Showing all posts about novels
99% of books optioned for film die in development hell
29 March 2022
It must be the dream of every author: to have their book made into a film. But with so many novels and manuscripts in circulation, what are the chances of this happening? Remote, to say the least, I would think. Not that long odds dissuade some writers, particularly first time, or aspiring authors.
I’ve heard literary agents say some budding novelists, when submitting a manuscript, have gone so far as to append a list of actors they’d like to see play the characters in their story, when their novel is inevitably — you understand — adapted for the big screen. This before the manuscript has even found a publisher, let alone anything else.
The exuberant hopes of first time authors aside though, even a genuine, bona fida, movie option on a novel is still no guarantee an author will one day be proudly striding the red carpet at the premiere of their book turned film. In fact, according to American steampunk fiction author Gail Carriger, there’s a mere one percent chance any optioned book will become a film.
Sobering or what? Only one in one hundred novels that have been optioned will end up as a big screen production. One way of looking at an option is to see it as a film producer taking a temporary hold on the film rights of a novel, while they try to find interest, and funding, for a potential movie. In the end — and the process may be protracted — they might not succeed.
While their novel may languish in development hell, there is one small consolation, the author will receive an option payment of some sort, hopefully one that’s relatively generous.
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The most prolific book reader and reviewer in the world
24 March 2022
From a Reddit post I stumbled upon this week, written in October 2018, by Scott Alexander. Read this, your eyes will water:
I don’t know how that author identified the most prolific reviewer at the time but I found one reviewer with 20.8k reviews since 2011. That’s just under 3,000 reviews per year, which comes out to around 8 per day. This man has written an average of 8 reviews on Amazon per day, all of the ones I see about books, every day for seven years. I thought it might be some bot account writing fake reviews in exchange for money, but if it is then it’s a really good bot because Grady Harp is a real person whose job matches that account’s description. And my skimming of some reviews looked like they were all relevant to the book, and he has the “verified purchase” tag on all of them, which also means he’s probably actually reading them.
I like to think I’m a somewhat avid book reader, but I could not — in a million years — come close to matching this sort of… output. Grady Harp, the subject of Alexander’s post, must read in a week what I do in a year. But we’re talking about reading and reviewing eight books daily. I know of some fast readers who can tackle a novel in a day, but this feat is truly incredible.
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Twitter novels, written in 140 character tweets
17 March 2022
Here’s a blast from the past, from back in the days when tweets were limited to 140 characters: “novels” restricted to said limit, written by best-selling authors including Jilly Cooper, Ian Rankin, Jeffrey Archer, and Anne Enright, in October 2012.
If there were an award for the best Twitter fiction “novel”, and I were the judge, I’d name British novelist Helen Fielding, she who gave the world Bridget Jones’s Diary in 1999, the winner:
OK. Should not have logged on to your email but suggest if going on marriedaffair.com don’t use our children’s names as password.
This may, or may not be, Fielding’s Twitter page.
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Helen Fielding, novels, writing
How I was conned by a manuscript thief
16 March 2022
American writer Peter C. Baker on being fooled into handing over a draft of his novel to a manuscript thief. The culprit, known as the Spine Collector, who was finally arrested earlier this year, had tricked numerous other authors, including many who were still unpublished, into sending him copies of their work.
It was the first book I’d ever tried writing, and, during the previous near-decade, it had become an overburdened locus of my ambitions, hopes, doubts, and fears. Many times, I’d looked at the manuscript and wondered if I was fooling myself. Getting fooled into handing it over made me feel sick.
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The Passenger, Stella Maris, new novels by Cormac McCarthy
12 March 2022
After a sixteen year hiatus, American author Cormac McCarthy, whose last book, The Road, was written in 2006, will publish two new novels later this year. Both stories are connected, and will be released a month apart. The first title, The Passenger, arrives in bookshops on 25 October 2022:
1980, Pass Christian, Mississippi: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wetsuit and plunges from the boat deck into darkness. His divelight illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flightbag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit – by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.
The second book, Stella Maris, set eight years earlier, is based on the treatment transcripts of Bobby’s sister Alicia, who is a patient at a psychiatric hospital, and will be released on 22 November 2022:
1972, Black River Falls, Wisconsin: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers.
While I haven’t yet read The Road, I did see John Hillcoat’s harrowing 2009 film adaptation, starring Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, and a then young Kodi Smit-McPhee.
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Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022 longlist
10 March 2022
The longlist for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction was announced on Tuesday. Just under ten percent of the original one hundred-and-seventy-five submissions were among the sixteen titles selected. A few familiar titles leapt out at me: Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead, Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason, The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Hellerand, and The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. The shortlist, consisting of six titles, will be announced on Wednesday 27 April.
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Avoid the loss of your Goodreads data, back up your account regularly
2 March 2022
Alarming news for members of book cataloguing website Goodreads, of which I am one. Be sure to regularly backup your account data, as it may be irretrievably lost in the event of a website glitch, as was the case recently for Nelson Minar.
Goodreads lost my entire account last week. Nine years as a user, some 600 books and 250 carefully written reviews all deleted and unrecoverable. Their support has not been helpful. In 35 years of being online I’ve never encountered a company with such callous disregard for their users’ data.
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The Film Adaptation Test of a book
25 February 2022
Telling an author you read their book is the greatest compliment they can receive, according to American poet Lee Ballentine. Anyone taking five to six hours out of their time to read a book cover-to-cover must have — in most cases — thought highly of it. The title evaded the did not finish pile: that’s saying a lot.
As an additional compliment, you could tell the author you’ll read their novel again. But with so many books in the world, who has the time to repeat read a title? Instead it might be better to say their book should be made into a film. It’s a way of saying your novel is so good, more people need to experience it, so let’s get it into cinemas. For most authors that’s probably an affirmation; it’s my guess many quietly hope their work will result in a movie.
It’s more than a commendation though. It’s an endorsement that discharges a reader from the obligation to pick up the book again. But it also makes for a useful metric in assessing a novel. If a book is worthy of being adapted for the big screen, it’s probably a good story. It’s something that should be put before a wider audience. And if not, perhaps you could settle for telling the author you read their book, and leave it at that.
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Global Grey, an online ebook collection
19 February 2022
Global Grey, the project of London based book aficionado Julie, is a repository of novels in electronic format, with about three thousand titles currently on the catalogue.
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This Devastating Fever, a new novel by Sophie Cunningham
19 February 2022
Melbourne based Australian author Sophie Cunningham is set to publish This Devastating Fever, her first novel in fifteen years in September 2022, according to Ultimo Press. In addition to her writing and teaching work, Cunningham is also one of the founders of the Stella Prize, an award honouring the work of Australian women writers.
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