 to do 45 contracts. So we worked on arranging it where they would have a standard contract actress theater and then they would arrange that which would play that. And there was a place that I knew about that I wanted to take a look and I wanted to want my Mr. Jory and for basically I said to John, John and Michael just pick the ones you love the most. And the one that John mentioned yesterday, someone asked what was your all time favorite and it was a play by Mark O'Donnell called Mark Bliss and I'm pretty certain that that's in that book. So we published a collection of 25 ten minute plays and it just took off. And we did so well that a couple years later we did another one and now we're setting the franchises up to something like six, you know. And now there are ten minute play festivals and productions all over the world, you know. There's an organization out of Australia that's called Short Plus Suite and they produce festivals in countries in that part of the world, you know, all over. I had a playwright who has been helping me a little bit. She sent a play out there and it was done by Short and Sweetpick and it was done at the Malaysia Festival and won an award for the best of the festival, you know. So you know, your work gets done on the award, you know. So this is just a quote. So Smith and Crouse, well I'll get to it. With Samuel French, I was able to get a lot of plays published by the waywrights that subsequently became famous, you know. And I had two varying degrees with kids who were mental and getting Samuel French. They were published at a movie theater, but you know, Don Nigro and Watson. And then, you know, I started to edit these books with Smith and Crouse and I did their annual lot of law books. They did an anthology of new plays by women, which they don't do anymore. And this is me now. Thank you. Yeah. And then also you produced the Boston Theater Marathon. Yeah, I'm not involved in that though. See, Smith and Crouse is basically all freelancers. You know, it's not that a man and a woman make Marisa Smith and Eric Crouse running out of their home in New Hampshire and they hire various people to do various projects. And about three or four years they published all of the Boston Theater Marathon plays and so then they were publishing an anthology of ten minute plays annually that Michael Dixon was editing. And then I'm alive, but they asked me to do it, I don't know. So I said, okay, so I started doing that and originally it was they would be two books. One was placed for two actors and one was placed for three or more actors. And I did, and then about two or three years ago they said, it does put them all together and I said, that's a big one. And they said, that's okay. So now that I've done the last three years, but what I've done for the last two years I want you to know is that I've been collecting a list of all the people in the world that do ten minute plays and with contact information and everything, you know, the hoo-ha festival and yada-yada. And so for the last two years, every book that I have in the back there's a list of all of them. So you get that one and you can put it, make your own database of submissions. And you know, probably some of them don't do it anymore, but you know, I try to update it as much as I can. So every year, the most up to date one is the new book which just came out in 2014. Is it available? I hope so. They had some. They sent some down, down, but you know, I don't know, maybe everyone bought it. But you can get it online or call them up. And they didn't send my new playwright book which pissed me off. You know, I don't know why, but you know what they also have in there that I highly recommend is their most recent publication. I call them they because I really don't work on the freelancer, you know, I work for them and a lot is the most recent hot off the press title is by Michael Bigelow-Dixon. He's right here. Yeah, and he'll probably tell you about it, but it's in my opinion, I mean, it's a brilliant brilliant book. I disagree with a lot of it, but you know. That's an out of town. But it is, in my opinion, could become as influential a book as like the theater in it's, it's, it's, it's the manifesto of what I call the versioning anything of realism movement. And it talks about why, you know, and so he's very, very persuasive and I highly recommend that book. Great. Yeah, so that's me. Great, thank you so much. So, yes, next I want to go to Linda from Dramatic Publishers. What's interesting about, about everyone here in these publishers is that there's some things that are shared and there's some sort of things that are different. And so I wanted to talk about that. And one of the things that I'm very impressed with what's happening with you is that the kind of thematic collections that you're doing, the editorial decisions, and in some ways it's trying to improve the editorial thing that's happening with several of these publishers, which is really interesting in terms of that kind of imagination to put things together. So, yeah, well, most of our Tim and Pipe collections have been commissioned. The most recent one is The Mullen Pipe, which I commissioned. And we asked 22 of our current authors to write Tim and Pipe's novel around the theme of bullying, and didn't expect all 22 to agree that they all did. So it's also a big part of the collection. And we have others like Stephen Grant, you know, me and Gregory. Richard Dresser, who was in Christmas Dollars, really wanted to play, and really took off. So, tons of copies of this and there are also some questions. And because they're 22, they can be done in different ways. And a multitude of them. So this is good. So it's 10 by 10. Tim Short played a team about ethics and values, also commissioned from about 20 years, and just submitted a university and loved death from the crime by John Jory. We published those probably 20 years ago. And after the beat, seven short plays that took place in Kramer, there's one on here, the Tarantino Variation, that gets done all the time by itself. And it's also included in other intelligences as well. And the cell phone rings for the, which is around the idea of a cell phone. In case you didn't know. And so, yeah, but most of the commissions that we do look, usually when we get submissions, except on solicitude submissions, we seldom get that many 10-minute play submissions. We get collections of 10-minute play submissions by the same office. So when we pull together something dramatically, you usually can issue those as results. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm here to my right, the Dramatist Play Service, which would be affectionately called the PPS. Sure. Yes, and it's shorter. Craig Pasachal. And it was tables quite impressive, because if those of you who write 10-minute plays will see what good company you're in. But Wendy Wasserstein and Chris Drang and Terrence McNally, what John Patrick Chandler writes when he's made to go home. And really wonderful political writer named Craig Pasachal. So... How did that happen? I don't know. Well, I think, you know, for us at DPS, kind of the 10-minute play explosion, I think started with All In The Timing. I actually tend to call it short plays, or the 10-minute plays, because I sometimes teach workshop on short play writing. And I tell people to focus on the word play, and not necessarily the exact length of the time. Write a play at the beginning, middle, and not just a skit or something. I love skits, but it's going to be a play. So All In The Timing, David Ives' follow-up, Mirror Mortals. We have three other collections of his after that, another one of his, I mean, All In The Timing was just revived in New York this past year. He's got another one coming up, I think, again, in primary stages. Christopher Durang, of course, Durang Durang, but we have a collection of 20-some of his plays and we're talking about his look like that. Every time I bring into a conference, and I tell people what the overall price for all the books are, they always pick that one up and go, this one too, assuming that it's like twice as much. Shel Silverstein, we have a lot of really dark and absurd pieces by him. You know, yes, John Patrick Chandler, we have a collection of short ones by him. This just came out a couple of weeks ago. Everybody always seems to express surprise when New Oster's speaking. We have a collection of seven short plays of curves. And yes, one of my own plays is short. Going back to what you're saying, that play is being done all over the world. One of my short plays, which is actually published by Play Scripts, is my single most produced play. It's been translated into about five languages, a Greek theater company, and Athens stole it and ran it for three months. It's recently stolen in Zimbabwe as well. We'll talk about Steven's play. Also, we started getting into, most of our collections, obviously, as I've shown, are by single authors, because you tend to get a single collection, unless you commissioned something like that or if you put out a daily call. But I knew that a lot of our authors were maybe writing a one-off, you know, like they did in 24-hour plays or some other contest. So I started editing for us a collection just called Outstanding Short Plays, where I would get about ten of them together. And this was the first volume, which came out a couple of years ago. I've edited the second volume, which will be out later this year. So it's just a way to work with our authors when they don't have six, seven, eight, nine, ten of them. But the biggest and latest, I think, of the ten minute plays is Almost Main, which some people may not think of as a ten minute play, but actually it's a series of them on a theme and strung together in a lovely way. And this has been, I think, one of the most produced plays in North America. The last three years alone, we've had over 500 productions a year. They just did a revival in New York. Yeah, they just did a revival in New York, which John Kerry on me was acting in. And, I mean, this is a real Cinderella story, because it was done in New York. You know, it ran for a month or so, it closed. It didn't make much news or headway. And slowly, people started discovering it. We got out there, and slowly we were licensing it constantly. I put it in my new playwrights book, scenes from it again. And I think that's one of the ways they started a revival. Yeah, I'm sure it is. I'm sure it is. And suddenly, every school, college, community theater, you know, you know, a whole bunch of side of the road started. And it's a lot of them. Yeah, it's a lot of them. I think it's eight of them. And, you know, it's been a huge, huge success, obviously. And it shows what you can do with the ten minute play form. You can put them all together. Two of my first two full-length plays, if you look at them, are, you know, they have an overall kind of story and arc and character and everything. And I'm sure it's same. It's kind of pieced them together that way. So, I love performing as my role. And I have a play here. Yes! Don't stand out too late. You've got to hang here. Thank you so much. It goes upstart, which I think, for a play that's more galvanized, this is Morgan Kuhl, who had a box of plays that then I still lost. Oh, really? So, can you talk a little bit about that? Yes! So, just imagine this says, great short comedies volume nine. I imagine this says, except these are also really great. So, about 20% of our open submissions, we also have an open submission, 40% are plays that are one-axe for high school competition, which is something that play scripts really, that's how the company was built, and it's something we're really passionate about. And we also have plays for the professional market as well. So, we're cross-market, but I would say that short plays are really big for us. We have ten volumes of great short comedies and dramas, and we define short as anything under, like, twenty, fifteen-ish minutes, but a lot of those plays are ten minute plays. So, what we do is, if you send us a ten minute play, and we love it, we say to you, let's make a publication offer. We don't know when our next collection is coming out, but when it comes out, you'll be in it. And so, sometimes we usually do about one a year, it's not super regimented that way. So, potentially we could say, we want to put this in the next collection, and it might be up to a year before it actually hits the stands, but that's kind of how we curate the collection. And then sometimes we'll end up sort of splitting them off into different genres, like this one's the comedies and dramas, and so we have a fair amount of collections for short plays, and we do really, really well. I mean, some of our authors that have full length plays, their ten minute play actually does better for them. We just have real reach in that market, and community theaters love to do them for benefits, because they can involve so many different people, and you can have, you know, like the middle-aged couple, who's the star in all the community theater plays, can be in this one, and then the young people who are just kind of getting involved with the group can be in this one, and it really allows communities to, you know, make things flexible for themselves, for people, or it also allows professional companies to use two actors or three actors over and over. So it works for lots of groups, which is like, I think, why? It's such a popular form. So we have that, we have plays that come in through the transom, as we say, but we also, then, like for example, we have a group of Adam Simcoitz, who's a great writer based in, well, Connecticut now, sent us a group of plays that are all around the theme of love, and so we're publishing those. So it comes either way, but I would say for us, mostly, it's us cherry picking ones that we're excited about and putting into collections. We also pretend this is a book with like a really fancy cover that says Naked Angels on it. So we have a collection of Tempted Plays by Naked Angels, which hopefully will be here later today. We also have a collection called 24 by 24, so it's 24 short plays by 24 writers that are all ten minutes, and they're great writers. Hopefully we'll be here later today as well. So it's something we're really excited about, something that we've seen a lot of success in, and something that we feel like is really appropriate for cross-markets, and I think that's why it does so well. Thank you so much. Thank you for ending. Even though she doesn't look like the grandfather, the grandfather, all of this is our friendship. Marcia, I just... I just... I just wanted to say that this panel, I believe in the past, was just Sam French who did this whole festival, and I just want to give a non-domainy who sort of said, oh, maybe we should invite other publishers. Yeah, so Sam French published the first Actors' Theater of Ruling, where a lot of this really started. I don't know, I think Schnitzel wrote short plays, you know. Really, it started... Yeah, we're still... And we don't do this anymore. And I think part of that, the Actors' Theater's kind of changed their model. I think what Larry was saying about handling 24 contracts is also very true. We also published the Boston Theater Marathon for some years, you know, Baker's plays, which used to be a subsidiary of French nuts, part of the company that Baker's did Sam French these days, but they published the Boston Theater Marathon for five years. And today, I think it's interesting that most of our short-play submissions or publications actually happen via Samuel French's partnerships, which we have a really intricate network of partnerships that we work very tirelessly to build. So for example, we published Thassian Playworks, which we have people in, like, Nebraska right now at international best bands, but they PDTA commissions or NAC commissions, they have a national competition for high school students to write plays. And we ended up working with them to make the decisions the results of that competition. We also have our own off-the-properly festival, short-play festival, which we'll probably talk about a bit more during a later panel, which is kind of become the pipeline for short plays. Which uses the publications for how many? Thirty? It's going... It's 39. Casey McClane is my colleague, which is probably why I'll be like, man, that's right. But, yeah, so we're going into year 40. I've never done this research, but Samuel French likes to say it's the oldest continuous short play festival in the country. Yeah, that we've not ever had a year off. It's gone through lots of different incarnations, so we've outsourced it. And now it's finally after six years, we've taken it in-house. So the whole competition, actually Casey and I are the core artistic directors this year. And all of our staff, who's licensing the plays by day, we stronger than them. We have a volunteer at night and they help implement the festival because Stalby's great playwrights. But this year we had 1,400 submissions and it's 30 plays that we'll be going up for a week. And then the result of that is that six of the plays get published and licensed, and these collections do really well, so they kind of look like this. But it's a bunch of them in the back. And that's very interesting too, because we've actually, you know, we choose this next play with the help of a lot of industry colleagues and professional playwrights. So it's not just time on French making these decisions, it's actually like, kind of a collective high of mind from the industry. And what often succeeds is the non-realistic stuff, which I think it was very interesting to hear John champion for those plays that maybe take more risks or the short plays that are kind of adventurous or have unanswered questions at the end. So it's very exciting. I like the short play festival is my favorite time of year, because we get to see some really crazy stuff on stage and kind of get out of that commercial like, oh, will this sell or who's interested. And really see playwrights kind of in their rawest, like, let's just throw it out there and see if it works or we've gotten some, I think, the most exciting writing coming through that festival, so it's very exciting. And we've also forged some really great relationships. I don't think Steve was in the room, which is fine because I skipped. You had several, Steve, yeah. We do. And Steve is also sort of almost mean. I would encourage you to check out his short play collections because he does this interesting thing with his shorts where he kind of leads them together to tell a larger story or a larger, even like, aesthetic story. So he has a very, like, certain style in a lot of the plays and when they're together on stage he makes this ambiance to the evening. We also have talked and, you know, I think the political ideas are exciting too or like having a daily news kind of approach to play is, because it seems like there's a large trend right now with theater breaking through barriers just doing plays for people with disabilities and we're seeing, you know, short plays about wars and short plays about, so as a writer, like, getting things together, like, you do publish a lot of collections by one writer, but even going further than that, it seems like you publish a lot of collections by one writer with a theme. So, like, Tina Hough, for example, I brought last year, I brought her plays for women. She wrote just, like, it's called Towering Tiger Lilies and that's a great collection where it's very, there's like a water robin's play where people are lactating in the pool and the nursing mother is, I mean, it's so adventurous and exciting. So I would, yeah, I mean, as a writer, yeah, I think, you know, yeah, finding a way to kind of curate your own material so that it really makes sense for a theater to put it at this kind of an exciting notion and, you know, there's lots of fun things you can do with that. Do UPS has a paid marriage? Yes, we are standing on ceremony. And is that something you commissioned or is it such a survey? No, they were being done. A lot of them was in reaction to Proposition 8 in California and there were actually a lot more, I think, to begin with what we contacted them and said, oh, it was done on Broadway. Well, it started in L.A. And also Mother Heard Out Loud which is the same, right? Yeah, Mother Heard Out Loud is more along the lines of the love loss in what I wore or, you know, what kind of gender version of the giant model. But again, it's a bunch of different writers coming together to do things around the theater. Yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting question because it also leads into the whole idea of what you look for, how you get something published, what's the best way and what submission policy is for each of you. Is it a good idea for a writer? It's very fascinating to me that the kind of editorial and almost group-to-sorial imagination that enters into that. Is it something that if someone has a couple of plays on the theme, maybe they take the initiative to find writers they know and suggest? So I'm curious in terms of like, what do you look for? If people have 10-minute plays, what's good advice? Someone want to read from that? Yeah. Yeah. I think what Larry said about negotiating for 25 different contracts can be very overwhelming and very difficult in some cases, especially if writers aren't willing to take a favorite nations agreement. Yeah. So if you're, and I'm sure favorite nations agreements will get covered in season 10, I'll get more into that later. But, yeah, making sure all the legal uses are in place, if you're getting together with your friends and you're like, hey, let's write these about Obama. You know, make sure that you're really looking long-term so that there's a vision of publication down the road and you've kind of counted for that in your early discussions about where this is going. I think that's really important. I mean, I've been approached recently about several collections and it's difficult because there hasn't been that forth but, and then there's multiple agents involved and there's, you know, writers have different expectations and royalties of publishers that gets a little complicated. Yeah. So I'd say there's that. But also I think, you know, French is not unsolicited anymore. We think we have a query process and so we review 10-page samples and kind of project ideas before asking to see. Oh, thank God. It's very, yeah. So we also see, you know, and we also ask for, like, a history of production. I think we have a very, at least I kind of have a philosophy that things need to be stage-tested, that the reading is as much a performance craft as it is a literary craft on the page. Is it a level of production factor in? It depends on market. So I will say if you're writing, please, and you know they're for high schools and if you have a track record of, you know, okay, we've done this at a high school, you know, it doesn't necessarily need to have five off-off-broadway or off-broadway production or anything like that. But it needs to be, you know, you've tested it within a certain audience and there's some evidence that it works with that audience. So that, you know, the people are contacting you about it. It got great reviews. It was extended. It sold crazy amounts of tickets and so many licensing requests that can't even deal with it. What we saw in the video just now 2000 people like that are paid for it. Yeah, actually, social media recently we've been, I have to say it's specific to some of the larger shows it's like knowing that I will say, I always say this but I do Google everyone that submits because I want to see like, ah, you never use it. Yeah, it's helpful that having a web page, okay, well I can go back if they want awards, like do they have relationships with theaters in place? Like if we pick this up and, you know, we need to, we have a marketing team, we have a great marketing team at French, so, you know, the end of the really proactive licensing team so we want to call the theaters you have relationships with and say like, hey, did you know they have a short play collection? You know, or do you have a place for that in your season? So really, yeah, it does, as much as it is a play, is a play a good play, you know, are you, have you thought about your career as a playwright and are you a successful playwright, which is a weird thing to say. Yeah, I'm interested in what we say is there a motor. Well, no, I mean, we've got a similar submission policy. I mean, the question that I get asked all the time is, you know, do you take new plays, unproduced plays, and I say, well, you know, if you go through the submission process, you know, we'll certainly take a look at them, but I'm trying to dissuade them from just, you know, finish it, hit print, or hit send, and get it to us. Because we're the final stop for your play. We're the last thing. If you just send it to us straight away, and we love it and publish it, it's probably going to damage because there are so many story marshals. Even so, it's very hard because, you know, there's so many plays fighting for so many slots, and everybody is really looking for, you know, what was big in New York, what was big in Chicago, what are they doing, you know, in Seattle or Los Angeles, so that they tend to go to, you know, schools will go to a lot of people, favorites, schools will go to what is, you know, brand new that they think they should do. So if, you know, your play can kind of get missed in all of that shuffle. And so it's incumbent on the writer to kind of push that boulder of their play as far along and up the hill as they can on their own, to get into the point where it gets some kind of visibility. It doesn't have to be a New York production or anything like that, but to get it along, to give it a production history, so that it's not just like, you have to read it to find out how great it is, it helps if you've had some kind of like, presence. I'm going to piggyback to you after that, and I want, I don't want to dominate so much, but er, I'm going to say the other thing about key publishing being a final stop on the New Play train is that published, there's a document that's out there for the community at large, that's a testament to that, that is the writing. So it becomes very difficult to change players once they're published, and so I think also to publish with a licensing agent since a nightmare, we've had very successful large players that all of a sudden are like, oh well, you know, I want an intermission, or I'm going to change the ending, I never like the scene, but then there's all of a sudden there's two different versions of the play that are out on the market, and if you don't want that early version performed, it's very hard to release. And sometimes if the writer is suddenly like, yes, now this is the definitive version, go out there and find the 40,000 copies of my old play and take them back. Or they can be really surprised when that old version is produced somewhere. How could this happen? It's 20 years. I was trying to explain to you at theater why they'll be like, but you printed this and you're like, yeah, but it's not, you know, you have to do it the way the writer wants to. Well, they'll be like, I liked it fell over. Yeah. And there were a couple of writers that's like every day they got out on the bus doing it. There must have been eight different versions of it in the Google group. And the all-time worst of mine was Robert Patrick with Kennedy Children. We wanted us to, you know, not to sell our edition with the 2000 copies. Anybody that wanted to publish a play would, you wanted us to send them his new version. And we're going, Robert, what are we going to do with these 2000 copies? And so he finally got so annoying that he just sold all his copyrights to Samuel French. So now Samuel French owns the copyrights. But yeah, if there's any including that you can just play with it until you feel like, okay, I'm exhausted and I don't care if it gets the bad high school production where they're... That's a testament that you've made it. I also think on an artistic level like on an artistic level I'm a writer and almost everyone on staff and play scripts is also a writer. So we're a little bit wary like why would you send your play out if you haven't heard it in a production. We all know how valuable that is and so it makes us a little bit like does this person really understand this craft if they feel like they can judge the publication without hearing it out loud. That's really different for the amateur market. We're more likely to not feel that way for a high school play because a lot of people don't have access to a high school production or something where we have writers who write for the high school market know it so well that they don't need to hear it from a brand. But generally in the professional market we're always a little wary if you send it and you haven't had a production just because we know that means that you didn't feel like you needed to see it on stage before you were ready and that's... If you're like that, God bless you but I'll just play right this way. Oh wait, of course there's exception. And hopefully all of you are. Everything that he writes when he sends me here is absolutely perfect and ready to go. It does not need any development and thank God and now your point is the ones you haven't got on the public yet there's the website and you can play all of them but... Don, I agree. But I would say Don is an exception to the call. Yeah, very much an exception. I would say too, like on the sorry, I don't know. On the market too, like I think with the bullying collection when you guys released that, I was like oh that's so genius. I was like, ugh, that's a good deal. It's about bullying, do you have any ideas about we also get like vampires, when Twilight was out people would be like well do you got anything about that? Those are off into the... But the occasion there are these all kinds of trends that flare up and there's a need in the industry I feel like. Yeah, can I just interject something on that? Because I suppose that in a few minutes we're figuring out how to put it out there not only just the festival but also the school tours. We do a middle school tour over the course of the year and I think this year it was like 40,000 kids saw short plays and this collection included or maybe last year's collection included two pieces from the bully plays and one thing I would tell all of you out there is if you one of the things to think about is especially for schools if you're getting funding from grants or from school communities they want thematic they want, Ricky you know that a connection to a theme so bullying is huge so we went to Linda's collection and suddenly went oh, this is really wonderful. So we found plays within that collection but the other thing that happened is that one of the young ladies you might have seen last night on the on stage the willowy one Mary Stinson became so captivated as a young actor working the school tour she's now one of our playwrights writing for the tour and I'm going to be sending you her plays because they're terrific and she's two minutes out of that age group and we can relate and it looks like she does, she's 26 who would know but I will tell you that was a brilliant idea and I'm hoping it's really successful out there. It is very successful so and we haven't really looked at it in place that's changed except unsolicited manuscripts we get about 500 in a year usually they're one at the store full length but we started to like take a much closer look at 10 minute life and like you do we take the ones we like and we keep them until we have something that follows some kind of theme and then we plan to go and publish collections and one of the collections I'm collecting for right now are from place for the type of collection it won't be called bully plays too or bully plays more bully plays or something similar though bully will definitely be in the title yeah unfortunately they can do a resonance topic that's the thing like that any unfortunate resonance topic is probably something you can think about dealing with I want to open it up for questions there was one that came from over here can I ask one time I want to say on the nature of these is that kind of thing if you have a publisher if you already are like published one of us or you know ask us like say I'm thinking of writing some 10 minute plays what is there a market for? I would have said bully plays so you know we're we're looking for stuff if you know you're thinking of writing something feel free to ask us because we're very aware of what people are asking for and what teachers are asking for so one question here is in terms of like you license all the plays do you do any trade applications that are just apologies or do you license everything that's a question French has French has we're old we've done everything historically like there was a time where we were doing trade and I'm actually working on for the OOB 40th anniversary next year to hope all of you fight in New York it's going to be the best party for short play we're already planning it we've been planning it for like two years so I am putting together a trade more a trade book of winners from that festival so Teresa Reback actually got her feet wet in the short play festival and I got a story about those two options but yeah it's a banana but that will be more like a trade and we'll probably bend it through the trade channels the differences between acting editions and trade editions which maybe we'll get in on a later panel but if you guys do the one-on-ones we could probably explain further but our acting editions are designed to go with licenses so someone is calling us for it to get a license of the show this is an acting edition just like this regular thing that doesn't happen this is true it doesn't just point crash on the cover and fancy things but sometimes whereas Smith and Carl's only publishes trade editions they're more expensive they're snazier covers but you want them on people's bookshelves and they're taught in they have different distribution channels colleges, course adoption bookstores so it helps to know that difference and most agreement of publishers are not exclusive in terms of trade and acting they publish something in a short place and then the author can send it to us for OOB and it can be in multiple collections because Smith and Carl's doesn't do any licensing and they don't ask for exclusive so they could then have it published by dramatic public or anybody and have them license and we love that, like you're the roosters getting printed in one of your books and we're licensing it so if someone encounters it this way they're just going to come to us so it's a happy friendly nice thing so there's a nice symbiotic relationship and I just want to yeah TCG as well TCG most of our larger phase are published in trade editions that are gorgeous and we have a great working relationship and both are good because it gets them out there it's more revenue from the writer ultimately depending on what agreement they have with the trade publisher yeah but the more you can get your play out there there was a hand up over here well you were saying we could query topics, so Smith said I just thought we might take advantage like after bullying are there any a couple other things that people are looking at now or what do you have a sense of like what people are hungry for we have one that's kind of fun but it's a stage combat collection by the writer I'm having a brain spark like but he did so we also have a bunch of themes that are like Naughty Christmas books it brings your monologue so it's good stuff all over actually Matt Holmerman who was here last year had his Christmas shorts which we've seen kind of a spike in that and then you just want to end the which is great but yeah so holiday collections are always kind of fun and there's a lot of them so just be aware of that I would also like Google the publisher do your research before you submit if you send us a collection of shorts to me that are holiday people they'll probably come back to you and say well we have like four other ones I don't know if this is the right place and that's as much about being an advantageous relationship for both of us I don't want to take your play if they don't think it's going to it's going to compete because that's really an injustice to you and I don't want you to be like well why did my play do well okay well I'll throw out some themes good writing I'm always I'm always wondering why no one ever does like a ten minute little short tiny funny riffs on classics like I feel like a collection of that a teacher would go crazy like a teacher would go crazy over that think about what a teacher we're really for ten minute plays thinking about universities high schools and community theaters we're thinking about professional theaters too sometimes they'll do that for a benefit but think about what are teachers teaching so bullies play it makes sense because that thing gets better that's a really big movement right now that's zero tolerance bullying policies like they're really that's really potent for schools right now it's really important to them so yeah like classics because then they can the other thing is this is big it's not like yeah schools now because of all these crazy curriculum centers no longer believe that a play is just literacy because it's a play you have to like sell it and it has to fit all these strands so teachers are looking for things that they can claim as like English class so you know what's ridiculous is of course we all here in this room know that any play is English class but you know so things like that are riffs on classic that are fun for the kids but also educational in the traditional sense for an English class are really great but make sure they're really classic like if there's an underlying rights issue oh yeah every market is going to have its own special themes obviously you know high school like bullying you know I would think that colleges there's been so many cases of sexual abuse going on where we've been hearing out in the news about it on the college campus these days I would think that that might be an interesting theme community theaters are probably going to want lighter fare for the most part you know but high school ones know foul language lots of rules for women colleges are always looking for plays that have like plays that you know like high schools they always ask can we pass the police officer I always think an old place with a woman you know seriously here would be another scene yeah we have a bunch of stuff as an activist I wonder that's climate change you know like I never seen a lot about that I would love to see more about that it's not like funny that's so good anyone who loves large schools what classes are for sure why you guys well say for the school for the large large-scale well I think there's two you just lived that two ways because I personally think a ten minute play short play with more than three or four people is getting too big but if you're doing the evening of six to seven feet of the and they've all got two pairs of three, four, two you're going to be able to involve a lot of people in that so so yeah two, three, four more than four is just as a record it's really hard to ten minutes but even there with the ten minute plays I think even there if they have a fundamental role I would say if you have a large cast show too reading other plays like I know Israel Horowitz who is a great short play writer we have a great question that I didn't bring you can order it he has a play where people are all jogging in a marathon and it's like eight people and it's ten minutes but it's fantastic so I can read a lot of plays I know we're all pushing our books so it's kind of there's a reason for that the more you read examples of oh this film is really worth and it's our cast and this is how look at the forms it's one of the jobs she's had her I work at books and books and I'm actually part of the children's department I have a charge of book buying so I was just intrigued on whether or not you pay attention to the literary trends we had the vampire dystopian kind of the trends correspond to or correlate to what submissions you get and what submissions you pay attention to now it's like what I call Siklin it's like the main character has cancer or they have there's something so I don't know if that's corresponding we were talking about bullying and I know what I had to do ordering this coming fall I had six or seven books all about bullying either the perspective of the bully or the perspective of the person being bullied I was wondering if everything panetized in with literary media and with I say yes I mean you sit down to write a play you're not necessarily thinking about what trends in my training did there are publishers who aren't presented that are more tight into those you guys publish a lot of children's literature dramatic do you have to give her and I think actually PYA yeah the Minneapolis Children's Theater and Seattle Children's Theater actually when they commissioned work they retained the licensing rights and they had a whole slew of stuff that specifically for young audiences called PYA yeah they may actually be more on those trends I will say that we often look for work we do a lot of one act competition plays for high schools and yes we're very much clicked into what high school kids are watching outside of their theater classes like Divergent and The Fault in Our Stars and you know obviously we're not able because of rights issues to get those exact things but we're often looking for things that we know kids can gravitate to because it's what's in the ether right now so I would say for the school market that's been already true and those things speak to each other so how has the self publishing trend affected your industry because we've seen some plays run into like our workshops that hey this is Publish I published this on Amazon you can buy it right now and they've never been produced yeah so how is that publishing a license publishing a license is really different so if somebody sells and publishes something they can still potentially pick that play up so it doesn't and sometimes we've found a beautiful thing maybe a handful in our past years where that's happened so it doesn't it's fine it doesn't hurt us I would say the same but again I would say that's probably the case of somebody who's just written it and wants it published and thinks that publishing is a first step rather than a last step or that by having it in book form it's there's actually several short play writers that I interact with who've gotten because you know the short play model is not necessarily you're not going to get rich from writing short plays I think that's something that everyone I mean there would be a few exceptions of people that have made a really substantial career out of it but so you know I think French is really scaled back overall on the amount of short plays we published and then had some writers we have a lot of writers in the French catalog I might know there's like several of them I think Robert Kaseley who was there last year had sent me a collection of great short plays and so I was like yeah you know it's hard for us we have a lot and he just published a lot of books and short plays recently I think they'll compete and he actually published his own collection which is the licensing them himself or in his agent but he just wanted the different hands to give to people I'm trying to figure out someone else to that series like Indie theater now there's that model yeah Martin Denson who's surrounded thearttheater.com started an online platform called Indie theater now which is totally a digital publishing platform and he ends up taking a lot of 10 minutes I know you published Matt Freeman's 10 minute plays via there but I also unfortunately could not publish and so yeah so there are other options and they say that Indie theater now is a little different than self publishing because they think Martin's actually asking people I think it's curated so Adam you know a lot of these 10 minutes businesses have like 1400 submissions so like what advice would you give how would you make your plays about the staff that's right one advice is we see there's like things that are in the cultural DNA and we'll see like 10 plays that are all set in a bar we divide up the submissions into packages 20 and in a packet of 20 4 plays can be set in a bar 4 plays can be on a park bench or on a bus stop and like 3 or break up plays and then you have like 2 plays out of that packet that aren't take plays in a supermarket aren't take plays so like it's the end of the world it's like a little more so I mean really if you're writing in a traditional setting and you have a short play really the idea has to be super original in that setting because you have to know that there's so many other plays that also happen and in the end I was just actually talking about is that for our composition it does come down a bit to programming and I think a lot of these festivals you have to have variety you have to have things that are a little off the wall you can't have, you know we have 30 plays we can't have 5 of them set in a bar I mean it'd be easy for Casey because then the set would be the same but you know for the audience it would be a little tiring so yeah I mean the ones this year talk to some people about the programming this year it's such a weird festival like the ones that really go to the reading process we have a play where they like these two girls kill a baby on stage it works in the context of the play we'll see if it works on stage we have a play that's a Japanese robot play that's really crazy plays that have really taken some big big risks and they seem to to land a lot better so I'd say you know use it to try out I was trying to say yeah I love what Tom Jury was talking about like to push out of the realism box you know I wonder because in you know the full play does not necessarily you know I wish he would explain but you know is that more possible in a short form? but yeah you can do anything in a short form you know when I look at my books I try to put a wide variety of different realistic play right next to one that has that device that number is that Mr. Jury spoke a lot of something really couldn't be done anywhere else that could only sustain and I'll give you two examples one was I've talked about Australian children playing right were very successful some of these play I've heard of one of my family play it was called Desla and the Friends Go Pardier and the characters were two helium filled balloons and a children's birthday apart and then another one that I'm doing a collection for a pause which is being prepared for publication that's placed specifically for teens and there was one I found in that that it was called Candy Lights Your Status and it's provided entirely on Facebook and it's hilarious and so I there's a guy in England named Bryce who does a festival every year and he takes the Edinburgh Festival and I sent that to him with a couple other ones and he's going to do that at the Edinburgh Festival he sent me pictures of it from their production in London and it was very funny so I think that those devices that I particularly enjoy those kinds of things that can only be done in 10 minutes I think that the most successful 10 minute plays are almost but the most produced at any rate not that successful depends on how you define that but I mean like the most produced one short plays that we have are you know David I who are not necessarily known for realism you know so it seems to me that the 10 minute form the short play form is almost built to a more geared towards that because of the heightened nature because they're so compressed I mean again when I talk about workshops of writing short plays I kind of again focusing on the word play so think of it as a fully played you compress down to 10 minutes and so everything needs to be heightened under pressure in a different weird way or at least when I write my own there's certainly more absurd than the ten minute play yeah as soon as just real quick I think it's not just the content it's also non-realistic it's also form that you can also play with form and sale so you can have a play set in the bar but like if I would Steve Goughy did with the chorus last night and that convention of the chorus was such an interesting way to tell to add something to the story that was really fundamentally you know about differences in couples but it was this weird like you know it's fun I think we have to wrap up well just one thing I'm wondering that you must be useful to the writers and to you folks in terms of a need from the field I teach at the university level and graduate and undergraduate level we use a lot of ten minutes plays in the classroom as a semester project or as a team and what we can't find are there are very few plays available to us that are two women which we need I mean really few and secondly we need plays which are indeterminate, two character plays which are indeterminate in terms of sex so that it can be cast with two men, one woman, one man two women to use in the classroom because you never know what the class composition is you know what I mean and those two areas are really wide open I always include in my book at least two or three examples where I put in there in the title of the content it's like this at 3,000 well you can contact the field because I'm out there and I don't know how to follow you jumped around John you're in my title exhibit this at Genuzi which is like I love to tell my high school in college because it's short scenes set in a museum but it's 26 men or 26 women it's like 25 different scenes it's all interchangeable and the set is just like that's what I really recommend reading something like that he also has all the kings women which is about women of Sussex Elvis it's like 26 women and the other market by the way I've been amazed by because I'm a Jane Austen adapter is I would say fully 30% of the productions I get are from Christian schools who are looking for material within their life view which does not necessarily inhibit you if that is not your life view I mean Jane Austen is fine but there's a big Christian market out there he actually published 10 by 10 which had a different name and this was based upon another commission given to ten of our playwrights to write a play on one of the ten commandments which they just had to draw randomly but in that market you're actually safer not doing biblical material because of differences in theological view you're actually better simply writing plays and not get the hotspots that they're not born we did because Michael Dixon's here yes down in the publishing