IP Picks🔎: 'The Bear' with a Dose of Country Music
âž• A British-set thriller with 'Big Little Lies' vibes and a mission to take back stolen Nazi treasure
Welcome to The Optionist. Come see what we’re reading this week, but first …
My local Target had Christmas stuff out for sale before Halloween. Before Halloween! So I guess I shouldn't be surprised that we got our first end-of-year "best of" list already — this one featuring the top 150 books (divided by category) from Publishers Weekly showed up before the first of November. I'll be flagging the major ones as they come out. They're fun to look at, even though what publishers like and what makes good adaptable IP aren't always the same thing. Still, I always go over the lists to see if there are things I overlooked while checking on the rights. (There are indeed a few titles I'm following up on from the Publishers Weekly one.)
I'm always looking at three or four different timelines at once when curating The Optionist. The main one is books coming out in a few months; stuff that's just about to start circulating. There’s also books that are just publishing or recently came out (the "best of" lists fit into this bucket), where I’m looking to catch anything good that I may have missed in galleys. Then there’s fresh book deals. It's premature to consider most of those, because there's usually not a complete manuscript to look at yet. But I'm making notes on stuff to follow up on and occasionally something will pop up that should be included, even at this early stage. Lastly, there’s backlist titles, which isn't really a timeline per se, but it's a bucket I'm always trying to fill. I'm always going back over each of these timelines to make sure I didn't overlook something on my first (or second or third) pass.
Publishing is so sprawling and so full of interesting IP everywhere you look that it's easy, even for someone who spends all his time immersed in it like me, to always feel like you’ve missed something. So you double-check. I'm not kidding when I say The Optionist is like having an extra set of hands on your development team!
There are also a couple of odds and ends I want to flag for your attention. This New Yorker piece on Emory professor Dan Sinykin’s new book, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, is worth a read. I'm fascinated by how much Hollywood and big publishing have begun to resemble each other structurally, especially with the rise of what we out here call business affairs in determining what gets made based on modeling, and assumptions about what will or will not make a profit. The same thing is happening in publishing.
The second thing that catches my attention is the acknowledgment that the romantic myth of the author as the singular creator is just that ... a myth. Publishing hasn't adopted the writers room approach to fiction creation (yet ... thankfully), but as Sinykin points out, there are already too many hands that go into a book and determine its success — agents, editors, marketers, etc. — to consider it really a solo creative endeavor in the way writing is romanticized. Will either of these ideas change how you do business on a day-to-day basis? Probably not. But I do think having a sense of the larger forces shaping publishing — still the biggest source of IP — rattling around in the back of your head is useful.
Seems I jumped the gun on Britney Spear’s ghostwriter. It's ghostwriters. In this great NYT piece, Jacob Bernstein (reminder: he's Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein's kid) reveals it took a team of three ghostwriters to get Britney's book across the finish line. I say that not to diminish the final product or throw shade on Britney, but because I think it illuminates the care and effort that goes into creating a celebrity memoir that is both readable and sounds like that person. Writing a book, even a memoir, is an earned skill. Just because you lived through something, doesn't mean you have the expertise to turn it into a compelling narrative. The term ghostwriter still has negative connotations, which I wish we could move on from.
Here’s the full rundown for this week:
A feel-good drama about a country music star who returns to his small Kentucky hometown to re-invent himself after his career implodes and reconnects with his first love.
A domestic thriller about some new wealthy moms who are possibly killers.
A YA thriller about a young girl framed for murder that comes with a paranormal twist.
A drama about one man’s hunt to recover his family’s treasures stolen by the Nazis.
