IP Picks🔎: A Biting 'Nanny Wears Prada' Tell-All
âž• A moody Korean horror tale and 'Bridgerton' as a comic caper
Welcome to The Optionist.
First, I want to urge you to check out Elaine Low's Fall Market Guide series over at Series Business, which digs into what the studios are currently looking to buy. This first installment spotlights Apple TV+, but she’ll be following it up with pieces focusing on each studio and streamer. (Monday is Disney, I’m told.) The story is packed with granular detail and smart insights on a range of topics — from the kinds of sci-fi and comedy projects that Apple is looking for right now to the value of big stars being attached to projects out of the gate. I’m looking forward to the whole series. I know I’ll learn something from each and every dispatch and think you will as well.
Yes, it’s time once again for The Frankfurt Book Fair (or Buchmesse as it’s known in its native country, a great-sounding German word if ever there was one). The annual confab is going on right now — from Oct. 16 to 19. While mainly an international rights market, Frankfurt remains an important stop on the global publishing circuit due to the sheer number of agents, editors and other book-biz folks it brings together. It’s a great place to get an early read on the titles that everyone will be talking about down the road.
It may seem a bit premature, but right now the titles on the horizon that The Optionist is keeping an eye on include a fresh-sounding time-travel novel, a couple of promising romantasy books, a story set in a museum that involves cursed antiquities and a novel that’s being pitched as Outlander-meets-Jane Austen.
Of course, it wouldn't be Frankfurt if politics didn't rear its head. Last year, the hot topic was the war in Gaza. This time around, it involves the festival’s country of honor, Italy (each year one country is chosen for a spotlight on its culture), which failed to include Roberto Saviano, author of a popular crime series featuring Mafia investigator Falcone and, perhaps more to the point, a vocal critic of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
On the other hand, 2024 may end up being the year that Frankfurt finally caught up with the times. Consider some of the topics flagged by Buchmesse president and CEO Juergen Boos at his opening press conference: Concerns about AI, the connection between gaming and publishing, reaching younger readers and harnessing social media (Instagram and TikTok influencers especially) and the introduction of a new book-to-film matchmaking event.
I don't think that anyone in publishing possesses any special insights into these things. But BookTok, which has become a hugely influential phenomenon, is definitely worth paying attention to get more of an idea how to generate and take advantage of bottom-up influencer enthusiasm to promote something.
Another sign of how important courting younger readers is to publishers right now is the big sections set aside on the Fair’s floor for new adult books — in particular romantasy and dark college, genres I've regularly flagged.
As for the book-to-film matchmaking event, I’ll be honest, it was a bit of a disappointment. Awesome in theory, but meh in practice. The chosen titles skew literary and often feel too narrow in subject matter or setting to support the broad audience needed to make a movie or TV show a success. As everyone knows — well, everyone who reads The Optionist — there's a difference between a great book and a great book for adaptation. The Frankfurt event seemed to favor the former over the latter. It's the same problem I bumped into with a similar event at the Berlin Book Fair. It's not that there's nothing worthwhile there; you'll have to kiss a lot of frogs to find that one prince.
Now, on to this week’s picks, which include a couple of backlist picks that came out of my Frankfurt reporting.
The full lineup:
A period caper set in Victorian England
A gripping drama about a Vietnam War POW
A satire set in the world high-end NYC nannies
An atmospheric psychological chiller from Korea
A feel-good romance about two people who suffer horrific tragedies and find hope in one another
