Could The Next Hollywood Be New York?

by R.S. Mellette

To work in the film industry, one goes to Hollywood; for publishing, New York. But could that paradigm change in the near future?

Way back in the 1990's, a book was something that came on paper and a movie on film. To buy a book, you went to the bookstore. To see a movie, you went to the theatre or a video store. They were two very different businesses.

Today, both movies and books are digital files. If you want to buy a book, you go to Amazon, iTunes, or Nook. To see a movie you go to ... Amazon, iTunes or Nook.

For computers, the only difference between film and literature is the size of the file. Tour a publishing house or a digital film lab without looking at the computer screens and you'll be hard-pressed to know which was which. They are both transcoding files for different platforms, QCing those files, preparing metadata and art (posters or covers), checking chapter breaks, compressing, and uploading them to the providers.

So, consider ... Motion Picture Studios don't really make movies anymore; haven't for a long time. Sure, they find the projects. They develop the material. They finance the productions, and they distribute them, but the nuts and bolts of turning ink-on-paper into images on the screen is jobbed out to production companies. Imagine makes movies mostly for Universal. Village Road Show for Warner Bros. etc. Of course there is a tight partnership, since the Studios are often putting in most of the money, but even that is beginning to lean more heavily in the direction of the production companies.

Let's say you're a publishing house. The book industry has become so volatile that you need some ballast. You need to leverage the assets you have in a way that can spread the risk. But what assets are those? You have a company full of people who know a good book when they read one, and they are willing to read a ton of them to find the gems. You have a library of good stories, and you're buying new ones all the time. But does that make you a valuable company, or the most insane person in your neighborhood book club?

What's the first thing a movie studio does? They find the projects. You, as a publisher, are sitting on a mountain of them. Not only have you found the diamonds in the rough, you've polished them and presented them to market. You have developed the material.

In your library are Romance Novels that could become a money machine in your own Harlequin YouTube channel. And you're buying new stuff. You just shelled out cash and resources for Mindy McGinnis's Not a Drop to Drink, which is screaming for a wide theatrical release. If you're good, you can lock up the film rights before Hollywood knows what hit them.

In fact, the right of first refusal on the movie is now going to be in your standard contract.

What's the next thing a studio does? They finance. You're a publishing company. You're in New York. You can't swing a big black cat without hitting a handful of hedge fund managers who would love to place a bet on a Big Six project. Where the independent film producer has to beg and explain what they are doing, you can say, "I'm the person who found Hunger Games and Harry Potter. Wanna play with me?"

So, you've got the money. You've got the properties. Now comes the tricky part every homeowner can attest to, finding the right contractor to build on your property. If only there was a high turnover rate in Hollywood. Then there would be plenty of experienced executives looking for the chance to get back into producing. They'd have the connections to put together a string of companies to produce your entire slate.

Oh, wait! There IS a high turnover rate of executives in Hollywood. You can't swing a hedge fund manager without hitting a former studio executive. Or, in my case, a current festival director who gave you this idea in the first place.

So if this is such a brilliant plan, why hasn't anyone done it before?

Not everyone has access to the intellectual property you do, and there's distribution. In the theatrical days, a company had to have a strong relationship with the theatre owners to squeeze their films into the crowded market. That's still true of theatres, but the future is on line. You, as a new studio, are going to have to have a working relationship with the platforms that distribute films, and – bingo! You do.

Amazon, iTunes, Nook, etc. You've been delivering to them for years. You have servers and staff in place to QC, package, and upload to all of these platforms. Once you are delivering films, Netflix, Playstation, Hulu, Vudu, Cinema Now and more will come knocking.

And you're vertically integrated. When people like the book they just read on their iPad; one click and they're watching the movie. What? The movie hasn't been made? They can pre-order it You'll send it directly to their device as soon as it's ready. Talk about crowd funding, a movie could be profitable before it's even shot.

And none of this takes into account the lower budgets on films. The guilds all have "made for New Media" contracts in place with attractive rates. Shooting digitally is a fraction of the cost of the old film days. You could crank out low budget Romance Movies as fast as Cali MacKay can write the books. For the bigger budget theatrical releases, you can partner up with – and learn from – a major studio. In fact, they probably own your company anyway, so the good faith negotiations will be a breeze.

But what about the writers? Will new writers be willing to sell their film rights at the same time they do their book? That's an individual choice, of course, and I hope agents and writers alike will comment here about their thoughts on the subject. Personally, I'd say yes for a few reasons.

First, you're not selling the rights, you're selling the exclusive option to buy the rights within a certain time period. At the end of that time - if they haven't sold it - you get to keep the money you were advanced, and go try to sell the option to someone else. If your agent is good, you might sell a 3 year option from the contract date. It will take two years to get your manuscript to market, and then one year to establish sales. Hollywood will read an unpublished manuscript, but they won't take a lot of interest if it doesn't have sales behind it, so you've been paid for three years of an option, when it's only costing you about six months of post-publising time.

Another reason to sell your film rights to your publisher is that they will be into your project for a lot of money. Turning the red ink on your balance sheet to black is a big motivator in the corporate world. They are going to want your manuscript to be as big of a hit as possible, and that larger investment is going to keep you on their hot sheet.

And finally, it's money! Take it! Sure, most Hollywood movies are based on books these days, but most books don't get made into movies. Yes, there's a chance that they'll hold onto the rights and do nothing, but they paid you. That's better than you and your agent shopping the project around to production companies for nothing. Let your publisher take the project to the same producers with the sales pitch, "and we have the money to produce it." You're in a win-win all the way.

Now, if only I could figure out how to make this a win for me... because, you know, it's all about me.

R.S. Mellette is an experienced screenwriter, actor, director, and novelist. You can find him at the Dances With Films festival blog, and on Twitter, or read him in the Spring Fevers and The Fall: Tales of the Apocalypse anthologies.

Do It Like a Pro

by R.C. Lewis

I have a confession. I’m a little bit of a perfectionist. Just a little. As busy as it keeps me in my own life, it also has a side-effect of making me picky about some things.

Such as eBooks.

My mother owns a Nook (e-ink), my father owns an iPad, and I have an iPhone. I’ve perused a number of eBooks on all three, both Big-6 and indie, using a variety of apps on the Apple devices. I haven’t e-published anything myself yet, but I’ve played with the file formatting process, educating myself in case I decide to go that route.

"But it’s easy!" I hear you say. A few tweaks to your Word file, upload it to Kindle Direct Publishing and/or Smashwords, and conversion to eBook happens like magic.

Well, sometimes.

And sometimes the magic malfunctions.

With many writers new to the world of eBooks, they often think their DIY product looks just as good as the latest eBook from a major publisher, but does it really?

Here’s R.C.’s personal list of formatting red flags. (And when they show up in “pro” eBooks, I’m really annoyed.)

• No Linked Table of Contents. Yes, I know, they’re not required. But why would you not utilize one of the most basic advantages of digital literature? When I bring up the ToC, I should see either chapter numbers or the full chapter title.
• Incorrect Justification. Text should be full justified (lining up on both the right and left edges) with hyphenation to avoid the odd case of one longish word spread out to fill a whole line. This is especially important when reading on a smartphone, and annoying when not done properly. Apparently, some people prefer the ragged-right-edge look—I'm not one of them. Most e-reading apps let the reader choose (which can lead to some other issues), but if there's a "publisher default" option, I prefer that to show up justified.*
• Missing/Inconsistent Indentation. Paragraphs should be consistently indented. I can live with block paragraph formatting, which is how this blog post is set up—no indentation, and extra space between each paragraph. I have seen eBooks (for which people charge money) with a few paragraphs indented, but many others missing the indent and no space to denote a new paragraph. The only clue that a new paragraph has started is the fact that the last line may have ended a little early (which is hard to spot if the book is left-aligned). Very difficult to read.
• No Chapter Breaks. Each chapter should start on a new screen regardless of my chosen text size. You’re not saving paper by starting the chapter a “page” earlier. Some may not think this is important, but when I get the chapter heading sitting at the bottom of the page, I don't like it.
• Weird Margins. This one’s more rare, and I’m not sure what the author/publisher is doing wrong to make it happen, but I’ve occasionally seen eBooks with very wide left/right margins. Again, when reading on a smartphone, this is particularly maddening.

Can you avoid these red flags on your own? It’s been done. There are innumerable forum and blog posts containing tips for formatting your Word document just right to get perfect conversion from sites like KDP and Smashwords.

Alas, my perfectionism has spawned my inner control-freak. If I’m going to DIY, I like the idea of doing as much of it directly as I can, rather than trusting so much of the conversion to happen outside my control. The powers-that-be over at AgentQuery Connect have been experimenting on that end and have developed this helpful guide for getting a file ready for Kindle. They've also got a matching fancy-pants guide for making an ePub file. (I don't think they agree with me about the chapter breaks. Maybe not justification, either. We'll see if they forgive me.)

For my own experiments, I’ve used Apple’s Pages word processor, which will export to ePub format. After a simple tweak to insert my cover image (rather than pasting the image onto the first page of the document), it looked great on both the e-ink Nook and the iBooks app on the Apple devices. (Oh, speaking of covers, I'll get to that in a minute.) I used a free program called Calibre to convert to .mobi format for Kindle readability—a Kindle-owning friend was kind enough to check how it looks on the actual device, and it seems pretty solid. I plan to do some more careful checking of that soon.

* Here's the promised note. I've made four ePub files that I read on my iPhone. Used the exact same style settings and process for all four. With my iPhone full justification setting turned off and auto-hyphenation on, two show up with full justification (as I told it to do in Pages), and two don't, with the exception of a few random paragraphs. After digging into the gnarly code (ePubs are little more than a zipped group of HTML files), I found the difference and had some fun with find-and-replace to clean it up. Still not sure how the inconsistencies crept in there from the Pages file.

I’m sure there are a number of ways to get it done, some requiring more technical expertise than others. The important thing is that your method delivers high-quality results.

Now, a quick word on covers. Remember, on search result screens, your cover image won’t be any bigger than most postage stamps, but the title (and hopefully your name) should still be somewhat legible. On a main product page, the image will be larger, so it should also look good under that level of scrutiny. On many e-ink readers, the cover image will be displayed grayscale; you need to have enough contrast.

Don’t use artwork/images/fonts you don’t have the rights to use.

If anyone could mistake your cover for an elementary student’s very first assignment using Photoshop, consider professional help. It’s the first impression potential readers will have of your book. Don’t make it a turn-off.

Do you have any pet-peeves regarding eBook formatting? Any tips for getting it done right (and at what level of techno-prowess)?