According to the Motion Picture Association of America, around 600 movies are released in the US each year. So let’s imagine the UK is slightly less and go for around 1000 movies a year for the US & UK.
Roughly Three million books are released each year.
If we go for the high percentage year of 2014 when around 50% of movies were based on books that’s about 500 books that became movie potentials. So, from this information let’s get a percentage of books that make it into movies.
That makes the percentage of books that get turned into movies 0.016%
Also bear in mind that most of the books that get turned into films or TV shows will likely already be best-sellers to be considered, a lot will be published by big publishing houses such as Penguin or Harper Collins and then you have old books made into movies – e.g. the release of Stephen King’s Pet Cemetery this year, the book was released in 1983 – whatever is leftover are books not in the charts published by indie publishers (like Olympia) or self-published.
Now, looking at the cold, hard facts. Please take the above into consideration when you email your publisher asking when your book will be made into a movie or TV show.
To quote Robert Blevins, Managing Editor and Co-Founder of Adventure Books of Seattle
“Authors write books. Sometimes they become best-sellers. Studios buy the film rights. Relatively few of them make it to the big screen. Even if they do, it can take years”.
How it works usually is a production company will contact us about buying the film rights to your book and we go from there. If a publisher sends a production or film company a book, they go straight into their trash we’re afraid. This is because they get thousands of books each week all wanting to be tv shows and movies but it doesn’t work that way.
To put it into a well-known perspective, it took 2 years before the film rights to Harry Potter were sold and that is very fast in terms of book to movie. Also, Harry Potter was a well-known novel at this point and was in the best-selling charts.
Still, anything is possible! Luck plays a big part, being realistic but hopeful is the best way to be.
