People outside of the film industry may have never heard of The Black List, but most everyone is familiar with movies made from the scripts it has promoted like “Juno,” “Spotlight” and “Slumdog Millionaire.”
The Black List was started in 2005 by Columbus native Franklin Leonard, a producer who’s worked for Universal Pictures and Will Smith’s Overbrook Entertainment production company. It began as an annual survey of film industry folks to identify the year’s best unproduced scripts floating around Hollywood. Nineteen years later, more than 400 of those films have been produced and four have won Oscars for Best Picture.
In 2012 Leonard parlayed The Black List’s cache into a website, blcklst.com, that serves as a virtual marketplace where screenwriters can post their scripts to be viewed by vetted members of the film and television industry looking for projects to produce. So far, more than 20 such screenplays have been made.
Now Leonard has broadened The Black List’s scope to include novelists, and he’s tapped Atlanta native Randy Winston to head up the project.
A graduate of Westlake High School and the former Southern Polytechnic State University, Winston, 38, moved to New York a decade ago to get his MFA in fiction writing from The New School. After graduation, he remained in New York, working on his first novel and immersing himself in a variety of academic and literary jobs. Along the way, he built a network of friends and colleagues in the publishing industry that has served him well at The Black List.
The way The Black List works, an author creates a free profile and posts a brief summary of their projects, be they published, self-published or unpublished. If they choose, they can pay a $30 monthly fee to post the first 100 pages of a manuscript. If it piques the interest of an industry member, they may read and rate it on a scale of 1-10 based on the likelihood they would recommend it to a peer or superior. Writers can also pay $150 for a 500-word evaluation of their partial manuscript.
Meanwhile, members of the publishing industry — agents, editors and slush pile readers — can join for free, but first they must undergo vetting to determine they are reputable.
“What we’re aiming to do is to make the work that is great more visible to the professionals who can do something with it,” said Winston. “The Black List works as a platform where writers can share their great work and industry members can find it.”
The Black List’s fiction component launched Sept. 4, and to date the manuscripts uploaded to the site number in the hundreds, and more than 1,000 publishing professionals have registered.
“The site also has a lot of resources for writers learning about the business, especially on the publishing side,” said Winston. “It’s not enough that a writer is talented. They need an awareness and an understanding of how the business of books works.”
There are no plans for an annual list of best-unpublished novels, like The Black List does for unproduced screenplays, but there is an Unpublished Novel Award giving a $10,000 prize to the winners in seven categories — literary fiction, horror, crime and mystery, romance, science fiction and fantasy, thriller and suspense, and children and young adult. Authors who have at least one evaluation on their manuscripts can option into the contest for free.
Judges include Roxane Gay, LeVar Burton, Eric Simonoff and Victor LaValle. Deadline is June 2025, and winners will be announced next fall. There’s also a contest for an 18-month film option paying $25,000. For details go to blcklst.com.
Because nothing occurs in a vacuum, especially in this era of social media and comment-mania, news about The Black List’s foray into fiction elicited some negative chatter suggesting it was profiting on the desperation of writers, who can query agents directly for free. I asked Winston to respond.
“The advice I give to writers publicly, privately, online and in person is to exhaust all the free resources you have. Write and revise your manuscript. Do that several times over. Share your manuscript with people in your life who you trust to give you constructive feedback. Take that feedback and revise your project some more,” he said.
“When you feel that you’ve taken your project as far as you could take it, look around the options available to you and make a smart decision that will benefit you and your career and is cost-effective. If that decision leads you to pay to enter a writing contest, great. If that decision leads you to pay for a six-week novel workshop, great. If that decision leads you to pay for a two-year MFA program, great; I did that!
“If that decision leads you to hosting and buying an evaluation on The Black List website, great. Do what is in the best interest for you economically. But be thorough no matter what you choose and make sure the return on investment is favorable for you.”
Suzanne Van Atten is a book critic and contributing editor to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She may be reached at Suzanne.VanAtten@ajc.com.
