:::.............................. EDITORIAL OVERVIEW

As a management company, AEI normally offers new clients 1-3 sets of "development notes." But when that is not sufficient to bring a project to marketable standards, the project is referred to The Writer's Lifeline.

One of the services that makes AEI unique in its niche is the work done by AEI/Writer's Lifeline to develop stories and writers for the commercial marketplace. Approximately 75% of AEI sales have been from writers developed in Writer's Lifeline, Inc.., directed by Ken Atchity's sister Andrea McKeown. Writer's Lifeline, Inc. manages approximately 150 clients - with AEI having "right of first refusal to represent" most of them.

Ken Atchity was Distinguished Instructor at UCLA Writers Program from 1970-87, and founded the "First Wednesdays Writers Series" at the Beverly Hills Library, devoted to locating and assisting new writers break in and re-motivating professional writers. The series alternated between practical information for writers based on A Writer's Time: A Guide to the Creative Process , and the "Great Storytellers Series" illustrating the great storytellers' storytelling strategies from a commercial writer's perspective. Many of these programs have been taped and are available from AEI Tapes. AEI drew its first clients from Ken's lectures throughout the U.S. to adult education classes and corporations on subjects including writing, career change, creativity, motivation, and "the Type C personality."

Writer's Lifeline, Inc. is AEI's "farm team," developing new talent and readying literary materials of all kinds for the marketplace. Development, structure, and style editors as well as staff writers reporting to Andrea McKeown:
  • coach clients through a first draft or rewrite of their projects, or
  • assist them in the actual writing.
This service is financed by way of fees from the writers themselves, from the companies that refer them (nearly half of The Writer's Lifeline's new clients are referrals from agencies, publishers, studios, and production companies that no longer have time for in-house development), or by higher percentages charged by AEI for taking an investment risk on a story.

AEI Management and Production generally has an informal "right of first refusal" on stories developed by Writer's Lifeline, Inc..

Sales of  Writer's Lifeline clients include Governor Jesse Ventura's Governor Jesse Ventura's I Ain't Got Time to Bleed (ghost-written by AEI/WL), Ripley Entertainment's The Amazing World of Robert Ripley, Steve Alten's Meg and The Trench , James Michael Pratt's The Last Valentine, and Michael Murray's 3-novel deal for SealSix.

Because the  Writer's Lifeline has grown in three years to nearly 150 clients, and the Management company to nearly 30, AEI is increasingly capable of "internal packaging," where one AEI client in need of a writer is paired with a developed AEI writer in a joint venture deal presided over by AEI (which receives a minimum of 25% for its "packaging" services instead of its usual 15%).