The old saw goes that everyone has a book in them. But these days it might be more accurate to say that everyone has—or at least thinks they have—a screenplay in them. Your great aunt, your paper boy, your hairstylist—it's likely they run some internal projector in their mind playing the movie that will, once they just put it down on paper, lead to one of those fabled seven-figure Hollywood advances. Of course, before anyone can cash out, there's the rub of actually writing the thing, which takes some know-how and some inspiration. Enter the publishing industry. For years houses have been offering advice, and hope, to these would-be scribes in the form of how-to guides on the trade. But, unlike most areas of trade publishing, the independents are dominating this field, exploiting a network of movie-industry insiders to market their books and to find new authors to write them.

Linda Seger, who has written seven books on the subject—which she claims have sold more than a quarter of a million copies—says that the big New York houses don't handle these books as well as some smaller publishers. Best known for her 1988 Making a Good Script Great, Seger published four of her early books with Henry Holt. After deciding that the publisher wasn't pushing them hard enough to the groups that matter most—those working in the movie industry and professors at film schools—Seger got the rights back to two of her titles and took them to smaller publishing companies. (She took When Women Call the Shots, about women in the industry, to POD publisher iUniverse, while FromScript to Screen is now released by Lone Eagle Publishing.) "You might get a bigger advance with a major house," she said, "but you might also lose out because these companies don't specialize in marketing to the film world." Seger pointed to five houses known for their screenwriting guides: Silman-James Press, Lone Eagle (which recently merged with the Hollywood Creative Directory, the company that does "the phone books to Hollywood"), Michael Wiese Productions, Broadway Books and Focal Press. As Seger put it, the advantage of going with one of these houses is that "they know their market and they're willing to expand it. They're also accustomed to doing niche titles that, over time, will sell."

At Michael Wiese Productions, based in Seattle, one of the house's bestselling titles was acquired as a result of the staff's connections in Hollywood. Christopher Vogler, who penned The Writer's Journey, which is out in its second edition (the most recent published in 1998) and has sold a combined 160,000 copies, signed with Wiese after an e-mail he wrote became the talk (and printout) of Tinseltown. Wiese v-p Ken Lee recalled that Vogler's book was born out of a memo (it distilled the ideas of author Joseph Campbell and applied the tenets of mythology to screenwriting) that was e-mailed feverishly among industry folk, with many claiming it as their own. Because a staffer at Michael Wiese knew the real author—then a little-known script consultant—the house was easily able to close the deal. The house's newer screenwriting titles include The Hollywood Standardby Christopher Riley (published in March 2005, 7,000 copies sold) and Save the Cat by Blake Snyder (May 2005, 6,000 copies). And a third recent hit (currently No. 2 among Amazon's bestselling screenwriting titles) is Derek Rydall's I Could've Written a Better Movie Than That!, which Lee said has sold 3,000 copies since it came out in November 2005.

Given the relatively modest sales stats of most screenwriting titles, it's not surprising that they better fit the economic model of smaller publishers. That said, screenwriting didn't start out as the domain of independents. The two "bibles" of the biz are both from large houses: Syd Field's Screenplay and Robert McKee's Story. The former, which came out in 1979 from Bantam (now Bantam Dell), is widely recognized as the first how-to on the subject and still sells well; according to its publisher, the title has more than 500,000 copies in print. McKee's book, which came out in 1997 from what was then Regan Books (now ReganMedia) grew out of the author's well-known seminars. Now the author's cachet and his sales are likely improved by his celebrity; McKee became a star in his own right after being portrayed in a movie—2002's Adaptation.

Given the glut of books that have followed Field's title—by one estimate there are about 250 on the subject—specialization is becoming increasingly important. "While the niche is dominated by Field and McKee, there's a whole level of screenwriting guides beneath those two that sell very nicely," said David Barker, editorial director of Continuum. The publisher's most recent title is Paul Gulino's Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach, which has sold 6,000 copies since it came out last year. "With Paul's book, the hook was his resurrection of the Sequence Approach, which breaks down the screenplay into more sections than the traditional three-act structure."

Seger agreed that the key is specifiication, noting that in the past 10 years or so, these books have been going in that direction. "In the late '90s you started to have more mythology books... then you started to see the focus shifting to marketing and selling." Now, Seger said, authors are looking for their own area to conquer, aiming to claim their niche within the niche. Some are tackling genre books—how to write westerns or screwball comedies—while others are getting into the art of pitching a finished piece or even just formatting it. Could the market be reaching saturation? Seger says no—"I'm still waiting for someone to write a great book on dialogue."