There are tons of people who want to know how to sell a screenplay. This means executives are constantly getting swamped with scripts, which begs a very important question: how are they supposed to decide what to read? How can you know how to sell a screenplay when you have to compete with all of these other people who want to do exactly the same thing as you do?

If you already know how to sell a screenplay, it’s surprisingly simple – they take recommendations from close friends who are also in the industry. This means that you need to befriend people in the industry and then soft sell, or very carefully, get them to read your script. If it’s really that good, they’ll pass it on to a higher up, and all of you will benefit in the process.

If you want to better understand how to sell a screenplay and successfully implement this process, there are two major concerns that you need to be advised of before you attempt to implement this strategy, both of which we will list and then go into further detail about below:

You need to make 100% sure that the writing is the absolute best it can be before you let someone look it over.

Do remember something important here – every time you ask someone to do this for you, you’re asking them to put their professional reputation on the line. That is a huge thing to ask of someone, as if they continue to make recommendations that turn out to be poor, it can negatively (and permanently) affect the trajectory of their career. That is a huge risk to take, so please be aware of what it is you’re asking when you make those kinds of requests.

Do not ever react negatively if someone is unable to help you with your script or is uncomfortable with making a recommendation.

If they’re hesitant to help, don’t end a friendship because of it – either the script isn’t up to snuff, or they don’t have the power you think they do. Either way, if you know anything about how to sell a screenplay, you know that it’s never something to lose your cool over – not selling a screenplay is a temporary issue, but losing a friend because you reacted poorly (and inappropriately) to a situation can be a permanent one very quickly.