Free Mini-Camp: Selling Yourself 

Brand-ishing Your Skills & Creating Opportunity During Disruption

Saturday, May 10th, 10am-11:30am (via zoom)

Moderated by Founder Jeffrey Gordon

You Can RSVP Here

Once you RSVP, zoom will control your access.

Please join us to discuss strategies for selling yourself as an artist, writer or filmmaker. Of session, by parallel process many of the points of discussion shared by Writers Boot Camp Founder Jeffrey Gordon may apply to other roles in the entertainment industry, including actors, producers and tastemakers on the business side.

Self-promotion can be an awkward yet necessary endeavor. In the arts, a common problem for practitioners is the lack of time to balance business outreach with the time for working on craft. But it can be a fallacy to expect one’s representatives to represent wholeheartedly– and too often writers with day jobs and without efficient tools have a tough time completing enough new work for their reps to sell. The reality is that an artist’s own relationships tend to be the greatest source of new jobs.

As always, the caliber of one’s writing, illustrated via more than one writing sample, is the real secret to selling.  While the key to one’s arsenal of writing samples for purposes of representation has always been a sense of project viability, the current reduction of production has made it even more important for each of your projects to be viewed as a viable vehicle.

Seeing yourself as the source of your own opportunity is probably the most important pivot in a shifting industry.

Extended productivity helps a writer scale the steep learning curve, and continued productivity gradually leads to career breakthroughs, like water filling up in the dam and finally spilling over. But too many “productive” writers do not rewrite enough and effectively enough, and do not test their concepts, and are overly concerned with getting their material around town, usually prematurely, which can undermine interest in you.

Too many writers also focus on pitching, which is usually an established writers game based on having fans of one’s prior success and execution. When starting out, pitching is more social than about selling. The tools and exercises at Writers Boot Camp are primarily for writing–and they are also tools for collaboration and creatively communicating.

At the Mini-Camp, we’ll also review a few Branding Exercises designed to align and articulate your writing voice. Part of the Concept Bullet Essay, Pro Checkpoint #1, shared in the first week of Basic Training, indicates at least three crucial personal-professional areas of self-awareness:

–Who are you writing for in terms of specific audience (while perhaps entertaining yourself along the way)?

–Who are the players and companies relevant that might require your services, in turn focusing the business model of your approach?

–What are your skills and applied experience, even as a new writer, that explicitly state a case for your ability to execute on paper through the many stages of rewriting and finishing work?

Writers, after all, are the finishers–unless they aren’t really writers. Writers Boot Camp alumni working at the highest levels of the business are successful because they finish what they start. When film financing became available again a few long years after the pall of the WGA strike and mortgage meltdown, nearly 80 feature films produced from 2011 to 2017 were written by our alumni–and, in most cases, they finished the job.

We’ll have ample time for Q&A. If you have a colleague or loved one who may be considering Pro Membership, or the 12-Week Basic Training starting in January, this is an ideal introduction. If you do recommend someone attend this event, please have your guest note your name on their RSVP.

If you RSVP and cannot attend, please let us know. Mini-Camps are an ongoing benefit of Professional Membership. We open certain Mini-Camps to Basic Training alumni and friends in the business to meet new writers and filmmakers who will benefit from our support.

For more info about Writers Boot Camp you can call 310/998-1199, check out writersbootcamp.com, or email jg@writersbootcamp.com

We always love to hear from alumni with news and success stories!