IP Picks🔎: YA with a Bollywood Twist
âž• The hunt for lost Bitcoin and the celebrity memoirs to watch
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
I wanted to flag this story about the IP market in the wake of the WGA strike coming to an end. It's a good overview of where things are. As expected, there's been a flood of announcements that were held up until after the strike because writers were attached. Among the handful of projects mentioned were two we flagged early on in the Optionist: Marisa Meltzer's expose on cosmetic company Glossier and its controversial girlboss founder, Emily Weiss, back in July, and Van Jensen's offbeat sci-fi/procedural novel about a small-town sheriff hunting a serial killer against the backdrop of a three-mile tall dead alien landing in a field, which has attracted upwards of ten offers ahead of its November publication. (Update: Imagine won the rights.)
New York magazine just did a list titled "The Most Powerful New Yorkers You’ve Never Heard Of," which I'm flagging because you might find the two publishing figures on it interesting. There's Jon Baker, who scouts for Reese Witherspoon, and Alia Hanna Habib, an agent at Gernert who has represented numerous high-profile authors of late. She mostly works in the current events space (Nikole Hannah-Jones, Chasten Buttigieg), so not stuff that's usually germane to the Optionist (though she reps Laura McGrath, who talked to us about her work using AI to illuminate publishing trends).
I was also thinking that it has been an incredibly robust fall for celebrity memoirs. We've gotten Jada Pinkett Smith's dishy Worthy, John Stamos' fun If You Would Have Told Me, nice guy Henry Winkler's tale of overcoming dyslexia in Being Henry, It Girl du jour Julia Fox's story in Down the Drain, Patrick Stewart's forthright Making It So and Kerry Washington's revealing Thicker than Water already. Still to come next month is perhaps the most anticipated of all: Barbra Streisand's My Name is Barbra, which clocks in at a hefty 900 (!!!) pages.
Just out is Britney Spears’ unexpectedly interesting and compelling The Woman in Me. (Well, unexpected by me who clearly underestimated the pop star.) We learn a lot about the abusive and exploitative pressures put on teenage Britney by the adults around her trying to milk every last cent out of her celebrity, and about the awful conservatorship she was put under. Plus, juicy stories about her relationships. Insightful and fun = a killer combo. And we get Michelle Williams doing the audiobook version. If you haven’t heard it yet, listen to this clip of Williams narrating a scene where Justin Timberlake makes a fool of himself. Brilliant. If she doesn't get a Grammy for this, there's no justice in the world. And whoever thought up and made this fab pairing happen should get an immediate raise.
The Woman in Me also marks the arrival of a new superstar ghostwriter in Time contributing editor Sam Lansky. (Here's a great profile.) To help turn Britney's story into one of the best-reviewed, buzziest and best-selling books of the season is no small feat. All on his first try. Amazing. I expect he'll become one of the go-to celebrity ghostwriters now.
Here’s the full rundown for this week:
A fun YA dramedy in the vein of Never Have I Ever.
A thriller about a woman who returns to her hometown, moves back into the family mansion and finally gets to the truth of her parents’ murder.
A coming-of-age drama about a girl trying to come to terms with her father’s death while working for a group restoring a wilderness hiking trail.
A drama about the race to hack a computer drive containing hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin.
