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To sell a movie is not an easy task for a new studio in the block or a low-budget film-maker. It is also one of reasons that may stop people from actually publishing or even creating their own movies. You create it, edit it, author it and then what?
There are few ways we can approach selling of the DVD
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Let others deal with it for a fee |
The first approach is where one will change from creator to a traveling salesman and run with a box full of DVD's around the towns. Don't get me wrong. It is a doable option for a very small local release and if one has no other job to do. In fact you have a great chance to sell a number of copies around your town, province or even nationwide. I don't suggest to start offering the DVD to strangers on the street, but you may go to different local CD and Video stores to offer few copies. Then - the golden source of Traveling Salesman income - regularly visit a local convention. It doesn't matter what convention in fact. People will buy a locally created film even if you offer it on Penguin Sweater Knitting Convention. There is some convention every weekend in every large city.
I remember meeting a local film maker at a Collectibles Show event who was selling his home made horror movies. It didn't matter that other people were selling a hockey cards there. He told me that every week he goes to various horror or sci-fi related conventions around the province and if none then to any other show or local convention. And he live from the sales. He was selling his DVD for $10. I will not comment on the movies, except saying that ten bucks seemed to be a lot of money for his movies. But they were replicated, shrink wrapped and with UPC.
Also don't be shy to organize local screenings in libraries and clubs. Most of them will likely support local artist and then you can offer to sell the movie(s) on DVD after the event.
Of course, I have other things to do as any of the show creators, so this Traveling Salesman option is unacceptable. Hey, we are professional amateurs!
The second option is the one that works for every other studio and many film-makers. It is using distributors to sell your DVD. Here is the trouble - a very small release will often consume the whole revenue by using this option. You have to sell far more copies to roll over the "break even" point. You have to pay for shipping and insurance to distribution centers and they may not take any large quantities at first. That is a problem if you don't yet know the "ropes".
There are distributor and secondary distributors. Many secondary distributors are in fact far from being secondary, as the DVD they sell came through more than two hands. Such secondary distributor will often take a very small amount of stock (1-2 units). Your aim is to find the big distributor that would purchase a large(r) quantities of your units at once. That require some hard research. Remember when using google, you know a big distributor from the crowd because it doesn't have any e-commerce on his web site - you can't buy anything from them directly. They are strictly B2B. (They may however have different companies that sells to the consumers.) Another indicator is that because B2B distributor has very little to offer to millions of web browsing buyers their web page will have a low rank (and that also means harder to find)
A good start would be to ask your local DVD store who is their distributor and then follow up from there.
With a distributor you have to aim your break-even point to be within a year. Don't expect it to be within a month, but if it look it takes longer than a year then that may indicate problem. You either do something wrong with the sales, or have bad business model. (too high production cost, wrong target audience or simply really bad product)
I didn't mention selling the DVD on internet by yourself. When you create a beautiful page and set up e-commerce it doesn't solve the problem of selling just transform it. People will not come to your page. Google will not list you in first million entries of "independent film". In today's world of zillion web pages to create just a little louder voice take years of hard work. The trick to gain an exposure is the old trusted word-of-mouth, but this time the mouth are the pages that link to you. But it is not the ill link-exchanges that have million links and no contents - as if people are somehow short of finding links. The pages that counts most are the hives of forums, review pages, newsgroups and blogs. Once you make people talk about your products you are successful internet businessman with a constant stream of income. But how? There is no simple answer to that, but one is clear: it takes a lot of time. Oh, and whatever you do, stay away from spamming! (and that doesn't include just spam in e-mails, but also forums, blogs and newsgroups). Spam is very, very, very bad.
Anyway, if you decide to have a commercial site then it is quite easy. You need to get a credit card processing gateway. You can get a merchant account from a bank, but that is not a best option to start. In fact it is rather expensive option and it start making sense only if you have many different things to sell. There are few good e-commerce solutions that will make this much easier and faster setup for example InternetSecure. With these payment gateways be prepared to pay either about 10% transaction fee or a monthly flat fee plus a smaller 5% transaction fee.
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