Blogger: Rachelle Gardner
One of the things agents often hear from novelists (and sometimes memoirists) is, “My book would make a great movie!” Authors want to know if their agent will work to sell the movie rights to their book, because after all, their book is dramatic, it’s visual, it’s action-packed, it’s emotionally deep — it’s a natural for the movies!
And you know what? Most of the time, we agree! Your book WOULD make a good movie. If it’s a good story, worth telling, then it probably could be told equally well in the form of a film.
But whether your book is dramatic or visual or compelling enough to make a good movie isn’t the question.
The questions are…
- Is the book selling like hotcakes? It it a New York Times bestseller?
- Has there been tremendous buzz in the publishing industry around the book?
- Was the book sold at auction with interest from numerous publishing houses?
- Is the book racking up glowing reviews from major outlets?
It’s not whether your book would make a great movie—it probably would—but whether it has these other elements that make it an attractive prospect for a film production company.
And those elements are hard to come by. Out of thousands and thousands of books published each year, only a small handful become movies.
Your literary agent already believes in you and your book. They think your book is great—that’s why they took it on. They’ve sold it to a publisher, so don’t take it personally if they aren’t spending a lot of time aggressively trying to get your movie rights optioned. The odds are high against getting a movie option, and your agent’s time might be better spent elsewhere.
If there are signs your book would be a good fit for a production company we know about, or we get inquiries, we will always follow up and do our best to get a film option. Otherwise, it’s not going to be our top priority.
Have you dreamed of having your book made into a movie?
Actually, no. Novels are all about imagination, and cinematic adaptation kills the magic.
* For that reason, think putting ‘representative character pictures’ on Pinterest is a terrible idea. Takes something away from the reader.
I know what you mean, Andrew. I am currently reading Inkdeath. My brain is refusing to see Mo as anyone other than Brendan Fraser and Fenoglio as anyone other than Jim Broadbent.
And that is why I try to read the book before I see the movie.
How about if I post Ken in a Roman tribune’s uniform and Barbie in a Roman tunic on Pinterest? Think that will inhibit the reader’s ability to create their own images of the protagonists?
Only if readers being preteen girls Carol. For others it may be fun
Interesting. But after seeing so many books become movies or television shows, I’m inclined to believe a small percentage of these book/film adaptations depend on who your agent or publisher knows. But only a small percentage.
I’ve seen a few writer friends’ works being taken on lately by Hallmark. How does that happen? Is it a different process? I’d love to hear/learn about that. What makes a great Hallmark movie?
This has been the case for some of our clients too, Shelli. We happen to have a couple of good contacts with producers who make movies for Hallmark, so we send out the books we think they might like. Even so, they don’t say yes very often.
Thank you, Rachelle.
It seems like authors often think about their book becoming a movie from the story standpoint. What movie makers (like publishers) are looking at is the selling potential. Will it bring in a lot of money because the book/story is already so well-known that everyone will flock to the theaters to see the adaptation.
*For me, I don’t currently have aspirations to see my stories be made into movies. I’m not dreaming that big right now. It would be cool, but not realistic to dream about right now. 🙂
Yes, it does seem like it would be cool. But I often wonder how “cool” it really is. Your story is not your own anymore. And except for the outliers, most movie adaptations don’t result in much money for the author. So in reality, I think the coolness is questionable; but we live in a “movie star” world, so we’re all primed to dream of this eventuality.
Well, I think three of my novels would make good movies. Especially my first baseball novel, that combines a Kansas farmboy breaking into the Big Leagues, the Mafia trying to influence the game, a false love turned real, and ends with a crossfire in Yankee Stadium. How could that not make a good movie? I don’t understand why the studios and production companies aren’t beating a path to my door.
Want ticket to premiere, David. Sounds cool.
David, you probably missed Hollywood’s call. You should answer your phone more often!
Right now I’m dreaming that my MS will become a book!
For the most part I tend to avoid the movie version of a well loved story because it’s usually a disappointment in comparison to what I imagined. In my humble opinion, Hollywood rarely does justice to the effort an author spent laboring over
details that can’t be included in the movie or worse still, they change the ending.
Of course, what author would say no to film royalties. Not me.
Well Lara, only a tiny fraction of book-to-movie deals make the author a lot of money. Very tiny. The ones that do make a lot of money are outliers, by a long shot.
Many years before I started writing seriously, I remember reading that movie rights for “Artemis Fowl” had been sold. I anxiously awaited the release, and all these years later, it has still not been filmed.
It seems that selling the rights just puts it in limbo and out of the writer’s control.
Having said that, Yes, I would still love to have my book made into a movie. Who doesn’t want to watch a fiesty Princess Anastasia fight to escape her captors?
Yes, most books are first optioned, and the option is never exercised, meaning the film rights are never actually purchased. If the rights are purchased, the odds of an actual movie being made are still astronomical. The movie business is crazy that way.
Interestingly my wife has maintained from the beginning that I should be writing my story as a screenplay instead of a novel. I think it would be a good film, but then I am biased. However, first and foremost I want to write and publish a novel. Anything thereafter is a bonus.
At the moment I would say that anything that has a series of sequels stand a much better chance than a standalone story. Film studios seen to have gotten hold of the idea, why make one film when you can make ’em flock to the cinema several times for one idea!
Chris, I agree with you – write the novel. At least the novel is in your control, and you have a chance of getting published. You could even self-publish, but at least it would be out there and people would read it. If you opted to write the screenplay instead, the chances of it ever being enjoyed by anyone outside your family are slim indeed.
For what worth, I find historicals seem more satisfying on screen.
* May be because writers use faux-period language for everything (dialogue, narrative, description), gets to be cloying; on screen period lang. is limited to dialogue, and not thereby overdone.
Interesting perspective, Andrew. I hadn’t thought of that. I imagine some readers adore the cloying “period” language, and that’s why they read historicals.
Yep, Rachelle, there’s the dream and the reality, and the latter sometimes involves a bite of reality. I recall when a previous publisher said they thought one of my books was good movie material (don’t even recall which one now) and they contacted their department that worked in that area. Never heard a thing afterward. I know the agents at Books and Such keep their antennae up for a book that might be optioned, but the reality is that most of us will never see that happen. Reality strikes again. Thanks for sharing.
We do try, of course, for the books we think a particular producer or film agent would like. But we get a lot of rejections, just like when authors send out queries.
I’d rather see the movie before I read the book. If I do it in the other order, it spoils the movie because the screenplay inevitably leaves out some parts that I think should be there. Even a great movie can’t include everything I love. Case in point, both the 1979 BBC production and the 1995 A&E production of “Pride and Prejudice” are excellent, but I still regret some of the parts they left out.
*My son hated the “Eragon” movie because he loved the book so much. It was the book that turned him into a rabid reader of fantasy adventure in 7th grade. I thought the movie was pretty good for its genre.
*The same is true of abridged audio performances. I have three different abridgements of “Pride and Prejudice” and an unabridged version. The abridgements are excellent, but each one omits something different, and I always hear the omission.
*I’m looking forward to the new “Ben Hur” movie coming out in August, but I’m going to have to make myself suspend my expectation that it will be just like either the Charlton Heston classic or the original Lew Wallace book. But even if I don’t like it, the timing is great for generating interest in the Roman history website that will be my author page. My goal is to have a full-blown version covering many topics up by the time the movie hits the theatres. I’ll let the movie guide some of my SEO decisions.
A question, Mrs. Gardner – do you feel that a badly received and financially underperforming screen adaptation of an early novel can destroy (or at least badly damage) a writer’s career? If so, it would seem that an early-career writer puts his or her future in the hands of others in accepting a film contract – and those others may have a very different, and perhaps fatally flawed, vision.
Interesting question, Surpreet, and I wonder if it depends on the country. Most of the people I know in the U.S. don’t really pay much attention to who the writer and screenwriter are unless they are already someone very famous. Even then, it usually isn’t the writer’s name that draws American audiences into the theater in large numbers. Maybe a flop wouldn’t affect the writer that much here.
*I think I recall reading the budget for the first Hunger Games was very limited (several million vs many million) but due to its success all future budgets increased substantially.
*I’m wondering what a successful movie adaptation does in regard to the long term popularity of a book or book series. What about kids who weren’t old enough to read Harry Potter at the time of its release and instead grew up watching the movies. How many children from that generation, as well as the next, will take time to read the books?
*My girls enjoyed the film version, but still preferred the books.
Is it okay to say my novel would most certainly not translate to movie form very well? Oh, sure, it’s visual, and there’s lots of action and all that. I just can’t see it as a movie without huge swaths of story being left out.
*
Mini-series? Possibly. Movie, definitely not.
I like the honesty!
I always want to read the books first and I’m usually a bit disappointed because of the changes made in the movie even though I can see why they made them. Just noticing them pulls me out of the story.
Yes, we book people tend to be that way. I often have to remind myself that we “book people” are actually a small percentage of the population, most of whom never read a book.
I don’t write anything that would be made into a movie, but have promoted Christian films since 2009 and am updating a book on bringing Christian films to one’s hometown / theater this year (first published 2014).
This thread is interesting in that the phrase “made into a movie” seems to assume big studios with major budgets. Just as writing is not just about the huge publishing houses, movies do not have to be just the blockbusters.
A few days I stopped by Wal-Mart and they had 25 Christian films available on DVD, well over half of which had no or extremely limited runs in theatres. Several independent filmmakers are making better quality films even if their budgets are not in the millions.
Very few books make it to the big publishers, and very few films are picked up by the big studios, but If your passion is to see your book on screen, it doesn’t have to be the big budget route (although it might take scaling Yankee Stadium down to a minor league park, David Todd)
I wrote a book, NEXT! The Search for My Last First Date, a few years ago. The premise is naïve middle age divorced guy goes internet dating – what could go wrong? It’s kind of an unromantic romcom. I had about 100 agent rejections. Not know what I was doing, I self published. I’ve only sold about 1000 copies, but I have a movie option on the book, and filming is scheduled to begin in April 2018. Should I try to find a literary agent now, given the filming and marketing of the movie? Where would I start?
Dear Rachelle Gardner
One of the things agents often hear from novelists (and sometimes memoirists) is, “My book would make a great movie. My biik “BLOWOUT” is getting 4 stars reviews from Indie Reader, SPR and others.URL: https://www.blowoutnovel.com
‘Blowout’, is a dramatic fiction novel, inspired by ‘‘Operação Lava Jato’(Operation Car Was) criminal investigations by the Departments of Justice in Brazil and the US on the siphoning off $ 20 Billion through Money Laundering, Bribery and Kickbacks organized by a criminal cartel of state-owned oil company executives, politicians, contractors and black market currency dealers. Based loosely on a true investigations during 2014 tp 2017 time-period.
Genre: High-tech crime involving supercomputers, artificial intelligence, Hugh-Frequency Programed Trading Company owned and operated by a superstar female ex-Goldman Sachs executive, her step-sister, the Administrator of Brazil’s Environment Protection Agency, and a testosterone fueled young American offshore oil-rig engineer.
Plot: The dramatic opening is the shocking discovery of a dead body found floating face down in the swimming pool of a luxury villa owned by a financial super star. The dead young man is the oil-rig engineer of the world’s most sophisticated oil rig which cost $ 400 million, which sank after catastrophic blowout. What began as an investigation into a catastrophic blowout on an oil rig, the Poseidon, morphed into a $20 billion loss through bribes, kickbacks, and money laundering and then quickly turned into something much greater, uncovering a vast and intricate web of political and corporate racketeering, all thanks to a dangerous and passionate love triangle . . .. set in Wall Street and Brazil. The scandal rocked the boardrooms and bedrooms in Brazil. Is this the biggest financial scandal in history? ‘Blowout’ takes us on a journey through love, dangerous passion, jealousy, greed, intense desire to win, dangerous passion, the rationality of these seemingly irrational emotions, examining the fundamental desires of what men and women want, and why these longings so often produce conflict. An emotional journey of three star-crossed lovers seeking experiences beyond the edge of million-dollar milliseconds.
Length, Structure and estimated run-time of the film: ‘Blowout’ is a 75,000-word high-octane fiction novel loosely based on a true story. The locations are beautiful architecture hotels, high-rise offices, beaches, villas, mansions, high-frequency trading rooms, night-clubs restaurants in Brazil and the Wall Street. ‘Blowout’ is driven by fewer major-characters (five), side-conflicts and subplots. The main narrative resembles more of a straight line and not veer off into complicated back stories, multiple points of view, and meandering plot lines. The set-up is approximately 25 minutes, series of conflicts about 50 minutes, and resolution takes about 25 minutes – a total of 110 minutes, in a three-act play structure. Show me the “goods”.
————-
Take a chance and look at my book “Out of the Cellar – a Story of Honor” by Michael Leon available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble:
A retrospect as told to a group of journalists by a United States Senator about to be nominated to run for President of the United States. Going back to the Great Depression, his story transcends four generations beginning with two unrelated Jewish immigrant families that settled in separate very tough ghettos in New York City; one on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the other in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. More than just the hardships and difficulties each family faced, the Senator’s story is about good vs. evil; a story of honor, responsibility, humility, deep faith, and evil beyond imagination. It’s a story of those in his family whose roots were predestined to secure the destiny of a future U.S. President.
The main characters include three young homeless brothers surviving on the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, one of which is the future father of the Senator. Displaced from their home and family after the accidental death of their father, these three young boys survive the Great Depression eating out of trash cans and living unnoticed in the cellar of the very tenement building where their mother and sister live with a charitable neighbor. At only ten, the oldest brother’s primary mission is to keep his promise to honor the wishes of his father to care for the family should something befall him. As soldiers the three brothers become World War II heroes as two question their faith after seeing the carnage upon entering the Dachau Concentration Camp as the first liberators.