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ShowbizU: Publishing the Best Seller "Story"- Robert McKee and Tim Kashani

Name: ShowbizU: Publishing the Best Seller "Story"- Robert McKee and Tim Kashani
Uploaded: 2014-07-22T18:35:08+00:00
Duration: 3 min 1 s
Channel: Tim Kashani
Description: In this interview excerpt, interviewer Tim Kashani asks screenwriting guru Robert McKee about his bestselling book Story. McKee explains that the book…

22 Jul 2014 · 3 min

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In this interview excerpt, interviewer Tim Kashani asks screenwriting guru Robert McKee about his bestselling book Story. McKee explains that the book grew out of a decade of intensive seminars, and that he felt ready to write it after hearing virtually every question students asked over the years. He credits publisher Judith Regan—described as the "queen of bestsellers"—for making an irresistible offer and positioning the book as a backlist title. McKee notes that the original lecture series was 24 hours (three days) and has since expanded to a 32‑hour, four‑day course, prompting plans for a second edition. He also highlights the book’s remarkable commercial longevity: fifteen years after release it remains in the top 0.1 % of Amazon sales, consistently serving as a go‑to resource for new writers. Overall, McKee had a strong expectation of success, based on his extensive teaching experience and Regan’s publishing expertise.

Chapters

You have obviously written a— I'll grab it. Well, you don't see it, but I'm going to put it up for our audience— a very well-known book. When you wrote that book, did you have any idea what it was going to do to your life?
Yes, yes, because the book is based on the seminars. And I had been doing the seminars for about 10 years, and, and then Judith Regan came to me. And, you know, if you know Judith Regan, she's the, the, the queen of the bestsellers. And other publishers had been chasing me for years, but finally she made me an offer I couldn't refuse, as they say. And I told her that I felt I was ready to write the book because I had heard essentially every question askable in the context of my lectures. And in fact, I had built many new sections into the lectures to answer those questions that were repeated again and again, year after year. And so I thought I'd heard just about every possible question, so— and I had found answers to those questions. And so it was time to write the book. And so I knew that the book would be an encapsulation of the key ideas from the lectures. There's much more in the lectures than there is in the book, of course, but the lectures are now 32 hours long. In fact, the lectures from which I wrote the book were 3 days, 24 hours. The course is now 4 days and 32 hours, and so it's really time to write story 2 to bring all that up to date. But yeah, I had a pretty good idea that the book would do well. I mean, Judith Regan was my publisher, and she knows what she's doing. And she said, you know, this will be a backlisted book. And indeed, what, it's 15 years later, it's still in the upper 1/10 of 1% of all books sold at amazon.com. And so every new generation, every new year, every year, new writers come into the world wanting to write, and the book they have to have next to their keyboard is story. And so It sells at the same clip now that it has sold since the beginning. It's been always about the same, and it's always up there near the top and/or at the top. So the answer is yeah, I had a pretty good idea that it would be a success.