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
Culture is a slippery concept; it's one of those terms we all know the meaning of until we actually think about it. For the writer, culture can be a two-edged sword: ignore it and your story lacks depth, colour and context; focus too much on it and you risk bamboozling - or worse, boring - your reader into putting the book down. Read more
Unpublished authors 18 years old or over resident in the UK.
Entry fee £8
Prize:
Book contract with HQ with advance of £7,500 and agent representation
The Primadonna Prize for unsigned and un-agented authors will, for the first time, offer the winner a book contract with HQ with an advance of £7,500 for world English rights. Read more
‘It's a big part of the job. Being able to put yourself in their shoes is really important. I'm not a writer, but I watch a lot of author content online and I read a lot of stuff from authors. Having that perspective is really important for me to be able to give my authors context. Their emotions are important. If they're disappointed we didn't sell, so am I.
Something interesting has been going on in publishing this year. Not the thumping increases in overall revenue - up 5 per cent to £6.7 billion across digital and physical books in the UK and Ireland. And not the surge in export markets: despite Brexit, exports are up 8 per cent to English language domains. Read more
People from many different industries have watched the rapid erosion of Twitter. While it remains up and running as of this date, millions of people have abandoned or shut down their accounts for reasons ranging from owner Elon Musk's reinstatement of former president Donald Trump's account to overall disenchantment with the role social media plays in our lives.
"Everyone always asks, so here you go," Aaliyah Aroha wrote in the caption of what would go on to become one of her most popular TikTok videos. She appears, lip-syncing to a song from the app-favorite Unofficial Bridgerton Musical and holding a stack of books, as the words "Enemies to Lovers book recommendations" float overhead. Read more
It was a dreary day in October, and the baby that was supposed to have arrived was already late. Maybe that means nothing to you, but to me, it meant that my out-of-office had long ago gone up and instead of holding my new baby, I was Googling the rates of stillbirth for post-term infants and the mortality rate of the women who carried them. Read more
At 91, Robert Gottlieb is perhaps the most acclaimed book editor of his time. He started out in 1955 and has been working in publishing ever since - serving as editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker. The list of authors he's edited include Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison, John le Carré, Katharine Graham, Bill Clinton, Nora Ephron and Michael Crichton.
Author and screenwriter Fay Weldon has died "peacefully" at the age of 91, her agent Georgina Capel has confirmed.
The writer was best known for her novels exploring society and class. She penned more than 30, including The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (Sceptre) and Praxis (Coronet), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Happy New Year, book lovers! For me, January 1st came and went like a flash, and my TBR pile hasn't budged one iota since the start of 2022. Not ONE. SINGLE. MILLIMETER. In fact, it's grown even taller. And the pileup on my e-reader? At this stage it's reached monumental proportions-a traffic jam of delectable books just waiting to be unleashed.
'Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.'