NTP Goes Amazon
No, that’s nothing to do with hairstyle in our nether regions. We’ve taken the step of becoming sellers on Amazon.
The decision was not taken lightly - we never spend money unless we have to. As I’ve often stated, I can’t recall a single instance where we’ve sold via Amazon, so I don’t think we’ll be talking big business here. They also charge a fee for every sale, so if you, or your friends or your local theatre company want to buy scripts, please encourage them to do it directly through us and not give money away to Amazon.
We are in the stages of uploading the entire catalogue to Amazon. The reason for working with Amazon is perhaps slightly less obvious than simply for face-on sales. As you will see from elsewhere in this newsletter, I have been using Google alerts to highlight when people are looking for NTP or for my own plays. Twice today I found that someone had been looking at an Amazon site. There they would have found the play title (all your plays are on Amazon’s lists already) but they would also have found it “unavailable” or “temporarily out of stock”.
My worry is that the person looking for the play would think they cannot get it, and would pick another play from another publisher. I called Amazon to see if we could get a link directly to NTP when anyone makes such an enquiry, but they don’t do that as such. This seller account is the result. When we’re up and running and someone looks for a title they will find it says they are “available used and new from another source” - in this case NTP - and will hopefully result in sales that way. Because of the fees and the discounts Amazon demand, we are not, sadly, going to make any money from book sales per se, but, as usual, it is the performance licences we are seeking - to see your plays being performed in theatres..
Obviously we will keep a close watch on any resulting sales to see if the expense is worth the outlay. When I spoke to Amazon yesterday they told me that - even if someone had placed an order through them - they would never have bought directly from us anyway, but would have gone through a book wholesaler (e.g. Gardners, Bertrams, etc.) so it’s just possible someone has ordered some books through them, despite my previous assumptions that it had never happened.
We should be fully uploaded within a week, so watch this space.
Member news item - James McDonald
James informs us that “A collection of my plays, entitled Russia, Freaks and Foreigners, is being published by Intellect Books, price £15.00. It’s in Amazon’s catalogue as well, if you’re interested.” Congratulations James.
Member news item - Dorothy Lambert
From Dorothy: “I am delighted to tell you that I have had a play selected as one of the six winners in the Pintsizedplays comp. to be performed in a pub in the Tenby Festival in September and later in a Scriptslam at Fishguard in October. As the plays are listed anonymously I had better not tell you the title. Naturallly, at great personal expense, I shall be attending both events. No wonder playwrights never get rich!” And congratulations Dorothy!
Review - WriteItNow, by Ravenshead Services
This software is aimed specifically at writers. The suppliers tell us:-
· Write and store complete novels
· Keep background details of characters, events, locations and ideas.
· Display charts of events and relationships
· Generate characters, names and ideas
· Registered users can generate characters and background notes using add-ons
· Record all manuscript submissions
· Sample story with tutorial.
· 100,000 word spelling checker
· Auto-scale charts
· 100 step undo and redo
· RTF output. Create a neatly formatted manuscript with two key-presses
· Save and load individual characters, chapters, events, notes and ideas.
· 200,000 word thesaurus
· Events summary screen
· Tree view of all characters, events, ideas, locations and notes
Price $49.95 (USD) for a download copy or $59.95 (USD) including post + packing for a CD.
See http://www.ravensheadservices.com/index.php for more details.
This product was (potentially) sufficiently interesting for our work, so yours truly got hold of a copy and set to work evaluating that potential.
The interface (the window you see) is fairly straightforward and you need only common sense to begin writing. You enter the title and author of the piece of work and then click on the Chapters tab at the top of the screen. This is very much like any other straightforward word processor (e.g. Word, Works, WordPerfect) but without the vast array of word processing features you get with those (after all, they are many times more expensive and I guess, in many cases, the simplicity of a straightforward “typewriter” will be attractive to many of you). After all, the mainstream word processors are designed to do just that. WriteItNow has a raft of features none of those products has. If you still want to use your normal word processor you can easily paste them in.
Where WriteItNow really starts to be a powerful tool for an author is the ability to organise all those bit of information you probably have on little post-it notes or small text files on your computer.
Using different tabs at the top of the screen you are encouraged to make notes about your characters, their relationships with other characters, locations, events and ideas. Instead of holding these in lots of different files, WriteItNow holds them all together and provides the linking between the two.
The various sections (tabs), then, in fairly brief detail are:-
Overview tab
This allows you to enter the title and the author, plus the creation date, which is filled in automatically for you when you start. There is actually a button called “Generate Title”, which has a good guess based on the first few words, but in reality is probably not much use. If you can’t come up with your own titles (or at least a better one than a piece of software) , you’re in the wrong business!
Below this is an open area where you can add free text notes. In all these free-format areas you have the usual Bold, Italic, Underline and line spacing (which sets for the entire screen), and there’s a useful button for inserting international (accented) characters. Glaring omissions here are text justification buttons.
And edit menu at the top gives various features which are also available, in much the same way as Word, et al, using right click. These include the usual cut, copy and paste, find and replace, plus the ability to insert text from other parts of the book or from an external text file. There is no “import filter” for the common Word Processors, so copy and paste is your method there.
Also immediately available at the click of a mouse is a thesaurus, a spell checker, a word count (giving words in the current section and for the overall document) and a useful “readability” tool that indicates what level of, for want of a better word, literacy should be able to understand your book.
At any point in the text (and this is the same for all tabs, you can link to another part of the book, so, for example, you can link to a character profile. At the time of writing this review, I am not sure just how useful that is, but I’ll try to find out.
Chapters tab
This is where the body of your book is written. It’s organised as “chapters” and you can give each chapter its own title. There are buttons to go forward and backwards a chapter at a time, to the start or end, and to insert a new chapter. All chapters are listed in a summary window to the left and there is a tool in the options menu to sort your chapters, should you need to.
Below the heading information there is the seemingly limitless free text area to hold your text, again with the soon-to-be-familiar edit options.
Characters tab
In here you can list all your characters. Basic details at the top of the screen include Title (Mr, Mrs etc.), gender (male, female or neutral), first, middle and last names, plus a “usual name” in case this is different. In fact this is the name that your characters will be referred to in the various menus and links, so it’s a good idea to make sure they mean something to you. In addition you can add the date your character was born and they day he or she (or it!) died. Useful if one of your characters is a hermaphrodite earthworm or a tree! At the top right-hand corner you can allocate an icon from a long drop-down selection (though some look very similar to others).
The lower text window this time is split into three sub tabs, called Description, Relationships and Personality. The first is free text with the usual edit options, but the Relationships tab allows you to insert relationships with other characters in your story. When you add a new relationship it asks who the relationship is with, giving s drop-down list of the other characters, and what the relationship is. Drop down options include the expected husband, wife, so, daughter, aunt, etc. You can also add a start date and an end date if the relationship changes throughout the story. Although not ideal, it would be possible to have a woman, for example, who exists in both pre-marriage and post marriage names, using her wedding date as the relevant start and end, but WriteItNow would treat these as two totally separate character entries.
The Personality tab is quite useful in some ways. If you want to make any notes about the character’s personality, do it in the Description tab, because the Personality tab contains a set of adjustable “bar graph sliders” with headings: health, wealth, happiness, friendliness, generosity, aggression, extroversion and caring. The sliders can be adjusted to suit your character and is a useful reference point when you need to check on how your character would react to a certain set of circumstances.
Events tab
This tab has a start date and end date, plus a title. So it could cover, for example, a period of sickness, employment or a holiday - the possibilities are endless. In the popup menu, you can refine the entry down to the time and you can say which of your characters are involved in the event. Once again there’s the free text area to add notes. All events are listed in the left hand summary window.
Locations tab
A lot simpler, this one. You can give each location a title and a free text description. You could use them for anything, from places to rooms in your extended “set”.
All locations are listed in the left hand summary window.
Ideas tab
It’s always useful to have a jotter to hand to note ideas in, and that, in simple terms, is what this tab is. Once again it’s simple, with just a title and free text window. It does provide an extra option on the drop-down menu to generate an idea. Maybe you’ll find that useful - personally, I didn’t and can’t think of any way I would use it.
Notes tab
The notes section is very similar to the ideas section at first glance. When you purchase the full version, however, you have an option to create a note from Add-On. This gives a drop down list, and in the version I tried I was given a choice of “Tudor Britain” or “Ancient Egyption Gods”. When you select one of these, a further drop-down gives a host of facts around that topic, but unless a character in your play is likely to base a decision on “Everyone had to attend an Anglican service once a month. The service was referred to as the Prayer Service, or the Prayer Book Service, and sometimes as Common Prayer.” then I doubt you’ll get much use from it.
Charts tab
Now this could be really useful. Items entered on the Events tab are represented here in timeline format, which should enable you to see who did what to whom and when, and - perhaps more importantly in a play script - who knew what/whom and when. Click on an event and it will take you to the entry in the events tab. It’s a pity they didn’t take the extra step and make it so you could drag the timing of events using the timeline, because that would let you manager what overlaps what (or not) in terms of time.
Submissions tab
This is a useful log of who you have sent your manuscript to and when, plus any results and any payments involved.
Help
Some help is provided for all areas of the programme, and there are sets of useful tips to give you ideas. In addition, the product comes with a sample book (Alice) so you can see how things can be done.
Finished script
The finished script can be output to a Rich Text Format (RTF) file, which can be read by most word processors, including ours.
The Use of WriteItNow for Stage Plays
The suppliers/designers of the software claim it’s for writing novels, and therefore it is geared that way, but this could be just the thing you’re looking for when you’re writing plays.
It won’t take away the job of actually writing the play in any way, but we have a few suggestions for making that easier. It won’t especially help with submissions, at least not to us.
What it could do for you is to make the whole writing experience more complete and better organised. I have no doubt that you will find your own uses for such software, should you decide to buy, but we have the following suggestions:-
1. On the Overview tab, you can enter the title and your name; below that, in the free text area, you can put the details we need for the cover and catalogue.
2. In the chapter pages, you can use the first for the cast details, production notes, etc., one additional “chapter” for each scene and one or more at the end for props, lighting and effects.
4. You can better plan your play by using the character profiles, events and locations.
5. You can use the timeline to validate the sequence of events - especially useful for a thriller.