The Scriptnotes Book is out today!

Our Big Orange Book is finally available in bookstores around the world today. We’ve gotten a ton of preorders and some terrific reviews. “Bound to be a staple, this guide, just like the podcast, is accessible, engaging, and informative” – Booklist “August and Mazin’s volume stands out for its wealth of real-life examples taken from […]

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Three Page Challenge Live in Austin 2025

John and Craig gather a congregation of writers in St. David’s Episcopal Church for a live round of the Three Page Challenge. They look at three listener-submitted scripts to offer them their honest feedback, face-to-face. They offer suggestions on world building in the apocalypse, making military characters specific, building mystery and suspense, and crafting con-artist […]

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Happy Giving Tuesday! Consider Supporting Authors Alliance

This past year, Authors Alliance continued to work to ensure that the voices of authors who write to advance the […]

New Whitepaper: A Thorny Question In Copyright

We’re very happy to announce the release of the third white paper in our Legal Pathways to Open Access series! […]

Your First Produced Film

John welcomes Danya Jimenez & Hannah McMechan, the writing team behind KPop Demon Hunters, to chart their path from film school to first feature. They look at navigating early career difficulties like finding your voice and trying to get reps, their method of building a writing partnership, and how a bad pitch led them to […]

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The Public Interest Corpus Update – Oakland Edition

The Public Interest Corpus recently completed the last of three planning workshops. The final workshop was hosted at the University […]

Suno, Yout, Perplexity AI and §1201: AI Training and another piece of the DMCA

“No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.” 17 U.S.C. […]

Big Ten Open Books: An Interview with Kate McCready (BTAA) and Charles Watkinson (UM)

Authors Alliance has had a longstanding interest in helping authors see their older books reinvigorated with new life by making them available online for free on an open access basis. One of the most exciting initiatives working on OA for backlist books is the Big Ten Open Books program. This post is based on a set of questions I posed to Kate McCready (Program Director for Open Publishing, Center for Library Programs at the Big Ten Academic Alliance) and Charles Watkinson (Director of University of Michigan Press and Associate University Librarian for Publishing at the University of Michigan) about what the program is and how it works.

Scriptnotes, Episode 712: Something Wicked This Way Comes, Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hey, this is John. Standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids: there’s some swearing in this episode. [music] John: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: You’re listening to […]

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Something Wicked This Way Comes

John and Craig welcome back Dana Fox (Wicked, The Lost City) for a magical flight through everything that went into adapting Wicked and its upcoming sequel, Wicked: For Good. They look at the history of the project, why it was split into two movies, the process for writing when you’re shooting two movies at the […]

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Scriptnotes, Episode 711: The State of Pitching, Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hey, this is John. Standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode. Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 711 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and […]

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Scriptnotes, Episode 710: What Happened To Weird?, Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: Whoa, my name is Craig Mazin. John: You’re listening to episode 710 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, Craig, whatever happened […]

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Scriptnotes, Episode 709: Live at the Austin Film Festival 2025, Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here. [music] [applause] Craig Mazin: Are you guys being paid for this? John August: I’m going to say, bringing in the warm-up act to get them in the mood, that was really good. It was worth all the hundreds of dollars. Craig: Yes. Wow. John: That […]

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Getting Stuff Written

When we turned in the first draft of the Scriptnotes book in late 2023, it was over 600 pages long. Over the following two years, we continually edited it down until it was only the very best stuff — but in order to do so, we had to make some painful cuts. One was a […]

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The State of Pitching

John welcomes back Aline Brosh McKenna (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, The Devil Wears Prada) to ask, what do executives expect from a pitch these days? They look at the typical structure of a pitch deck, how that differs from lookbooks, how pitches have evolved over the years, and best practices for pitching on Zoom. Also, what happened […]

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