Amazon Storywriter

» see studios.amazon.com/storywriter as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

amazon storywriter was a free screenwriting web app amazon released in april 2015. it lived at studios.amazon.com/storywriter, formatted screenplays to the industry-standard master scene layout, and offered a submit button that fed the manuscript directly into amazon studios' consideration pile. the sibling tool storybuilder did storyboarding under the same account.

the pitch was democracy. amazon studios had been experimenting with crowd-driven greenlighting since 2010, running audience test screenings of pilots on prime video and letting comments shape which shows moved to full series. storywriter extended that logic to the screenplay stage. anyone with a browser and an idea could write, format and submit without paying for final draft or movie magic screenwriter.

the results were thin. amazon studios greenlit only one screenplay from the storywriter slush pile to a full series: gortimer gibbon's life on normal street, a children's show submitted by first-time writer and preschool teacher david anaxagoras. amazon closed submissions in april 2018 under jennifer salke, who had replaced roy price after his october 2017 harassment scandal, and announced in may 2019 that storywriter and storybuilder would both retire on 30 june 2019. user accounts were disabled and any scripts not downloaded before the cutoff became inaccessible.

i was in ankara building perception models in 2018-19, not writing screenplays, so storywriter never had a use case on my desk. it surfaced for me the way most niche web apps did in that stretch: as a hacker news thread about the shutdown, brief and quiet, with a couple of comments from writers who had actually shipped something through it and were now digging their exports out of the export tool before the deadline.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it competed with ~

final draft was the paid-industry default at around $250 a license. movie magic screenwriter was the other big one. celtx and writerduet were the free web competitors. storywriter's real distinction was not the editor, which was fine, but the submit button. that button was doing the marketing. amazon was pitching a story where you would write in the same tool used to submit to a major studio, and the submission would go to a real reader. that framing was more valuable than the formatting, and it disappeared when submissions closed in 2018.

~ how it ended ~

storywriter and storybuilder were shut on the same day, 30 june 2019, as part of the general amazon studios pivot away from the roy-price-era experimental submissions model. amazon's statement was the standard "we are always reinventing ourselves and looking for ways to become even more efficient". the amazon studios pitching process moved to standard agent-and-manager submissions like every other major streamer, and the free-tool pipeline experiment was over. the storywriter chrome app kept working offline for a while, but the account layer was dead.

~ the tail ~

gortimer gibbon ran for three seasons on prime video between 2014 and 2016 before ending. david anaxagoras kept writing for children's tv. the storywriter format specification was documented publicly for a stretch, so a few open-source screenplay editors still support importing storywriter's json output. the tool itself is remembered as one of the more literal versions of the "amazon opens the gates to everyone" pitch that pretty much every big platform ran between 2013 and 2018 before the gates went back up.

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