Summer Time and the Living Is Easy or What to Do in the Entertainment Industry When the Phone Stops Ringing
July 7, 2010
The Fourth of July usually means barbeques, beer and fireworks. For Hollywood it also usually means the slow down of the feature film business. Phones stop ringing, specs stop going out, and people start going on vacation.
Does that mean that you have to spend the next two months twiddling your thumbs? No! It means you have two solid months where you can spend your time and energy on things that you could never do while the phone rings every two seconds.
My two favorite activities that I like to do in these summer months are:
* Diversify
* Be creative
By diversify what I mean is I like to spend these summer months looking into arenas that I haven’t explored before and want to have better knowledge about.
For example, when my business partner and I started Tom Sawyer Entertainment, we spent the summer months learning everything about the TV business since we came from the feature world. Now we do almost 1/2 of our business in the TV world and several of our clients are staffed on TV shows.
A couple years ago we spent the summer learning all about the book world. Now we have sold seven books so far and are working on two more book deals.
There is always some segment of the entertainment business of which you could grow your knowledge, and the summer is the perfect time to do that.
By being creative what I mean is having the time to go through all those articles, ideas and scraps of stories that I have kept in a folder while I wait for some peace and quiet to sort through these.
My business partner and I will take an afternoon and read through everything in this folder and see what we want to develop for the next year.
Or being creative means finally having the time to work on my website, blogs, etc. For anything that takes creativity and the time to do it right — the summer is the perfect time for it!
