Bill Donovan

Bill Donovan was once an aspiring screenwriter. While earning a master’s degree in film production and screenwriting from the University of Southern California, he won three student screenwriting contests.

Those wins helped him get agents twice, but none of his work was sold. However, that experience helped bring about his “Be That One In A Hundred” screenwriting book series: he made several of the mistakes covered in the first book. The second book in the series, expanding on chapter 8 of the first book on marketing oneself as a screenwriter, is being written.

From 2007 to 2012, he was the publisher of Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and served as its editor for two years. He was also the executive producer of the Screenwriting Expo from 2007 to 2011, supervised 10 screenplay contests, and personally produced 10 of the company’s 60 educational DVDs for screenwriters.

Since 2012, he has run Screenwritingcommunity.net, offering his screenwriting books as well as proofreading and story comments to screenwriters and advertising opportunities to people and businesses selling services and products to screenwriters.

In his work, he has come into contact with thousands of screenwriting hopefuls, more than two dozen Oscar winners and writers of Hollywood blockbusters, and nearly a hundred produced screenwriters in all.

His “Be That One In A Hundred” book and the coming sequel on self-marketing arise from the sum of those experiences and his research on what causes most aspiring screenwriters to fail.

His credentials as a researcher include more than three decades working as a reporter and editor for daily newspapers, the Associated Press, and business news publications, where he won or shared five national business journalism awards.