What is Coverfly?
Coverfly is three things:
- Writer Dashboard – a writer-centric platform designed to help emerging screenwriters track successes across competitions, fellowships, labs, festivals and talent-discovery platforms
- Partner Dashboard – a software platform for screenwriting competitions, festivals, fellowships, labs and writing retreats to manage submissions, readers and evaluations
- Industry Dashboard – a universal database of unproduced film and TV screenplays (by default screenplays are private until and unless writers choose to opt in) that vetted industry professionals can peruse for screenplays and writers they may be interested in optioning, purchasing, signing or producing
We realized that even the best writing programs only actively promote their winners. Coverfly is an opportunity for you to take the best of your contest and coverage evaluations and aggregate them into a composite metric that can help you gain exposure and can help the industry easily gauge your project’s potential quality.
Ultimately, our intent is to help you put your competition successes to work. Coverfly is free to use for writers and doesn’t have any of its own competitions. We explain how we make money later in this introduction.
The Coverfly Rank
The metric we’ve designed to quantify your projects’ evaluations is called a Coverfly Rank.
Without diving into the details of the algorithm, it’s important to note that the Coverfly Rank is not a metric of quality, it’s a metric of confidence of quality, which increases with strong scores or placements. Read more about the nitty-gritty of the algorithm.
Your Coverfly Rank and data are completely private by default.
By default, your project submission data is only visible to you. It is completely private and cannot be seen by industry members unless you choose to make it discoverable to the industry, and it does not affect your performance in (nor is it used by) Coverfly partner competitions. The Coverfly Rank is a combination of your scores and rankings from all contest entries and evaluations that are currently partnered with Coverfly. We’d love to have it include 100% of festivals and are rapidly adding new ones, but we don’t currently have the bandwidth to manually add all results. With that said, you can add all your successes as a note next to any project on your Writer Dashboard.
If you choose to make your project discoverable, we may promote it to the industry and it may show up on The Red List.
Coverfly has staff dedicated full-time to promoting the top discoverable projects in our database to producers and managers. We also have dozens of producers, managers, and agents browsing public projects on our industry-facing dashboard.
Discoverable projects and their scores may also appear on The Red List, which is a public leaderboard of all public projects in the Coverfly database. Only vetted Industry members may download your project or contact you about your work.
This is completely free for the writer, and it is not how Coverfly makes money. We think if we can turn competition successes into career success, writers will want to enter competitions through Coverfly and no other platform.
Your Writer Dashboard
You can use the Writer Dashboard to sync all of your entries and placements into one place and build out your Coverfly Rank. Since many programs are already using Coverfly as a management platform, all of those individual placements are instantaneously added to your projects page and sometimes affect Coverfly Rank. It is completely up to you if you want to make your project discoverable and ranked, and all future entries to contests and festivals partnered with Coverfly will be added to your dashboard unless you delete your account.
Cost and Fees
Coverfly is free to use for writers.
We charge programs a fee for using our platform. We also have features that make judging fair and easy – like normalization of scores to help balance “tough” or “easy” judges. As a hosting platform, Coverfly is free for unlimited scripts versus Inktip or Black List. One way Coverfly makes money is by charging writers a small fee to update a contest submission draft mid-contest – this is a totally optional feature that allows writers to send in an updated draft to the judges instead of completely resubmitting. The goal is to get programs the best drafts, to prevent writers from having to pay full cost for a resubmission, and to allow Coverfly to keep hosting and tracking free.
Say Hello!
Coverfly is a writer-first platform, and we are committed to introducing new features and improving existing ones. If you have ideas or feedback that would make your Coverfly experience better, or just want to say hello, don’t hesitate to reach out to support@coverfly.com or via our support channel.
Happy writing!