I’ve lost count of the number of posts on this site but one remains a favorite. In fact, it’s the top post year after year and that’s how to get published with Hallmark.
Half the interest is publishing a book with them, the other, having their story idea turned into a Hallmark movie…especially a Hallmark Christmas movie.
The majority of e-mails I get are from writers wanting to know how they can sell their idea or story to platforms like Netflix, Amazon, and yes, Hallmark too.
So, I thought I’d address the topic here. While I don’t know much about the screenwriting and movie acquisition side of the writing business, I do know one thing, and that’s for the majority of submissions you’ll probably going to need an already written screenplay and an agent who will submit your work and represent you.
If you have a literary agent they can probably handle that for you or they might even know another agent with experience in handling movie and TV rights.
I am seeing lots of books being turned into series. Two on Netflix I’ve been watching are Virgin River taken from the books written by Robin Carr, and Sweet Magnolias written by Sheryl Anderson. So, if you are already established and have a series of books like these two then it might be worth asking your agent about submitting them for consideration.
As for Hallmark, and according to their Web site, you do need to submit through an agent.
I did some searching online to see if I could get any more details and did discover that (if I understood this correctly), that over at Amazon you can submit ready made movies for consideration. And Hulu also looks like it has a submission form for ideas.
It’s a topic I know 99 percent of you are interested and therefore something I’ll pursue some more. I’ll even see if I can interview anyone that has more information to pass along to you so stay tuned.
In the meantime, here are all the links I found from Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and also Hallmark-
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/100386
https://studios.amazon.com/help/participation-guidelines
https://studios.amazon.com/help/submission-agreement
https://help.hulu.com/s/article/submitting-feedback?language=en-US
https://www.hallmarkchannel.com/hallmark-publishing/for-authors