How to Get a Play Published

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Laura and today I'm going to talk with you about how to get a play published. In America today, it is not an extremely good climate for publishing plays. If you go to your everyday Barnes and Noble, you're going to find a drama section that is maybe two columns in length, or probably one, actually one column is for Shakespeare, the other column is for plays. So, there's not a huge market for people buying plays just to read them. People will buy copies of plays in order to produce them. And, in order for you to get published and to sell like that, your play is going to have to be widely, widely produced. So, the first thing you probably need to do, or to get published is to get produced, and then once your play has sort of taken off, then it might be a candidate for getting published and going to national markets. You're not going to see plays that are doing well in just one city. Get published all over the United States and the same goes with you know, novels and things like that. But, there is a bigger market for novels to be read, plays just tend to get produced and read, and often read and produced for no money to a playwright. So, think about that, as you're thinking about getting published. So what you should probably really be thinking is just getting produced. But, you can also self publish your own play, usually, the way to go. Whenever you want to see your play actually published, and that's something that you can do. And, make sure, when you do that, make sure that you edit the play before publishing it, and include all of your copyright and fair use information with it, so that nothing bad happens with those copies. But, definitely self publish and sell to your friends, and help people to do your plays by getting it out there in that format so that they can be done. So, really the point of publishing a play is not for people to read it, but for people to put it on. So, good luck with publishing your play."