Books, Movies, and Money

Three sure ways for a movie to make money right now: remake, sequel, and based off a popular book or comic.  There have been some standout movies and series based off novels.  Books give movies a built in audience.

So, why does this matter?  Because the business practices in the movie industry need to stop just paying attention to what is happening in the book industry and jump in.  There is an opportunity here.  With several books going directly to eBook, without the publishing houses and agents, movie executives could directly contact authors using a new business model.  How can this work out?  Here is a rough (and perhaps impractical) brain storm idea…

Optioning of eBooks instead of scripts – but payment is in marketing instead of cash:

A movie studio creates a small team (partly consisting of people in the book industry) to work with new authors.  This team is given a budget (let’s say $4Mil a year).  With the budget, they (the production studio) will try to attach themselves with original books by new authors (let’s say 100 new books a year).  Instead of offering the writer any money directly, they will make a contract for marketing.  They will spend that money ($40,000 – I know this is probably high side, but the better a book does, the better then movie generally does) in a specific time span (say six months) marketing a book (they could have prepackaged marketing plans by genre).

At some point (say 30 months after the marketing ends) they will decide if they want to make a movie out of the book or not.  The contract will define how much the author gets paid based on book sales (under 200,000 books, amount A; 200,000 to 999,999, amount B; 1,000,000 to 4,999,999, percent of movie C; 5,000,000 or more, percent of movie D).  If the studio doesn’t buy the movie rights then, the authors get their rights back in full.  Even if the production studio only green lights a few contacts a year, they will probably still do well.

Summary of Plan:

• Production studio creates team to read and option books
• Book options are for marketing expenses/packages, not to pay authors directly
• Movie industry chooses which books to turn into movies after a defined period of time
• The cost of the movie rights are defined in the contract (by sales of the novel)

Advantages:

There are advantages for both the author and the movie execs.  The author becomes known – their book reaches the masses and they have the potential to make some money off of it.  Since the movie industry has no interest in the book royalties, the author will get to keep all of those.  The movie industry can lock in rates for acquiring movie rights for less than normal.  The upfront expenses for the movie agency are really small time for the potential reward, but upfront money for advertising is hard to come by for authors.  Once an author is famous, they won’t need to make this kind of deal again (although there is nothing stopping them), but it helps them get a foot in the door.  The movie industry gets much needed new material.

And here is the great part: this will help the smaller publishing houses and book agents.  The movie industry doesn’t really have the infrastructure to know what will make both a great book and a great movie – they only know what will make a great movie, but they need the books to succeed as novels first for this business model to work.  So that small team I was talking about would consist of movie experts combined with agents, editors, and/or publishing houses that they contract with.  The agents, editors, and publishers know the material that works as novels as well as some of the better methods for advertising.  The team members wouldn’t get royalties, but probably something more like regular salary combined with bonuses for when certain books/movies reach financial milestones.

So that’s a rough model for just one new business model in the entertainment industry.  Any thoughts?  I would love to hear what other author’s think of this plan, or any ideas they have.

NOTE: If any studio takes this seriously, I would love to work on it.

Books Business Model Idea, Optioning for Books