There are a couple of reasons why Hollywood wants to purchase the rights to a book:
1) Books come with fully-formed, fleshed out characters and plots, which makes it wonderful when it comes time to turning the book into a movie or TV show.
2) Books come with a large group of fans already desperate to see the movie adaptation of a book they’ve enjoyed. This guarantees that a film adaptation of a book is going to make at least a chunk of its money back due to a strong fan base. Most producers will, throughout their career, want to purchase the rights to books in order to maintain a fresh set of viable projects they can work on and produce.
Turning Your Book Into A Movie
If you’ve written a book and want to get it turned into a movie then a great way to do this is to be proactive. A lot of the time authors will write a book and it can be successful and even have a good following. But these same authors will wait for their book to be picked up by a producer or movie studio without doing anything to move the process forward themselves. This is a big mistake.
In my own experience, I’ve seen more authors sell the rights to a book by taking a proactive approach themselves rather than wait for a producer to option the rights to their book. I remember one author (who had self-published several mystery books on the Amazon platform) got in touch with the production company I used to work for.
This author wrote to us describing what his book was about and that he was an author who had self-published. He included a short bio and made reference to his other titles. After reading what his book was about, we offered to purchase the rights to this author’s book for over $70,000.
The fact that this author had never written a screenplay before didn’t matter—screenwriters are often hired to work on other projects and this was no exception. Just because you’ve written a book, it doesn’t mean you have to write the screenplay for the book too (although you can always try if you feel like you can do a good job). The reason why we decided to option this author’s book was for one simple reason—we believed that his book would make a great movie.
That’s all there is to it. When a producer considers purchasing the rights to a book they’re thinking one thing and one thing only: is this a good story and will audiences enjoy it? If the answer to these two questions is, “yes!” This means that the author’s book has the potential to make a lot of money if their book is adapted into a movie (we’ve seen it time and time again with adaptations like The Hunger Games, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and Fifty Shades of Grey).
Who Owns The Rights To A Book?
Even if a book is published, the majority of the time the movie rights and the television rights to the book are granted to the author of the book not the publishing company. This means that it is the author that controls the rights to a book. So if you’re an author and you’re looking to sell the rights to your book to get it turned into a movie or TV show, this is good news because it means that you (not the publisher) controls the rights.
Selling the rights to a book doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, obtaining the rights to a book can also be quite easy (just as long as you don’t expect to obtain the rights to a bestseller or famous author’s series of books). But turning well-known books into movies is still big business! Also, something that’s nice to be aware of is this: if you want to adapt or use a book in the public domain (any book that exists 70 years after the author’s death), you don’t need to pay for the rights to adapt these books, it’s free, anyone can do it. For example, Romeo and Juliet, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Frankenstein, Pride and Prejudice are all public domain books, so anyone who wants to adapt them or make movies out of them is free to do just that.
There are many more public domain books out there… a simple search on Google will provide you with a much more extensive list. I hope this article helps to give you a nice idea of not only how to sell a book and get it adapted into a movie or TV show, but also how you can go about purchasing and acquiring the rights to other books out there as well.
*Liz Fairbanks has worked as a reader, development assistant, and talent agent in Los Angeles over the last seven years. Liz loves traveling, reading and yoga. Liz also works as a freelance consultant for Script Mailer (a company that connects screenwriters with agents and producers in Hollywood).