Life on the Bubble: Spec Market Roundup — November 2009
The most recent round-up from Jason Scoggins at LifeOnTheBubble.com:
Here’s the cliché you knew was coming: Not with a bang but a whimper.
As usual, the 2009 Spec Market effectively ended as of the week of Thanksgiving. (There will be a few intrepid souls who take scripts out between now and Sundance 2010 — as of this writing there are three in the marketplace for the week of November 30 — but conventional wisdom says all thoughts of buying have been banished by visions of sugar plums and the Wailea Four Seasons.) November’s numbers were on par with what we’ve come to expect from this discouraging year:
- 17 new specs hit the market, 3 of which sold
- 14 of the 17 went out wide, none of which sold
- 2 scripts from the ancient past (in spec market terms) also sold
It’s safe to say the fork has been well stuck in the tactic of taking a spec out wide. The ratio for the year to date is 18 sales out of 369 scripts (5%), but that’s front-loaded by the numbers from January through April (15 sales out of 195 scripts, or 7.69%). Since May 1, just 3 out of the 174 scripts that went wide have sold (1.72%). I’ll update the stat in my year-end reports and continue to track it in 2010, but I’ll stop commenting until it becomes a “Man Bites Dog” story again.
If you haven’t bookmarked Life On the Bubble, you should. Jason and cohorts have also recently launched It’s On the Grid, an excellent source of information about the spec and OWA (Open Writing Assignment) market. I’ll be doing a feature on that site in the next week or so.