Streaming services are still eager to acquire TV and film rights to books despite reports of a decrease in the number of subscribers but are now more focused on known backlist IP that is less risky, agents and producers say.
The latest set of accounts published at Companies House also show pretax profits increased to £14.4m, from £13.2m the year before. TRDSC's former directors Luke Kelly and Claire Wright said the performance "exceeded expectations" with revenue 13.2% ahead of budget. Read more
When Sarah Pinborough's thriller Behind Her Eyes was published in 2017, even she described it as a "Marmite book". Her publisher slapped on equally dire warnings, hyping it with the hashtag #WTFthatending.
Netflix's blockbuster show, Bridgerton, has led to renewed demand for the Regency-era novels by Julia Quinn that form the basis for the eight-episode program. Netflix released Bridgerton on December 25 and since that time, HarperCollins's Avon imprint reports that it has sold a total of 750,000 copies of books from the series, including 285,000 copies last week.
Author Rumaan Alam kept his expectations low, even as the film rights to his upcoming book "Leave the World Behind" became the center of a bidding contest among Hollywood studios this summer. Read more
"Nobody knows anything ... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one." Read more
Is Netflix a friend or foe to the book business? That question was addressed by the Global 50 CEO Talk 2019, which featured a conversation with Kelly Luegenbiehl, VP International Originals of Netflix, hosted by publishing consultant Ruediger Wischenbart and with the editors of global trade journals.
A JRR Tolkien expert working on Amazon's forthcoming multi-series adaptation of The Lord of the Rings has claimed that the retail and streaming giant has been refused permission by the estate to use the bulk of the book's plot.
Netflix will produce a new series titled Zero, an Italian-language show based on the work of 27-year-old Antonio Dikele Distefano, a formerly self-published Italian author whose books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies since he signed with Mondadori. Read more
‘My success, I believe, stems from a combination of factors. Firstly, the freedom of self-publishing allowed me to explore and cater to my niche without being constrained by traditional publishing expectations. This direct connexion to readers, without intermediaries, provided invaluable feedback, enabling me to refine and better my work.
For the second in our profiles of bestselling authors, this week we're delighted to speak to Mark Billingham, who was recently presented with three Nielsen Bestseller Awards: gold for selling half a million copies of Sleepyhead, and silver for selling a quarter of a million copies of both Scaredy Cat and Buried, all published by Little, Brown.
My name has always felt, somehow, apart from me. But names, like all words, are approximations. From the day of my birth, I was called Christie, though it wasn't really my name. My real name was Christine. Well, my middle name was Christine. My first name - Miriam - I heard only at the receptionist's window of the dentist's office or on the first day of school. Read more
For the last two years, I've had unexpected success in experimenting with my "chipmunk research method." I was inspired to try this technique after hearing an intriguing comment made by my friend Oriano Belusic, past president of the Canadian Federation of the Blind (CFB).
When book sales spiked in 2020 and 2021, publishers believed one reason for the increase was that more people had turned to reading during the pandemic, and they were hopeful that some of those people would continue to read when things returned to normal. However, a new report from the National Endowment for the Arts seems to dash those hopes.
In early August, after Andrew Lipstein published The Vegan, his sophomore novel, a handful of loved ones asked if he planned to quit his day job in product design at a large financial technology company. Read more