TV adaptations are having a profound influence on the book publishing industry

The Atlantic

"If you want a preview of next year’s Emmy Awards, just take a walk past your local bookstore," explain The Atlantic's Alexander Manshel, Laura B. McGrath and J. D. Porter. "According to data drawn from Publishers Marketplace, the industry’s clearinghouse for news and self-reported book deals, literary adaptations to television have been on a steady climb. The site has listed nearly 4,000 film and television deals since it launched in 2000, and both the number and proportion of TV deals have increased dramatically in that same period. Last year, reported TV adaptations exceeded film adaptations for the first time ever. Literary adaptations are big business. For streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, they provide a reliable source of content for limited or multiseason series; Publisher’s Weekly reported in 2019 that Netflix was on a 'book-buying spree,' and the company has shown no sign of slowing. Rotten Tomatoes cites 125 literary adaptations in development right now. All of this has had a profound effect on the literary world. As you might expect, becoming a TV show increases a novel’s popularity enormously. Adaptations can drive book sales, as in the case of this winter’s breakout hit Bridgerton. The Regency-era bodice-ripper is not alone: A number of backlist titles, such as The Queen’s Gambit, have enjoyed a late-in-life revival thanks to Netflix’s attention. We see evidence of the adaptation effect in other measures of literary success as well. We compiled a list of about 400 21st-century novels that met certain criteria—inclusion in top-10 best-seller lists, critics’ picks, publishers’ comp titles, and so on. Within this group, a novel that becomes a show will receive about four times as many ratings on Goodreads.com as a novel that has never been adapted to TV or film. (Film still has a bigger effect, boosting a novel’s Goodreads ratings more than 1000 percent; TV nonetheless dramatically improves the fortunes of a novel.) More surprising is that TV adaptations also correspond with a rise in a novel’s prestige. Adapted novels in our set have almost twice the citations of unadapted works in academic articles, and appear on about twice as many college syllabi. TV doesn’t just borrow highbrow status from the novel; it apparently sends some back."