Spec Script Market Analysis: Genre

One of the available Go Into The Story resources is The Definitive Spec Script Sales List (1991–2012), what I think is an invaluable database for research and analysis. As an example, earlier this year Susana Orozco, a loyal blog follower, went through all of those spec script sales to see how many were written by men and how many written by women. I did a post here, including the infographic below and that went viral in a big way, hopefully contributing to the conversation about diversity in Hollywood, at least on the writing front.

Now I think it’s time to dip into the database again to do something that could be quite helpful to writers: Track the sales of spec scripts each year from 1991 through the present in terms of their genres.

What can we learn? I have already done the breakdown for 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 and if you compare 2008 to 2012, we learn that Action and Thriller were #1 and #2 (respectively) in terms of sales last year, which is a marked change from 2008 in which Comedy far outdistanced every other genre, over three times the number of Thriller sales. So if you are a writer who chooses to track market trends (not that you have to), perhaps that could influence your decision between writing this story or that one.

Beyond that, I think it would be interesting to see genre trends in spec sales over the years.

So here’s my thought: Are there folks out there who would be willing to go through the 1991–2007 database and aggregate sales by genre per each year? One person? Two or more people to divide the task?

I would expect we would put together another infographic and I would include your name(s) in related blog posts.

If you are interested, please post something in comments. Or drop me an email.

There is another type of analysis I’d like to see happen, but that can wait until 2014. For now, let’s focus on genre.

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