By YARDENA ARAR
c.1995 Los Angeles Daily News
LOS ANGELES - For years, story-writing software was considered a
niche-market product that could only sell in Hollywood. Then Cary
Brown of Collaborator Systems persuaded his local Tower Books to stock
the $99 ``story tool.''
Six months later, Collaborator has become the Sherman Oaks store's
biggest money-maker and Tower stores in a dozen major cities are now
offering it to an eager population of writer-wanna-bes.
``We currently are selling as many a month as we did a year, a year
ago,'' Brown said. ``Tower has become our best customer.''
Collaborator, which has been selling about 4,000 units a year, is one
of several software packages developed in Los Angeles that promise to
help writers create fiction by identifying and organizing elements
such as character, conflict and plot development.
Others include the best-selling Dramatica Pro and Writers Dream Kit
from Screenplay Systems Inc. of Burbank, Plots Unlimited from
Malibu-based Ashley Wilde Publishers and West Los Angeles
screenwriting guru John Truby's Storyline Pro.
``They call them scripting tools, but they're really story tools,''
said Gabriele Meiringer of The Writers Computer Store, for years the
only retail outlet for these products, as well as script-formatting
software such as Screenplay System's Scriptor, and Script Wizard from
Glendale-based Stefani Warren and Associates.
A West Los Angeles fixture since 1982, The Writers Computer Store
opened a second store in Sausalito, Calif. two years ago and is
looking into a New York location to cater to a growing number of
computer-savvy aspiring writers.
``We have an incredible amount of new customers coming to us every day
to see what's out there,'' Meiringer said.
The screenwriting bug appears to be spreading internationally. Bob
Koster of Tarzana, a reseller for all of the major screenwriting
packages, says his StarComp business has mushroomed since he put up a
World Wide Web site ( [4]http://www.leonardo.net/starcomp ).
``I just sent a couple of copies of Dramatica to Madrid,'' he said.
``They don't even speak English, and they want it. I've sent software
to Australia and Japan. ... It's definitely in the dozens per week,
and it's growing.''
Most of the new buyers are not professional writers. A 1993 Writers
Guild survey of 500 members found that while 80 percent wrote on
computers, only about 45 percent of them used any specialized
software. Those who did were using formatting tools, with Scriptor
being the most popular.
Formatting software deals only with elements affecting a document's
appearance - margins, the way a character's name is displayed and so
forth. It does not affect content.
Several developers are in a race to produce the first stand-alone
Windows script word processor. Right now, the only Windows product in
this area is Warren's Script Wizard, which is an add-on to Microsoft
Word for Windows.
Brown, one of three struggling writers who first released Collaborator
eight years ago, said it has taken a long time to break into the mass
market. In fact, he left the company for a few years because the
income generated by Collaborator's sales - mostly though The Writers
Computer Store and Writers Digest - could not support all three
co-creators.
``We were totally tied to writers, but we were looking to broaden
this,'' he said.
Lowering the price from $329 and adding a novel module to draw
would-be romance authors helped, but Collaborator's big break came
when Brown walked into the Tower Books near his home and looked
around.
``I saw a stack of books on how to pick a lock, divorce your wife,
cheat the police. ... I thought, this is perfect information for a
writer. If they can sell this, they could sell Collaborator.''
It took Brown a few weeks to convince store manager Craig Escalante to
accept the product on consignment.
``We're in an area with a lot of writers, producers and
screenwriters,'' Escalante said. ``It was kind of a no-risk for us,
because he brought it in on consignment. We took 10 each of Mac and
IBM to start with, and we started out just putting it in with other
software - encyclopedias and stuff like that.
``Then we tried cross-merchandising it over in the screenwriting
section with the books, and that's where it really started taking
off.''
With Collaborator's assistance, Escalante promoted the product with a
demonstration box at the checkout counter, a poster in the store
window and a cardboard display box. Tower's sister video store also
offered purchasers of Collaborator free rentals of the five films
analyzed in the package, including ``Pulp Fiction,'' ``Quiz Show'' and
``It's a Wonderful Life.''
Escalante estimates he has sold 50 copies of the product since the
spring. That may not sound like much, but the $99 price tag means a
much greater per-unit profit than the typical book - and ``I don't
know that we've sold 50 copies of any book, except maybe Howard
Stern.''
Tower Books marketing director Jack Lamplough said the Sherman Oaks
experiment was enough to earn Collaborator a larger trial.
``We figured if it could do 50 in that one store, it could do more in
the whole chain. We picked it up, and it's been doing well ever
since,'' he said.
In the past month, Tower shipped Collaborator to about a dozen stories
in major cities nationwide. ``We think that's where aspiring writers
would be centered,'' Lamplough said.
Collaborator, which in its third version fits on two 3{-inch diskettes
(a third includes the sample analyses of ``Pulp Fiction,'' ``Forrest
Gump,'' ``Quiz Show'' and ``The Shawshank Redemption'') is by far the
cheapest of the story software packages on the market.
The user is guided though a series of questions that Brown and his
partners, Francis Feighan and Lou Garfinkel developed based on
Aristotle's principles of drama and their own experience.
``It helps you organize your thoughts and thought patterns,'' Brown
said. ``It does not write a word.''
Dramatica Pro, which since its initial release 18 months ago has
become the top-selling product of its kind, offers more elaborate and
detailed guidance for a heftier price. The package - three diskettes,
an instructional audio cassette, a fat user's manual and an even
fatter textbook - lists for $399, but Screenplay Systems President
Steven Greenfield says it's usually available for around $300.
``We haven't been trying to target the wanna-be writers. We've been
going as high as we can to target the Hollywood writers,'' Greenfield
said.
For beginners, he added, the recently released Writer's Dreamkit
(originally called Dramatica Lite) has many of the same features for a
list price of $149, with the actual retail hovering around $100,
Greenfield said.
``Dramatica is a theory of story,'' he said. ``We don't come from a
Hollywood-centric point of view. It's fundamentally a broad-based kind
of tool.''
Story software is a relatively new addition to Screenplay Systems'
product line. Greenfield and a University of Southern California
classmate, Chris Huntley, launched the company in early 1983 with
Scriptor, a formatting program that last year received a technical
achievement award from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and
Sciences.
Screenplay Systems' production software - Movie Magic Budgeting,
released in 1985, and Movie Magic Scheduling, released a couple of
years later - is used in 90 percent of all Hollywood films and TV
shows, Greenfield said. Screenplay Systems now employs more than 30
people who work out of the company's Burbank offices.
In addition to advertisements in Writers Digest - a principal source
of business for all of the story software packages - Dramatica is
marketed at specialty stores, including Book City in Hollywood.
``We're just starting the process of trying to convince the big chains
that we should be on their shelf,'' Greenfield said.
``Murder, She Wrote'' writer-producer Tom Sawyer, who created Plots
Unlimited, said he hasn't even tried to push it in mass-market
outlets.
Plots Unlimited offers about 5,600 different plot segment ideas that
are linked to each other in various ways. You tell it what kind of
story you want to create and it offers you a number of options.
``It's really an idea jogger,'' said Sawyer, who says about 4,000
copies of Plots Unlimited sell each year, mostly through ads in
Writers Digest.
Storyline Pro, with a list price of $295 and a street price around
$265, is an interactive version of Truby's popular screenwriting
course. ``It's America's foremost coach,'' said Jim Woodson, Truby's
office manager.
The program guides the user through 22 story ``building blocks'' with
a series of questions, along with advice on how to avoid common
pitfalls.
Storyline Pro is distributed primarily through mail order and Truby's
newsletter, but has also been ordered by selected retail stores in
cities around the world.
``We're getting into student stores at colleges,'' Woodson said.
Writer's Blocks, a Windows program from Ashley Software in Mission
Viejo, and 3 By 5 from MacToolkit in Santa Monica allow users to
create and manipulate virtual index cards with story elements. The
MacToolkit program, for Macintosh only, lets you include graphics and
sound bites.
Users of story software say that while there's no substitute for
imagination, the programs help them organize their thoughts.
``I write alone, and especially when you write alone you tend to
become so absorbed in what you're writing that you start missing
things,'' said Carl Weaver, an unproduced writer from La Crescenta.
``That's when I find Dramatica to be the most helpful. ... It takes a
look at a story in a different way than I have ever done before, and
I've been writing for 15 years.''
``If you're a writer, you have it in you. But sometimes it helps to
have a jumping off point,'' said Collaborator user Serita Stevens, a
nurse who has written 26 books, including a number of series mysteries
under pen names.
Brown said the market for Collaborator and similar programs is just
beginning to take off.
He noted that Writers Digest has a readership of 3 million that is
constantly changing. ``Fifty percent of those use computers, so that's
a possible 1.5 million possible customers - and that's only the people
who read Writers Digest.''
NYT-12-25-95 0954EST