Last week, I urged Final Draft to release a free converter app to let screenwriters move their old-and-busted .fdr files to the newer .fdx format.

A reader wrote in to say that Final Draft already has one. Sort of.

The evaluation version of Final Draft 8 — which supports both .fdr and .fdx — is free on the Final Draft website.

You can open an .fdr file, then save it as .fdx. The problem is, the evaluation version is limited to 15 pages.

Mac Harwood has a solution:

1. Select the menu Format > Elements to bring up the Elements dialog box.
2. In the Font tab, select ‘Set Font’ and change the font size to ’1′.
3. Then press Apply Font/Size to all elements.
4. In the Paragraph tab, set ‘Space before’ to be 0, and then do the same for each element.

Now the 200 page epic will only be a few pages, which you can save with the evaluation version.

This works, but the resulting file is a mess of tiny letters. His fix:

Just open up the created .fdx file in your favourite text editor (I use Notepad++) and do a search and replace for all occurrences of “Size=1″ to a blank. Then save.

This workflow could save your life if you were stuck somewhere with an .fdr file and no way to open it, but it’s hardly a practical solution for screenwriters staring at folders full of old files. ¹

Erik Harrison offers a possible explanation for why a Final Draft converter isn’t forthcoming:

There probably ISN’T a file format [for .fdr]. It’s likely just a binary dump of the state of internal memory at the time of save. Certainly that was true of a lot of word processors I used in the old day, and even still is true for Word in some senses.

If that’s the case, it helps explain why the new iPad app doesn’t support .fdr. In order to support the old format, the app would have to duplicate way too much of the full Final Draft.

1. If someone out there finds a way to automate this crazy workflow, let me know. ↩

Last week, I ran an experiment to see what would happen if I took one of my existing Kindle titles and made it free for three days.

Snake People got a lot of downloads. Over the three days, it “sold” 654 times. It climbed the charts, topping out at #7 on Kindle’s free short stories list.

Since returning to its normal price of 99 cents on Saturday, it sold seven more copies. It no longer shows up on any of the best-seller charts. In no way did it catch fire.

However, if you compare those seven copies to how many it would have sold in a normal week — 2.2 copies on average — the free promo seemed to at least bump the needle. There was also a fair amount of spillover to my other Kindle title (The Variant), which sold 13 copies, up from its average of five.

In another week or two, I suspect Snake People numbers will be back where they were before the promo. I’ll post another update if I’m wrong.

So, was going free worth it? Hard to say.

It certainly increased sampling, and it was gratifying to see readers tweet about it, particularly those who stumbled across it on the best-seller chart and took a chance. I strongly doubt it cost me any buyers; the people who got it free hadn’t been holding off, waiting for a sale.

In the end, I’m hesitant to even label this an experiment because the numbers are so sketchy. I’d hoped to provide a graph showing how many copies were sold based on which spot it reached on the best-seller list, but I can’t. Amazon’s sales figures are maddeningly murky. You can’t be sure how often they’re updated, so any correlation is suspect.

As Snake People was rising on the best-sellers chart, the dashboard report would only show five more copies had sold. An hour later, 100 more sales showed up. Were those additional sales the cause or effect of moving higher in the best-sellers chart? There’s no way to know.

Most writers are probably better off writing new stuff than spending a lot of time gaming the Kindle publishing platform. That said, the spillover effect from one free title to other paid titles probably merits some attention, particularly for authors with many titles available for sale. If I had 15 books for sale on Kindle, rotating free sales periods among them would be a way to increase exposure and probably bring in new paying readers.

I’ve written several times about my experiments with self-publishing on the Kindle, mostly concerning my short story The Variant, which briefly hit #18 on the overall bestsellers list.

Overall, I found Amazon’s ebook tools satisfactory, but the price structure was frustrating:

Amazon doesn’t distinguish between free and paid content on their Kindle bestseller list. In fact, 19 out of the top 50 books are free. There’s nothing wrong with free, but it’s a semantic and tactical mistake to include them on a “bestseller” list.

They’ve fixed that.

Free books are now listed separately, and with the introduction of the KDP Select program, self-publishers can finally price a title as free for up to five days. (Before this, only major publishers could set the price at zero.)

After reading David Kazzie’s post about his experience with KDP Select, I decided to try it out on another one of my short stories, Snake People, which had gotten nice reviews but never achieved the traction of The Variant.

To enter KDP Select, you have to promise that the title isn’t available for sale anywhere other than Amazon. Unlike The Variant, I wasn’t selling Snake People as a PDF, so there was nothing to take down.

Dropping the price is handled through a pop-up box called the Promotions Manager. The only option listed for me was “free book,” but the system seems to be designed for more-extensive campaigns. You’re allowed to be free for up to five days total, divided however you want.

Snake People went free yesterday (February 1st), and as of this writing sits at #20 on Kindle’s free short stories list, with 75 copies “sold” in the last 24 hours.

The list is everything

From our experience with Bronson Watermarker, we’ve learned that where you fall on the lists has a huge impact on sales. The higher you’re ranked, the more people see you. The more you’re seen, the more you’re purchased. Winners keep winning.

The pure ranking matters, but even more important is where the page breaks.

For Bronson, we made the front page of the Mac App Store in the “New and Notable” section. For the two weeks we were there, our sales were ten times normal. Once we fell to the second page of “New and Notable,” we quickly regressed to the mean.

I realize that writing about Snake People while the experiment is still running will inevitably corrupt the data. Some readers will click and buy it because hey, it’s free.

And that’s okay. I mostly want more data to answer correlation questions: If 75 copies lands a title at #20, how many copies is the #1 short story “selling?”

In my initial experiments with The Variant, I was able to estimate how much Stephanie Meyer was bringing in off of her Twilight books. (A lot.) I’m curious what the numbers mean in Kindle’s new free ecosystem.

So if you haven’t checked out Snake People, go get it before the promotion ends on Friday. I’ll publish a follow-up on Monday with numbers.

When I criticized Rob Ager’s analysis of spatial impossibilities in The Shining, I didn’t realize the extent of wild theories about Kubrick’s film:

“Room 237,” the first full-length documentary by the director Rodney Ascher, examines several of the most intriguing of these theories. It’s really about the Holocaust, one interviewee says, and Mr. Kubrick’s inability to address the horrors of the Final Solution on film. No, it’s about a different genocide, that of American Indians, another says, pointing to all the tribal-theme items adorning the Overlook Hotel’s walls. A third claims it’s really Kubrick’s veiled confession that he helped NASA fake the Apollo Moon landings.

Of course, we’ll never know Kubrick’s true intentions, because he’s dead.

Unless he isn’t.

Jeremy Dylan doesn’t share my zeal for renting movies:

In a recent episode, August and Mazin presaged a dystopian future in which entertainment exists only in an ethereal online space and nobody owns anything. Apparently, we are marching inexorably towards this brave new world and any attempts to halt the approach would be futile.

I like owning things. I own The Philadelphia Story. I own all seven seasons of The West Wing. I own The Last Waltz. I paid a one-off charge at a store at some point, and in exchange, I own these things. I can watch them as often as I feel like, whenever I feel like, in perpetuity, and it costs me nothing further. I don’t need to be connected to the internet to do so. And no one can take away my ability to watch it. If I come across someone who’s never seen The West Wing (seriously?), then I can lend them my copy. While they have it, I can’t watch it, which is only fair. If they get bitten by the Sorkin bug, they can trot off and buy their own copies, and enjoy the associated privileges I listed above.

Valid points, every one of them.

I think one reason DVDs (and Blu-rays) have been so successful is that they hit a sweet spot of being cheap enough and small enough that you can afford to keep an extensive collection in a normal-sized apartment. If, at two in the morning, you suddenly have a jones for the second season of 24, you can pull out the discs and start watching.

That is, as long as you’re at your apartment. If you’re in a hotel room in New York with your iPad, the ability to get that through streaming is much more appealing.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been travelling so much — or because I’m going through a general discardia phase — but I’m much happier to not own things. If a book is the same price in hardback or on Kindle, I’ll always take the Kindle edition.

With movies, yes, there’s the risk that I won’t be able to watch what I want when I want it. But that’s my argument for more pervasive licensing and rights-packaging. With HBO Go, I can watch that episode where David gets carjacked and confirm that oh shit, yeah, that was insane. It’s like having all the DVDs to all the seasons of all the HBO shows, and I’m happy to pay for access to it.

But that’s me. I rarely re-watch movies. I rarely re-read books. For folks wired the other way — which I suspect is a sizable majority — ownership of atoms makes a lot of sense. I think we’ll continue to have ways to buy physical books and movies. It’s not either/or.

Responding to our podcast Zen and the Angst of Kaufman, reader Scott argues that Charlie Kaufman is in fact thinking of the audience:

He’s just like you. He’s trying to write movies that HE would want to sit in a theater and watch. But what he likes to watch is something true, not something he’s seen before in a slightly different form. We may not be entertained by this, either because our culture has trained us that a movie should be a certain way, or because we simply like different things than Charlie Kaufman likes (because everyone’s different).

He’s putting himself in the theater seats as he writes, as we writers should, but he’s asking us to be a more critical audience of ourselves than real audiences actually are.

We’re conflating two points here. I think both are valid, but they shouldn’t be confused:

1. Screenwriters should write movies they themselves want to see.
2. Screenwriters should consider the point-of-view of the audience.

Violate the first rule, and you have hacky trash.

Violate the second rule, and you have solipsistic indulgence.

Kaufman is clearly writing movies he wants to see. That’s good. But if another screenwriter loves horror movies and wants to see more movies like Halloween, his intentions should be considered just as pure despite being more commercial.

Scott feels Kaufman knows what “real audiences” are like, but holds himself to a higher standard. Okay. But if this higher standard makes the screenwriter’s work inaccessible or uninteresting to an audience — or at least, a large chunk of the audience — I don’t think it’s fair to put all the blame at the feet of “the system.”

In his BAFTA speech, Kaufman isn’t complaining as much as explaining (or exploring) why he feels compelled to write the movies he writes, and the resulting frustration.

Scott continues:

The Hollywood model panders to the universal truths that we already know are universal, because that will translate to the largest demographic and therefore the largest box office. What’s funny to me is that one fairly common “truth” sold by many of these films is that “money isn’t everything” (or some variation thereof). Yet the person (or committee) who wrote the script, the people who greenlit it, the people they hired to make it, and the people marketing it are solely concerned with it making the most amount of money possible.

Agreed. It’s likely because the credit-slash-blame for movies is shared among so many people that this thematic hypocrisy goes unnoticed.