As authors struggle to get a foot in the door with publishers, The Black List offers fiction writers a unique entryway to potential industry exposure and connections with agents and publishers. Join us for a discussion with Franklin Leonard and Randy Winston about how their platform is working for fiction writers and how books are getting discovered these days.

Franklin Leonard founded The Black List in 2005 to help spotlight and nurture unproduced screenplays. The platform opened to unpublished, novel-length fiction in late 2024. Recently an author scored a book deal for a hosted manuscript for the first time. The Unpublished Novel Award is returning for a second year, offering four writers prizes of $10,000 to support their paths to publication. The Blackstone Publishing Novel Initiative offers a $25,000 publishing deal to the winner.

Expect a brief walkthrough of how writers can use The Black List to create a public profile, to purchase feedback, or to host their manuscript for industry professionals. Then, we’ll discuss the current landscape of publishing and film adaptations, and take audience questions.

A Q&A will follow the presentation; you can pre-submit a question when registering for the event. A recording will be made available for those who cannot attend live.

The event will take place via Zoom with automatic closed captioning. To request any other accessibility features, please email support@authorsguild.org and we will make every effort to accommodate.

Panelists

Franklin Leonard is a film and television producer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of the Black List, the company that celebrates and supports great screenwriting and the writers who do it via film production, its annual survey of best unproduced screenplays, online marketplace, and screenwriter labs. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, an advisor for the 2022 Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Exhibition “In America”, and a member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). In 2019, the Writers Guild of America, East bestowed him with the Evelyn Burkey Award for elevating the honor and dignity of screenwriters. His TED talk – How I Accidentally Changed the Way Movies Get Made – has been viewed more than 1.7 million times.

Randy Winston is an artist, curator, and literary speaker box from Atlanta, Georgia. He is the Creative Director of Fiction at The Black List and former Director of Writing Programs at The Center for Fiction, where he managed, curated, and directed the production of all writing courses, the illustrious First Novel Prize, the famed Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship, and the highly-sought Writers Studio membership. Prior to his work at The Center, Winston served as Fiction Editor of Slice Literary Magazine for 6 years and has over 10 years of executive admin experience in higher education. Before his MFA, Randy was the editor-in-chief of, formerly Southern Polytechnic State University, now Kennesaw State University’s, online and print student publication in Marietta, Georgia. He is a 2016 graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing (Fiction) at The New School. A former Orion Magazine trustee, Winston currently sits on the board for WriteOn NYC.

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