IP Picks🔎: An Absinthe Mystery, a Gaslit Bride and a Murder Solved By a Fugitive
➕ The Black List is getting into the publishing business
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
Let's start with some potentially huge news about Hollywood and IP: The Black List, the annual survey of the hottest unproduced scripts created by Franklin Leonard in 2005, which has led to roughly 400 screenplays getting made since its creation, will now be bringing its crowd evaluation model to the world of fiction publishing.
The new initiative underscores just how much cross-pollination there is these days between the movie business and book publishing and how much the two are converging. How will it work? Well, unpublished authors will be able to set up a free profile on the List’s site, make their manuscripts available for professionals for a $30 fee and get an expert evaluation of the first 100 pages or so of their novels for a $150 fee. Randy Winston, the former director of The Center for Fiction, has been hired to oversee the effort.
The Black List will also introduce a new Unpublished Novel Award, which will be given out annually to one in-progress manuscript in each of seven genres: Children's & Young Adult, Crime & Mystery, Horror, Literary Fiction, Romance, Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Thriller & Suspense. The award comes with a $10k prize. The list of judges for the inaugural honors includes actors Tessa Thompson and LeVar Burton, producers Brad Simpson and Isaac Klausner, writers Tananarive Due, Claire Mazur and Graham Moore, and agents such as WME’s Eric Simonoff and Anonymous Content’s Howie Sanders. Entries close in June.
Additionally, The Black List will be teaming with Simon Kinberg’s Genre Films to give one lucky manuscript a $25k, 18-month option. (The deadline to apply for that is in July.) Finally, the group will be launching a new podcast called Read the Acknowledgments, which aims to demystify the publishing business via interviews with industry professionals.
I'm a big fan of both The Black List and Leonard, and this new expansion of their mission has a lot going for it. For starters, there's the value of having the respected Black List name attached to it. Like The Optionist, The Black List doesn't have a stake in the projects on its site, so people can be confident that there's no hidden agenda or ulterior motive in what gets promoted. Also, it promises to be a welcoming space for all voices in an industry not known for its diversity.
The Black List's evaluation model and its broad reach within the entertainment biz will give writers a decent shot at steering clear of the dreaded slush pile — and a leg up in circumventing the industry’s traditional gatekeepers, allowing fresh eyes to look at a project. “It could be a tool for publishers and editors to take more risks,” Aevitas’ Sarah Bowlin told the NYT. “What is rated highly might surprise us, and I hope it does.”
Still, publishing and Hollywood are very different worlds. The inefficiencies in the movie business that The Black List initially exploited don't exist in the world of books. At least, not in the same way. In movie development, the pyramid narrows very quickly. When the Black List started, there were too few gatekeepers, and the ones in power operated in a bit of an echo chamber. The Black List shone a light on the wealth of promising material below the tip of the pyramid. And it had the fortunate timing of arriving on the scene during a boom time in production.
In publishing, however, power and opportunity are more spread out. There are a lot more literary agents than movie agents and also more small publishers. Bringing a book to market is much cheaper than putting a movie into multiplexes. Then there’s the whole self-publishing sector, which has led to the rise of Kindle Direct and Wattpad. The self-publishing phenomenon (and its cousin, fan fiction) is not unlike the democratization that The Black List helped bring to the movie business. Just look at what happened with such breakout books as Fifty Shades of Grey, Legally Blonde, The Martian and The Kissing Booth. As a result, many agents, publishers and development execs now dig around in these places for new talent.
These spaces didn't just circumvent the traditional gatekeepers, they established a new fan-based hierarchy. Take Fifty Shades, my favorite example. E.L. James’ novel succeeded because readers liked it. Even the most open-minded publishing professional probably would have passed on the book because it didn’t check the conventional boxes in terms of style and characterization. But these bottom-up models can offer a ton of exposure — and opportunity — for unpublished writers.
I’m rooting for The Black List, though I'm trying to set my expectations at a realistic level. The Black List's credibility will draw authors, as will the fact that it already has a critical mass of insiders who are members. For the best material, its megaphone has the potential to reach more professionals and do it more quickly than other avenues. The potential of cash and prizes will attract authors. Seven different prizes means that a lot of hopefuls will think that they have a decent shot at winning. But I suspect that The Black List’s biggest impact will be the way that it convinces authors that posting their fiction there will be a shortcut to getting optioned.
This is exciting news. More opportunities for writers to get attention (and maybe representation or a book deal) is never a bad thing. Especially ones that lower the barriers for people who have felt frozen out of the business for one reason or another. I'll be watching closely.
Now, on to this week’s picks, which include a spin on the classic country house mystery, a hunt for an oddball forger and a gripping psychological thriller.
The full lineup:
A true-crime drama about the search for someone who created phony vintage alcoholic spirits
A psychological drama centered on an elderly woman who may have heard her husband confess to a notorious crime
A country house mystery set on a remote island during Prohibition that finds an on-the-run maid trying to figure out who murdered her boss, the wife of a notorious gangster
A true-crime thriller about a husband who teamed up with his au pair to knock off his wife so they could be together
A drama about an heiress who chooses a random group of people to get her fortune
