Vox Popoli commenter ZhukovG ponders the future of films based on best selling novels in the post-Big Five era.
Just my uneducated opinion, but it appears that in the future, if you put in the work, it will be easier to ‘make a living’ as a writer but much harder to ‘make it big’.
I also wonder if this will hit the movie industry hard. Funding a major motion picture is much less risky if it’s based on a big bestselling novel. But if top authors in the future are people with tens of thousands of fans rather than millions, it’ll be enough to give a studio exec a nervous breakdown.
How will the old publishing paradigm’s collapse affect Hollywood? What you’ve got there are two converged institutions coasting on the fumes of their depleted cultural capital. They have an incestuous relationship, and they’re both hemorrhaging revenue.
Howard Tayler once told me that a property needs six million fans to justify a film adaptation. Sure, you get movies based on less popular IPs, but studio execs’ job is to come up with reasons not to make movies. If your novel series has a fan base of six million, a film adaptation of the first book is pretty much guaranteed to turn a profit, so they pretty much have to option the rights.
It is indeed reasonable to expect that in the near future, a successful author will have a readership numbering in the tens, or possibly hundreds of thousands. His earnings will rival all but the current A list authors, in part because indies earn 5.6x higher royalties. However, he’s unlikely to be a household name. There are already authors who anonymously make seven figures per year on Amazon.
But if you look at the quote I took from Nick’s post, you’ll see he’s not predicting a total collapse of trad publishing. Instead, the Big Five publishers will turn into vanity presses for the A list. If you’ve played poker with Castle or are a prominent politician, you’ll still get the red carpet treatment in NY and LA.
At least until the Chinese buy all the studios.
As it happens, lots of readers tell me they’d love to see a movie version of my space opera-horror novel Nethereal. Full disclosure: I’m a little shy of the six million necessary fans. But you can help solve that problem!
