Alison Weaverdyck

Early on, I submitted to a lot competitions and kept track of the results – crunching the numbers to figure out which of my scripts was the “best”. And although I loved my second pilot, Riftmaker, other scripts clearly were performing better. I stopped submitting it and moved on to new ideas.

Nowadays, I’m not submitting to paid opportunities nearly as often. But when I got a free entry through my Network ISA membership, I figured I might as well take advantage. The freebie was for one pilot or feature entry into the Emerging Screenwriters Suspense competition. As I thought about the best script for the job, I realized my beloved Riftmaker was due for a dust-off. I had submitted it to general TV pilot contests as well as some sci-fi/fantasy things, but it had never occurred to me before that even though Riftmaker has monsters and multiverse, many of the scenes themselves are full of suspenseful writing.

And it looks like my gamble is paying off! I’m thrilled that Riftmaker has gotten its best placement in a competition yet, and here’s to hoping July 31 will see it advance to the finals 🙂

At the same time, it got me wondering. When I submitted Riftmaker before, was I just “wrong” about what genre I was writing? As the writer, I should know it better than anyone else after all.

Was there some key thing that should have made it clearer that Riftmaker was X rather than Y? Is there some kind of parameters that I just didn’t know about?

Or does it boil down to the old “get your script to the right person at the right time” adage no matter what the genre label? Did I just stumble on a couple of readers who dug my style, case closed?

Unfortunately, I’ll probably never really know. And although it has been an interesting experiment, my experience is also just one data point. I’d love to hear from fellow writers – have you played around with your genre labels on sites like Coverfly and seen a change? Do you submit to OWAs even if the genre isn’t a great fit? How do you approach it?