There's Mark Swann, right there. Yeah. I hope you raised your hand. A lot of progress. I want to take this next. We're a little late, so we have 30 minutes maybe. You're fine. Great. So just to talk a little bit about what we do, and hopefully I can kind of answer some questions about publishing and the role of a publisher in terms of your life as a playwright. But we're a very old company. Most of you guys have heard us or got our plays or have Samuel French editions on your shelf. We started, I think the American Office started in 1850. The UK Office started in the 1830s. We have about 9,000 active titles. Titles that are, you can license them now. They are still under copyright. And I think the number of authors is even greater. It's something like 15,000 playwrights over the course of our history. So when people tell me that playwriting is a dead art, I'm like, really, I had no idea. Because our catalogue is just so, it's great. It's really, really great. And it's very vibrant and we get tons of submissions over here. So I work, I think the best way to talk about what we do is to kind of frame it through the life of the book and the life of an author's journey with us kind of through the door and then through publication and actually through marketing. We are publishing and licensing house. So we print actually as a result of licenses we do for plays. Our books are actually guides. The teleproduction company is how to do plays. So if you're looking to get things published, there's actually a range of types of publications for playwrights. You have trade publishers like TCG and Smith and Krause and Mary Weather who do kind of academic guides of your plays or reading copies. They'll do like the art town that you study in classrooms. Whereas our version of art town actually has like the sound effects list and how those go into the script. Those lovely set designs that I'm actually kind of trying to phase out. And I'm going to remember the early editions where it's just stick pen and handwriting and it's like a circle and it's just a chair. Those were in terms of Samuel French's history. Those were actually the blueprint for smaller amateur groups to know how to produce a play and to do it, to honor the playwright's intentions in doing that production. So we were really the framing device on plays that came in. We made sure the playwright's ideas were preserved that their intentions were honored. And of course that varies from playwright to playwright even today. Some people are very strict with how you do their plays. There are some authors that every time the show gets licensed we have to call them and clear it with them. I won't say who it is but there's one that actually requires to look at headshots. Everybody knows who it is, right? A lot of people know who it is. And then there are others that are like maybe some of you could speak to this but it's actually who want different interpretations of their plays and who are open to different interpretations and people that don't even use stage direction because they believe it's the director's prerogative and that all happens in production. So the way you submit to French and I'll kind of talk about our general things and then maybe some of you could tell your submission stories or how you came to French. But we have right now... We do not currently accept unsolicited submissions. So like a lot of clean publishers and regional theaters and such we take query letters, 10 page samples and then in that query letter there's several things that we ask for. So production history, your bio, why you think it should be published, why it's the right time for you. This isn't unusual at all and I actually have a huge believer in transparency. I think it's really good for any lit office to try to be upfront about the needs of the company and why you're submitting. And so on our website right now we actually have things that we're not looking at and all of that is basically for curatorial reasons. We're not taking holiday plays at the moment and that's just because we published six last year. Visibly we have to get those out to companies and kind of let them saturate the market before we take any new holiday plays. I'm not sure if I'll ever lift the van on Christmas Carol. I think we have 17 versions of Christmas Carol in our catalog. So if you're thinking about doing adaptations with Christmas Carol, it's really for your benefit. You want your play to have a place in a catalog and really get individualized attention. So I think before you're submitting it's always a good idea to be like what's in the vein of what I have written, who publishes that play, do I want to be with that play, do I want to be... You know if you wrote a fairy tale adaptation like a TYA play, who's doing TYA scripts really, really well? How many fairy tale plays do they have or are those plays getting licensed? Often on publisher's website you can look up that information. On our website currently we have a now playing calendar. You can see what's playing and how many productions it's getting. DPS's website, they have a page to stage. You can look up how many publications or what publications are getting produced where and how many productions there are. So it's kind of in your best interest to find the publisher that's going to be the right fit and really can... You know, that really has a unique place for you in their catalog. You're not just getting lumped into a bunch of Christmas carols and then your play gets lost and that's the end of it. So yeah, so if you'd submit, you'd email your script to me. We look it over if we think that it's a good fit for us or if we feel like there's... We want to have a further conversation. We request the full script. That comes in. If you have representation or a lawyer, often we'll take full manuscripts straight from them directly. Which I think is how you guys, most of you guys have representation, right? Yeah. So yeah, in Robert's case, Marta Prager is the one that's sent on front to me. I'm not actually set with this for quite a while, I think. I think maybe I have the record... I think seven years. I think seven years, I think so. But the two titles that I have with you, both very different kind of submission stories. The first play, Front, I wrote, you know, back in 1992 or three. I mean, a long time ago and my agent was just kind of getting it out there and getting productions that way. And then after a decade, decided to submit it and that it was just published last year. So from 1992... Patience is a virtue, not just spalling the playwright, but patience as well. Whereas Happy, I think I sent it, I wrote it and within a year, within that year, I sent it to you and you folks responded within a couple of weeks, if I recall. Yeah, I can say that, actually, it's interesting that you bring that up because I kind of, I like to tell players how do I get my play published and what is it, how do I get it published? It's actually a large question that plays us in our offices. Timing, you know, a lot of publications about timing and where the script is in its own life, you know, it doesn't need publication, like is there a place for it? I think with Front, it'll be totally candid. We had some talks with Marta. When it came in, we all loved it and we were very enthusiastic about it. But we had just published a number of scripts that we felt like would compete with it. And so we were like, can we hang on to this? We're going to, strategically, we want to keep the baby in the office, but we'll contact you, you know, maybe when it's about our time and we think there's really something we can do. And that's what happened. It just took a very long time. And a bit of the French has had some new administrations and every time that happens, there's a bit of an educational, you have to go back and look at the scripts and I was like, is it still worth it? You know, should we hang on to it further? With Happy, that's a case where that's a national new play network and it had six productions in a year. We knew there was a lot of people talking about the play. We wanted to make it available while people were talking about it. And so we thought it better to act immediately and get it into print so that when we sent it out to theaters to license, it was all fresh. You know, they knew about it. It was very like, okay. And with Front, you know, that's who we've been sending it to many theaters, but there is more of an educational arm with that and we have to really be selective about who we send it to if they haven't been targeting colleges and some adventurous high schools. Yeah. It's big. It's big. So I want to say, you know, with your own scripts, if there's something you feel, publishers do look for commercial heat. That is a term that I throw around a bit. But if there is a play that you have that you feel like people are talking about it and you're getting licensing requests for it, people are emailing you and saying, how do I do this? How do I cut it up? Yeah, that is a really good time to contact a publisher and be like, hey, I need help handling me. Sorry, I think it's a really good. I'm getting six requests a year and there's all these little theaters, I think, that could be interested. Yeah, that's a really good reasonable contact someone. Also, if you have a play for a very specific market and there's a market need for it, for example, I just have to do something. We've got so many requests from bullying plays the past two years, every high school in the country, and also vampire plays. Oh my gosh, what's my next play? The vampire requests have kind of dwindled these past couple of years, but for a while, all these teachers at conferences were like, yeah, do you have anything that's kind of like twilight? Because that's what my kids want to do. Well, you're a vampire. We have other avenues that people come to us through too in addition to the queries and to agent submissions and their relationship with us. We also have a number of partnerships and sponsorships throughout the country. For example, we published The Winner of the Princess Grace and we published the Weisberger winner. And so I always encourage people, the more awards and competitions, the better. There are some that strategically come with the option to publish at the end. So if that's something you're interested in, you can target those. We also have OOB, which is how three of you, Matt, do you want to talk about your submission story? Sure. Well, I just, I don't know if OOB is still this way, but you need a theater to nominate you. I don't know if you can, you can more self-nominate. You can self-produce, yeah. Self-produce. But at the time that I applied, you had to have a theater. So there's a theater in town called the Algonquin Productions and they submitted my play and it got chosen and me performed it and then it wound up winning, which was great. But it was this play, the student is, I had this idea because I was having trouble getting my shows done and I was like, you know, everybody's competing for, there's like five shows in a season and everybody's competing for the four slots and there's the holiday slot and there's Christmas Carol and if you're a smaller theater, eight reindeer monologues, Tuna Christmas and Dana Sedera's play. So I wrote five short comic Christmas plays and this was one of them and so when it won and it got published, then I made a pitch to you guys to produce the whole evening of Christmas plays, which you did. And it's been pretty successful. It's been pretty successful and you wanted to show my little box. Yeah, I do. Well, I wanted to get to marketing. So that's not like he has a... There's something coming that's going to be really exciting. Steve, you also came to us kind of through OP. But do you want to talk a little bit about that or like what had you been doing before OP? Like how was it? I was in graduate school at NYU and we had the opportunity through a vital theater company in New York who used to produce a lot of short work and just got a really fun group of people together and did this really weird play about terrible, terrible, terrible things happening in a small town in the middle of nowhere. It's just three like overlapping monologues and I thought like no one's going to listen to this. And it won, which shocked us. And so then I think, coming out of grad school I had two plays that both had two productions and had done pretty well, Octopus and this other play Cartoon. And I think you guys requested Octopus and my agent sent Octopus and Cartoon and was like, hey, he's got this other play also. And then they were like, we want to publish Octopus. And my agent was like, well, you can only have Octopus if you also publish Cartoon. And they worked out this whole thing where Sam Brunch is like, fine, we'll do that, but what was it? No, no, no, it was that they tried the two plays together. There's something called the cross-collaterizing which we love. Publishers and licensors love it where to recoup in advance and we tie the two plays together. So if one play pays off its advance against performance royalty, the money it makes will go towards the other play and so both of them are paid off. And what's great about that story though is that Octopus has been done maybe eight times, which is cool and really great productions. And that one's been done in different places around the world. Cartoon's been done 30-something times by all different levels of theaters, like colleges and universities do it, regular community theaters do it, like professional theaters do it, and everyone just kind of goes to town with that play. It's usually like the first play of mine that gets done in a new city, like in a new market, and then people go and kind of seek out my other work. So it's just funny how that worked out. It is really funny. Yeah, and that shows you, I guess the moral there is that sometimes what publishers say is not the deal and not a lot of people try to know our markets really well, but Octopus, alright, Cartoon probably would have gone on and had regardless of what we decided. This is a bizarre play. But I will say too about Octopus, and this is back when I was an associate of the company, we were getting so many people writing us and telling us about Octopus. Like we were carrying things on the LNDA board all the time, but we tracked, we hunt for playwrights. Like that's a large part of my job is reading message boards and looking at season announcements and calling up other lead managers and asking them who they're excited about, who's going up in their season. And people kept telling us, oh, you've seen this play, Octopus. It's amazing. He's really young. Someone needs to put him in the print. And I think we're like, we got to call up his agent and ask for the script. So that's another way, actually, to get the attention of a publisher is just get your work out there. Get done, get people talking about you, get a secure professional recommendations. I've actually had a lot of publications come through other playwrights. Playwrights that we already published have talked to me and said, oh, you know, there's a writer that I'm working with or who's in my class. I'm really, really excited about them. You have to come to this reading. And that kind of recommendation he got you pretty far. I love getting my inbox full of, you know, read about this person and see this person's work. So that's very exciting. But I wanted to go on and talk a little bit about what happens after we acquire a play. What? Yeah? Oh, well, I'm going to circle back to OV. Oh, oh, oh. Would you, yeah, when you get to O-O-V because there was some rustling over here. What is O-O-V? Oh, I'm so sorry. It's the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival. It's the largest, I just assume that people know about it. But it's the oldest and largest continuous short play festival in the United States. It started in 1978. So we're in our, I don't know what year we're in. It's in 38 or something. So I guess if my math is wrong, sorry. But a lot of our playwrights have come out of there. We published Theresa Rebeck's first play in O-O-V. We published really Lara, a version of Open Admissions, which she went on and wrote a full length. It was on Broadway. It was Tony nominated. And that early version of the play was actually in like the third year of the Opera Broadway Festival, where she added, published. It was outsourced for a long time to a company called Love Cregan. And we took it back in-house the past couple years. So I think for the past six years, the Samuel French staff had an epiphany that we were all theater practitioners that worked in licensing and that we could actually run a really great festival if we hold our broccolines and did it. So we've been doing the festival. I also function as the literary coordinator for that festival. She's one of us who was here with me last year. She's an incredible stage manager. She's the festival coordinator. And also, by day, our licensing development manager. So it's very real. This is a night job. It's our passion. And we get off the clock in the office and then go straight to the theater and produce these plays. And we invite... It's kind of an American Idol format. So we have three judges. We're kind of playing with the format of this year. So in the past, it's been certain types of industry this year we're kind of taking that type hat off of the judges and so it can be actors, directors, people who are playwrights. We have a lot of playwrights to judge. But respected agents, we've had agents, although this year we don't think we're having agents to judge, yeah. But respected industry professionals who have opinions we value and they come and they watch six plays a night. They choose one or two to move on and then we have the finals and there will be 12 plays on the finals. We choose six for publication and licensing. So that is, you know, we published our plays from that. And Steve, Debra did the festival last year. So Debra's on our radar from here on out. We consider her a member of the family. It's a lot of culty actually, like once you do that at the Broadway festival, we're like, you're our family member. That's really true. It is. And you get to know us really well because we're at the bar every day after the show and dancing and you're like, wow, I don't know how much people have known me. But they also do this, they do this thing. They do this thing where they like stand up at the bar like on a chair and announce to the cast and playwrights of all of the participating plays which two are moving on. So you're like all in the room together drinking and having a good time and then they like crush the night. But then like two playwrights and their cast are like, woo! And it's like this, it creates this immediate like sifting effect. What I have to say, there's like many people, I mean it is like... No, it's great. It's social, it's fun, right? It's not even I would say that I, I mean when you were doing, when Love Creek was doing it, I had two plays that made it to this, then it was different. Now you just choose the top 40 and do it in a week. It used to be Love Creek, it was like the top 300 or something. Yeah. And it was over a couple of weeks. It went on forever. Yeah, it did. It's much more, it's much more better organized now. But I had a couple that didn't make it to the finals and so, you know, you just keep coming back. Well, I think that's it, as we don't, you know, you see a lot of people who've been in the festival before and not made it and then actually they come back and make it. And people that are in the festival that don't move on, you know, we've gone on to publish their plays because you always have, once you're in the festival, you have an open-door relationship with us. And it's like, I know who you are, I'll go to your readings, I'll go to your staff, go to your readings. We love you. We're so proud of you. So it gets very, I was saying family, but I actually use that term in earnest. Like, Samuel French loves to support the people that, because we're helping you produce this play, ultimately. So we feel very interested. Thank you. Can I just say that, I know some people were asking about like, are some of my friends just got into it this year and they're like, you know, self-producing, how much is involvement? It's really not that hard to self-produce your play. Because you're really, it's very minimal. Every, you know, you get it. It's a few set pieces. You just have to find a place to rehearse to teach your actors. We have the set pieces. Yeah. So it's very... It's not at all what Summer Schwartz does is the, you know, the coma. It's amazing for us. It's what we do. I tell people, it's not a stage reading because there are no scripts in hand, but we've had kind of a show after we were like, oh yeah, we just put it together in our living room last night. And they're like, okay, well, we hope it works. Yeah, this is good. Yeah, I just want to, I want to add something about that. Because I was able to go up and be on the judging panel this year since we've started this relationship. Being believers in the short play genre and being believers in visibility for playwrights and opportunities for playwrights, it's kind of a wonderful thing. Because, for example, we had cooked up our relationship a little bit. They had given me the galleys of the plays that had won the previous year, which had included this play, Bedfellows, which we wound up producing last year in summer shorts, if you remember. It was John Adams and Ben Franklin in the band. That was that play, okay. But meanwhile, we had also gotten Matt's play. We had gotten Matt's play from Samuel French and from Matt and from like everywhere else. And we were holding on that play to see when we were going to do it. This turns out to be that summer. But that we were finally doing it and we don't care if it's Christmas. We don't care. You know, Joe is Joe. But the other part of it is, is that is where I met Deborah and she actually then sent me another play all together from the one that I had seen at the reading. And that is the play that has become a finalist this year because of Friends and Family, I guess now, our new association. Yeah. And then Katia is McMullan, who is, where are you? I'm here. Oh, but she has a lovely play which you will be hearing in the readings as well. Either Friday or Saturday, I'm not sure which. But the good news around it is that we're all invested in the same thing. And as you all are here, as playwrights, for example, you all have, if you are city rights playwrights, you can give us directly two short plays, directly to us. Ahead of our, ahead of our submissions. And Amy and I go back and forth with what that is. And again, as she said, last year, she saw four plays in Summer Shorts and wanted them, they made it, they made it on to what they're doing and hopefully she'll see some more this summer that she will want to do that way. Well, and I actually too, I think last year even we took submissions directly out of, I mean, I left the festival with a good packet of 30, 30 plays and people out of city rights and emailed me plays to consider for the festival. They'd go, I'd like these to be in consideration. So I actually have a sign up here too, which I'll have all weekend long. If you want more information about the festival or the application and when it becomes available for next year, I'm happy to send you that. And we have an application fee now, we didn't use it too, but it's another conversation. We waived that fee for you guys as conference participants so, 10 year plays. Can I just say real quick, I immediately agreed to come here when Susie and Dan were like, hey, do you want to come down for this? I immediately agreed because I'm, I'm like a champion, a really loud, not even champions out the right word. I'm annoying about how an annoying proponent of short work. And like lots of times you sort of hear people say well, you know, there's not a lot of venues for short work or there's not a lot of opportunity, you know, and so like, with my time, you better spend somewhere else, but a really strong short play can be a fantastic calling card and also open a lot of doors in situations like this, like the one that you're in right now. And so I just got up on my soapbox a little bit, but I just think like this is so, that's one of the reasons I was so excited to come down here is because short work for me ended up being the, you know, like the first year I did the same French festival, I won. The second year I'm not allowed to do it anymore. I can't, there's some rule. We didn't know published authors. That's the other thing too. We put it in place because people were accusing us of nappetism and paperism. They're like, oh, it's always your authors that win. So we actually decided to be like, this is our open door to new writers who we do not have an existing relationship with. Because, because you guys I mean, whatever, you know, but we want new voices, new faces and new, and we've actually talked about, you know, representation and what are the requirements there and I think we limit people now to two plays, two submissions of these. So it's, really about putting our best foot forward and also just meeting the company and getting to know our team. So, yeah. I did want to fall up. I know we have work crunched for time so I might, I have a one-on-one session that's tomorrow and if you have questions, if you want to meet with me then and talk, let's do that. But for now, I just want to cover a little bit about publication and what that looks like and then also I want to show, I think you're going to be like the the grand supply. But we have, I brought in two books by our authors and it's very still and hard to see. Wow. Very still and hard to see. Which is actually, it's a, well do you want to like us? I don't need to. It's a, oh do I have to hold it? Yeah. It's, my favorite thing about Sam French now is that you can, you can ask them to use specific artwork as a cover thing which makes me super happy because it really helps things pop off a shelf in a way that acting editions don't. But, I sound like a spokesperson. But, this is a play that is sort of a cycle that's always based on sort of Japanese folk tales, but they all take place in a modern hotel that's probably somewhere like Miami, but, you know, and then that's the first, that's the second half of the book. The first half of the book is nine, 10 minute plays, like nine short plays. This is my second, so basically it's my second collection of short work from Sam French. Cool, and then I have Robert Sprint too. It's also a great image. I think the image is also for a Philadelphia production. Yeah. We tracked down, the guy was in school at the University Arts. Yeah. He designed it. We tracked him down, I forget how we tracked him down, but he was quite happy to get his design on the number of the book. Front, it takes place in London during the Blitz of World War II. It's about a group of women who work in a munitions factory and decide to sabotage the production of shell casings. Yeah. So we'll see what's really interesting. I mean, we obviously pointed out the graphic covers, but I think that's a really good springboard to talk about what you should be thinking about when you write about things a little bit. Right. I don't know if that makes sense, but I think it's a really good, Steve has a very interesting approach to publication because I think he thinks of it from the get-go, like from the time he posts like the pen on the page or maybe I'm reading and what that final book looks like. Actually, when you send me plays now, he often sends me a cover image to go with the submission. I was like, this is what I was thinking, and we love it because we're like, oh, we can picture that and as a publisher, it's a very attractive thing. But just in terms of the interior of the book too, also thinking of, you know, how is your idea, if someone else wants to do your play and you're not involved in that production, how are your ideas preserved and communicated? So, you guys are really specific set design you like and you want to use it. Have you asked a set designer, like, oh, down the road, can I use this as an example? Or we have a great playwright, Crystal Skillman, who is everyone knows her. She's a big personality. She, when I did her book, she really, really wanted, she's like, I have these amazing directors that I want to give credit to, can they all write forwards? And so the cut actually has the actors about how they approach the material and how they spoke to the actors. And, yeah, she pulled in her friends and she said, you know, I want to give them credit and I want this to be a really holistic reading experience for the licensees. So they know, okay, that's exactly how she meant to approach this text. And that's an event, you know, she's not talking production design. She's almost trying to preserve aesthetic. You know, they're supposed to be comical, what the place is supposed to sound like and feel like, and that's what she was really trying to speak to at that book. So I think that's a very, you know, thinking of preservation of your ideas from the time you start writing the play, or at least until the play starts to shape up is a really important thing. And in the back of mine, I have some topical references in my comedies and I'm like, as these things age because there's a problem, you know, it's also really important too. That's, I think so many people are writing about like Facebook and iPhones and social media and it's a challenge for us because we are like in 10 years that may totally shift like my space plays, which I got when I first started working at the company. My space is no longer around. It's coming back. Yeah, it's coming back. It's coming back. But thinking about that, the longevity of the play, you know, is this something that how do I preserve this idea in 10 years? You know, do I, do these jokes you know, if I'm asking them to play Jay-Z, is that because it takes place in a certain era or that's a certain feeling, while that feeling lasts later than the road. And then lastly, I know we only have a couple more minutes but I just wanted to talk on the same note kind of about marketing your work and also what happens kind of after a book is published. So we go through this editing process and then we come to the front, we put it out there, we email all the theaters, we get licensing. I normally have meetings and then we talk, okay, what are your friend's theaters that we should send this to? Who should we target? Whose turn, you know, where has this play been and where hasn't it been? But then we also talk a lot about, you know, ways to really make it stand out and to see a place that's out there, let's work on marketing it. I always recommend that writers have websites. If you don't have a website, get one. It is like your card. It is more impactful than having a card. The first thing I do when I get a submission is Google someone. I find information about you online. It shows me that you have some kind of presence out there. We like, it's much like conventional publishing. Nowadays a writer almost has to have a fan base and a following. So the publishers really know, okay, we don't have to build this person up. It's already there and we can move on that momentum. So the more work you've done in terms of getting a name for yourself and really, that's great. That's great for us to see if you have a gorgeous website. It's like, I mean it's okay. Yeah, I think it's okay. And it's become like a calling part. I really feel like people go, there's lovely production photos, it's really a lush, it's really, you know, I think there's lots of video of your work on Monday. Matt has, I mean, you have quite a following from your solo teaching. Right. So we've been able to like, kind of play into that and be like, oh, you know Matt, occasionally we do encourage people to do kind of, I don't know the word for it, but like extraordinary marketing things for their play. Like extraordinary. It's extraordinary. And Matt and us worked on this great campaign for Christmas Shorts together that I do want to show you. So you have to know football but my dad is a marketing company so like I grew up being trained in this but I'm a very self-promotional writer and so, because I was marketing, from the beginning this was marketing you know, market and idea and time of year. I went into the American Theater Magazine and I looked in the back with December issue where they name all what theaters are doing what shows and I made a list of 100 theaters that were doing plays like Chris that I thought would be market for Christmas Shorts and then I came up with this and I said we sent this to 100 of them. So they got this box like this and then they opened it up and it says there are two kinds of Christmas Shorts and it says here's one and then here's the other and it was a copy of my script with a bookmark with all the license information and it's amazing. Did you see that? Oh it's really really cool. It's great but all right we're gonna have that in the book and then you see there's this underwear yeah and then you put the script on the other side yeah and now we got like great feedback like artistic directors were wearing the and we actually I don't think Matt knows this maybe you know this but we actually just picked up hands on a hard body a Broadway show and we actually borrowed that idea yeah I didn't know that we were so inspired and we were like this is a show that had it closed early and we wanted to make sure that the perceptions of it were so really strong so we ended up sending out the CD and a box and said with a script we put those hands on a hard body to all these artistic directors so I think they're sometimes taking that extra stuff while there are certain artistic directors that will not go ahead and be like Sam French was crazy you know it's also a really good way to get on people's most people are flatter they think most people are like wow you really put a lot of time you researched my theater and this is I'm sure you could you could describe your feeling I know it yeah so do you have time actually I participated in Sam French last year so I know there's some participants here so I'm around this conference if anyone has any questions she did the most current festival and had a lovely lovely piece in our festival so she'd be a great resource well let's do this let's take five minutes and then we're going to do the switch over to the next thing okay but go ahead yeah so does someone have real quick questions I submit the 10 page query and all the information at another time or once you rejected that place off the shelf forever I think not necessarily but really the resubmission has to be justified the play has to be rewritten or there has to be some big like maybe you just got three other productions and you're like I've developed it further it's a different submission you know and occasionally people will suddenly think I've rewrote it but it's actually just a couple lines like we know it's about quality it's not always and actually less often it's about quality it's more about the fact that we have like a competing play in the catalog or we we've published a lot of things this year and we just don't have the it seems like the best way in is through your OV yeah for short plays definitely um for full length plays of course OV isn't really an option but for full length family what was that but it gets me in the family it does exactly and for full length plays I would say the best way is really to try to secure some good productions of those plays get people talking about it good reviews submit those I mean theaters we can't take work that isn't production tested because publishing things about production I mean you're not totally sure that it works neither are we and people don't look to license world premieres they want to do them at their own theaters it's the coverage of the play like we need to know that there is a commercial that people are going to come to us and we can say you know we have a new play by Steve Gocchi and people are like oh I love Steve Gocchi's plays and we're like great we'll send it to you so it's harder for us to do that if we're like well you know it was produced at one college and for them it's like oh how is this going to sell seats for me like that but it really is what theaters ask us a lot so yeah and toad or do you have in-house lawyers that we do have an in-house lawyer we have a business affairs department when you use the contract stage they drop the contract often lawyers are involved with submission but once a play gets in the contract stage and then we've accepted it for publication and send you a contract that's on the drama to skill or lawyers come into play a lot and we go back and forth about what's really the best terms for the play you know it's a dialogue that happens any other questions about OV or San Franche yeah Mark I was just wondering what what you take on the sort of play publishing in the digital age oh yeah I didn't really talk about e-books it's an interesting thing I mean we're trying very hard to we just entered e-publishing about two or three years ago we started working with Apple and we were on that platform for a long time and now we're you know everywhere we're on Kindle we're on I have to say we thought the demand for e-plays would be a lot higher than it has been the sales have been actually really slow for us but I do still believe that it's going to be the way people get plays in the future I mean and really actually what we didn't anticipate as a side effect is it's been great in terms of preserving the play because no longer do we have artistic directors immediately like please send it to me can't you just send it via email you know we're like wow this is actually available online and you can go and purchase it so it's been more yeah I mean it's been interesting we'll see how it develops I think there's lots of exciting things happening right now where some of our biggest states we're actually talking about like enhanced e-books with them and so for Agatha Christie right now I know we're trying to put together kind of a drama in her bio while you're reading it your music and so there's there's lots of cool things happening it's just it's very young it's very young tell everyone to buy e-plays something like that yeah and you sign a separate I don't know that's when you sign a separate contract yeah now it's a part of the contract so it's when we first started it was actually like a an amendment to the agreements and it was optional I think it still is optional but it takes some dialogue with us so now it's in the agreement and unless you don't want it to be there and then you're a lawyer would come back and be like you know we don't want to do that okay can everybody give a nice round of applause Annie it's here