IP Picks🔎: A Hopeless Meth Addict Becomes an Olympic Hopeful
➕ A true-life 'Talented Mr. Ripley' set in London's glitz-and-grime underworld
Welcome to The Optionist. Thanks for reading along.
I’m a firm believer that the plural of anecdote is not data. Being cautious about drawing a big conclusion from a few good stories strung together is a good practice. That said, some anecdotal evidence from the last couple of weeks has me wondering if the IP market is heating up. I’ve run into an unusually large number of books whose rights have already been snapped up. Usually, I might cross one or two titles off my list because they’ve already been optioned. But over the last couple of weeks it’s happened maybe ten times. In the two-plus years of writing the Optionist, I’ve never hit a streak like that before. I don’t know if it’s just a random cold snap — over the course of baseball season even an all-star hitter is going to have a stretch where he goes 0 for 15 — or if it signals a real trend.
As for patterns on what has been optioned, well, there really aren’t any. But I have noticed that the most popular genre is probably the female-centered thriller, followed by high-concept romcoms and true crime tales. A few were closer to publication, but others were summer books. And a bunch originated in the UK — either British authors or represented by British agents or both. Like I said, no clear patterns here just some interesting data points. But I wanted to toss it out there because it has been such an unusual stretch for me that I’ve been trying to puzzle out what’s going on.
On the other hand, as this week’s list demonstrates there’s still a lot of great material out there. In fact, I think this crop of picks is as promising as any that already got optioned.
(Fun trivia: My first sentence — “the plural of anecdote is not data” — is actually a misquote. The original line, attributed to a political scientist at Berkeley around 1980, actually said the exact opposite — “the plural of anecdote is data” — but a couple of years later a pair of Canadian scholars inverted it to make a point and, well, that’s what stuck in the public imagination.)
On to this week’s picks, which includes three promising beach reads. But, in line with my intro, be aware that the clock is ticking on all three, as suitors are already circling.
A spy-vs-spy thriller with Mrs. and Mrs. Smith vibes.
An insidery thriller about the personal assistant to a Hollywood couple who gets a little too involved in the lives of her employers.
A mystery about a daughter hunting for her missing mother — only a bloody shoe was left behind — and the secrets she discovers about her along the way.
A Talented Mr. Ripley-esque real-life mystery about a high school kid posing as a Russian oligarch.
An inspirational drama about a meth addict turned Olympic hopeful.
