For Every Rule, There Is an Exception
In the previous blog post I told you about cold email strategy. Some people think that cold emailing is spam. I disagree. Everything I have achieved on the book promotion journey - I have accomplished through cold emailing...
I emailed journalists, reporters, and radio show producers. Almost every cold email led me to amazing results. My story was featured on world radio stations and the pages of magazines. Click to see all media appearances here
But my main goal was to reach film producers. I frequently sent emails to the production companies’ general inboxes and received almost zero responses. The chances to hear from them were really slim. It was like knocking on the door to the house of a person who moved out long ago.
Even if I did hear from some of them, the replies were mostly kind and polite refuses or advice to find an agent and contact them back as a writer who was represented by the agency. It sounded pretty encouraging in regards of my story potential but thinking about all the time I would have to spend again on finding the agent put my mood down. But anyway, any response I received was better than silence.
Observing almost zero results, I realized that the most important and productive tactic would be to find right people and get in touch with them directly.
To obtain contact data of film producers was extremely tough. I would say this group in my database was the most time-consuming to get. I often found myself frustrated and disappointed, going through tons of names without proper contact information listed on the websites. However, I totally understand that producers hide their contact info to avoid the disaster of getting hundreds of pitches every day.
I’m with them if I were one of them.
Since I’m not and I’m on the opposite side of the barricade, my job was to use every source possible to locate direct contact information.
However, the idea that I was invading someone’s privacy by trying to send a “cold” email to a person who did not candidly provide me their email addresses, did not leave me for a while. It felt a little uncomfortable, but I looked at the situation from a different angle and discovered a new concept that encouraged me.
I thought that if the person voluntarily provided their personal email anywhere online, they probably understand that people can eventually see it and contact them. So, any email I saw in the directory or on IMDb looked like an invitation to me. I emailed without hesitation – many, many, many times.
I have learned that film producers do not work with scripts that haven’t gone through screening with literary agencies. I have heard that a story has no chances of developing into a movie, because all production companies hide behind huge walls that are built around them by agencies. Producers conceal their contact information from the public and never accept unsolicited material. It’s not possible to break the barricade that agencies have created around them.
Unfortunately, those are the rules. Luckily, even strict rules sometimes have exceptions. I received responses from production companies who showed solid interest in doing a project based on my book.
My consistency won. So as the system.
The plan of actions that I drafted at the beginning of the book promotion journey shaped up into a solid System of Actions, which I’m happy to share in Chapter 11 of this book: From Zero to Self-published Hero.
Come back for my next blog post and I will tell you how cold emailing changed my life forever.
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