We will soon have a horror movie "in the can" we are shooting on DV. We feel we may have to go it alone in selling copies of the completed project. Some of the methods I have heard of are:

1) Setting up a telemarketing room to contact mom-and-pop video stores

2) classified ads in monster mags (i.e., "Fangoria)

3) "Monster" and "Horror" trade shows

4) Internet

if anyone has any experiences in any of the above methods, or can recommend any others, please post.

-- Mark Curran (dvfeature@freedomnet2.com), June 21, 1999

Answers

As far as the internet goes, check out Amazon.com as they are now allowing people to sell their own self-published books, music CD's and VHS tapes (indie films!!!)

Basically, they will set up a webpage for you with your cover art, reviews, synopsis, etc., just like they do for their books. You send them 5 VHS copies to start it all off. Upon selling them out they will e-mail you to send more to their distribution warehouse. I don't know how they figure the revenue split but it could be a venue for some folks who can market to those millions of "Amazon eyeballs"

Check their website for the details.

Joe :-)

-- Joe Anderson (joebiz@msn.com), August 14, 1999.

I think your best bet for your money would be a direct-mail campaign that targets both the independent video retailer and the buyers of the major chains. Your chances of capturing business will be greater when you have specifically targeted who your customers are and what price-point they will be willing to pay. Then you contract a fulfillment house to ship your product or you do it yourself & work like a dog but save $. The Amazon route sounds good but you are limited to people who are both owners of a computer AND web savvy. Also, they don't know that you are selling anything over the internet unless you tell them or they stumble onto it themselves while visiting Amazon's site. Advertising in print and securing a booth at a trade show is prohibitively expensive and it does not give you access to your core customer. In my opinion, money spent on anything but direct-mail at this level is money wasted. You could easily finance another movie with what you would spend trying to market the first one. I would like to create a consortium of independent DV filmmakers that combine their limited financial resources for the purpose of packaging and distributing their films to the major outlets. We can do more together th

-- Jeff Coatney (jcoatney@aol.com), September 20, 1999.

JCoatney,

It's another approach to consider, but consider this: to reach 10,000 retailers, at a cost of about $.50 a piece, and a 1% return on the mailing, it would cost $5000 to sell 100 tapes. If you sold the tapes for $30, you'd go in the hole $2000! You could sell the tape for $50, I suppose, and hope for a 2% return, but still, the profit margin is way too low to make this method very attractive. Plus, wouldn't most retailers just throw this in the trash?

-- Mark Curran (dvfeature@freedomnet2.com), September 20, 1999.