The Breakdown - Week of 8/3/20
Well, hello there! It’s Friday, so I’ve got another issue of “The Breakdown” for you!
But first, a possible change and then a reader question.
As each week’s posts have gotten longer and my analysis deeper, I’m finding the newsletter taking up more time. Now, I LOVE DOING THIS NEWSLETTER! Don’t get me wrong. I really enjoy compiling interesting news, tracking the changing landscape of publishing and entertainment, and interacting with all of you. But I have to fit this project in with work and my own writing. So, I MAY be moving to a twice monthly publication with either a Writer’s Workshop or Industry Deep Dive as well, alternating every month. Which means, in short, we’d move from four posts a month to three. I’m still mulling it over but I wanted to give you that heads up.
And now, a question from reader Britain K. that came in after the last newsletter (Thank you BK!) - Do you know if there are other communities on Reddit like r/nosleep that are not focused on horror stories?
I responded directly to Britain, but dug a bit deeper and will expand on this a bit more here. So, although reddit has other subreddits dedicated to short fiction (like r/shortstories and r/ThrillSleep for example), few are terribly active and none comes close to being the phenomena that r/nosleep has become. According to another article I found, How Reddit is helping horror writers find success, that delves more deeply into the channel, r/nosleep has grown to about 14 million subscribers and has its own writing community and subculture around it. The article also delves into some of the pitfalls of publishing there (and elsewhere online) like steep competition and plagiarism. It’s a good read, so be sure to check it out.
All right, with that, this edition will be broken up into four sections:
Writing Prompts
Contest Alert
News
Final Thoughts
Ready? Excellent! Let’s get started…
Prompts
These prompts are from my book, What Would Your Character Do? They’re designed to give you some momentum if you ever find yourself stuck in a scene. If these five prompts don’t work for you, hang tight! You’ll get another five in a week, or you could just buy, or check out, the book to pick from over 500 more!
If you're stuck in a scene, try to have your character:
1. Make a lucky guess in a tricky situation
2. Complain about something that's been bothering them
3. Receive new information and chart a different course
4. Accuse someone of something
5. Question someone's motive
Give those prompts some time to marinate, and if they’re not doing it for you, you’ll get five more next week!
Contest Alerts
The Imagine-Impact/Netflix initiative has opened up their next round
The next segment in the year-long initiative will be opening up soon and the prompt for this one is: Lifestyle Movies with a Competition Element
Yeah, I didn’t get that one at first either, but some digging finally turned up this bit:
This prompt is seeking movies set in fresh, interesting lifestyles or subcultures with stories that organically incorporate or crescendo in a competition of some kind. The competition can be in any field, from sports and arts, to business and academia, and everything in between.
Some examples include: 8 Mile, Blue Crush, Step Up, Pitch Perfect, Whip It, Stomp the Yard, and Drumline.
Okay…now, that makes much more sense! Applications open August 15th and remain open until August 30, 2020 at 11:59pm PT and the program now has a podcast!
American Zoetrope Screenplay Competition and the Stories 2020: 24th Annual Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Competition
I hadn’t realized that Zoetrope (Francis Ford Coppola’s entertainment company) still held sway in the contest world, but by the looks of the quality of companies represented by their judging panel (WME, ICM, Sterling Lord Literistic, Fox Searchlight, etc.), it still does. Now, we don’t know who will be reviewing the entries—it could be a junior agent or development executive or it could be someone’s assistant who’s just there to rep the company. But in any event, Zoetrope is very well-regarded, and I’ll have more about how their contests serve as a source for literary agents in an upcoming edition.
The John Steinbeck Award for Fiction
Awarding one of the richest purses among literary magazines—$1,000 for the winning story—the John Steinbeck Award for Fiction recognizes exceptional works of fiction. Aesthetically, they are open to most styles and approaches, including experimental and literary. All works should be stand-alone short stories, not chapters of a longer work. Submissions should be limited to 5,000 words.
The PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers
(Note - For this one, your short story needs to be published in a literary magazine, journal, or on a cultural website, first, and then submitted) - The PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers recognizes 12 emerging writers each year for their debut published short story. Each of the 12 winning writers receives a cash prize of $2,000, and the independent book publisher Catapult will publish the 12 winning stories in an annual anthology entitled Best Debut Short Stories: The PEN America Dau Prize, which will acknowledge the literary magazines and websites where the stories were originally published.
News
(Click title links for the source articles)
‘Resident Evil’ Producer Constantin Film Acquires ‘Perfect Addiction’ from Wattpad
So…the streak continues. Wattpad, as a viable development hub for IP and content, especially content aimed at Gen Z, is pretty much firmly established by this point. What’s interesting is that they’re clearly doing deals outside of the big studio deals they previously announced with the likes of Sony Pictures Television, Universal Cable Productions, and a host of international studios. Quite a few of the latest deals have actually been with smaller production companies. This deal, for example, comes from Constantin Film.
Constantin Film has acquired the rights to hit novel “Perfect Addiction,” set in the world of boxing, partnering up once again with producer Jeremy Bolt. The film will blend a “Rocky-esque underdog story and a salacious romance in a sexy and gripping package,” according to a statement from Constantin. Claudia Tan’s book is the second novel of the very popular English-language “Perfect” series, published on Wattpad, and has racked up more than 81 million reads and won the People’s Choice Award – by audience votes – at the 2015 Wattys.
Earlier last year, Wattpad announced the acquisition of Rachel Meinke’s story Along for The Ride in conjunction with Picturestart.
Now, one of the things I’ve wondered is that given Wattpad is as much a tech company as it is a user-generated content company, how far off is a lower-tiered, self-serve, subscription model where independent producers and production companies, who can’t pay the white-glove, premium studio price will be able to sign up with a credit card for access to a clean functional user interface? This would allow them (or more likely their development assistants) to search, the library of over 500 million stories by genre, reads, comment sentiment, and activity? I don’t know that this is a direction they’re taking or even exploring, but they’ve been doing more deals with smaller players and with the explosion of growth they’ve experienced, and competition hot on their heels (see below), I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a service they offered in the future. If they did, it could be a game-changer for the platform as well as for writers.
Now, before you go gettin’ all excited about putting every story you’ve got up on Wattpad for Ridley Scott to discover, or whatever, there are definitive patterns to these deals and there are discovery issues on the platform (as there are with most large publishing platforms.) But that’s a longer post that we’ll have to get into at a later date.
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Serialized Fiction App Radish Gets $63M Funding, Opens LA Office, & Eyes TV Opportunities
So, remember how I mentioned competition for Wattpad on the horizon? Well, Radish Fiction is one of their competitors, and they’ve just gotten a HUGE infusion of cash from the likes of SoftBank and others. What’s interesting is that Radish has a slightly different revenue model than Wattpad does, both in the way it monetizes its stories and in their strategy for conquering Hollywood.
The primary Radish revenue model relies heavily on “coins,” which are like in-app purchases, where readers pay for access to a story chapter by chapter, after making their way through the first few chapters for free. Some of these stories are revenue-shares with the authors and some are purchased outright. In some instances, there’s free content available on the site or readers can access a new chapter after waiting a certain amount of time for it to unlock. But for the most part, Radish has relied on this in-app, “free preview chapters + chapter-by-chapter unlock” model as their go-to model to date. It’s a very common model used with serialized fiction sites in Asia. It’s only now that they’re leaning heavily into monetizing their IP. From both the article and from what I hear from Radish writers, the bulk, if not all of the original IP they hope to develop for film, TV, and games will be company-owned.
Wattpad, on the other hand, was very late to the monetization game, only introducing coins about a year and a half ago with the introduction of their Paid Stories program (of which I am a participant.) Their focus prior to that was building up a huge, global user base of readers and writers, monetizing that base with ads, and then going straight for Hollywood, making deals—at first—with the more experimentally-oriented outfits like CW Seed, CBC Gems, Awesomeness TV, and Tongal. In the past year or so, those deals have evolved, and are now often with the major players like Universal and Sony. With the Wattpad deals, the IP is still owned by the author, and Wattpad partners with them, acting like an agent, a manager, or a producer, depending on the deal.
Two different approaches, the same aim: to be an incubator and go-to source for content, especially content aimed at Gen Z and digital natives.
Now, don’t forget that Tapas and Webtoon are also in the mix, as highlighted in my Comics for a Mobile Generation article back in May. Other online platforms are serving this function as well, as highlighted in my last story about the Reddit Short Story to Netflix deal and my Industry Deep Dive #1. I do believe that these online “direct-to-consumer” platforms will increasingly become viable, and even fluorshing, sources for new film, TV, and game IP development. And again, while I’ll have to break it down further in a longer piece at a later date, the fact that a platform like Wattpad has enabled a project from an unknown, unpublished author to go straight from posting chapters online for fans to active development at the SyFy channel is kinda mind-blowing.
It’s all so fascinating, don’t you think?
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NBCUniversal Begins Layoffs As Streaming-Driven Reshaping Takes Effect
Aside from the ousting of NBC Entertainment chairman Paul Telegdy for allegations of professional misconduct and the effects of COVID, especially on the NBCU theme parks and TV & Film production, word is that their streaming strategy and the push behind the Peacock launch is driving as much of the paring down and restructuring as anything. I don’t know. Studio corporate strategy and theatrical distribution are way above my paygrade, but I’m parking this here as one to watch. With the move to digital releases for big Hollywood films like Trolls World Tour, Tom Hanks’ Greyhound, and now Mulan going direct to Disney+, it feels like the ground is really shifting beneath our feet, and in a fundamental way. Add on top of that Universal cutting a deal with AMC Theaters to shorten the theatrical window of time before a first-run film can head to PVOD (the acronym industry term for “premium video on demand,”) there are just so many moving parts! How it will affect the likes of you and me (as consumers and creators), we’ll have to see.
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Book Deals: Week of August 3, 2020
Of note, Sourcebooks’ Anna Michels and Jenna Jankowski nabbed world English rights, at auction, to the historical novel The Girl in His Shadow, written by Jaima Fixsen and Regina Sirois, who are writing the title under the pen name Amelia Blake. It’s about a woman who survived a mid-19th-century pandemic that “left her an orphan secretly studying medicine when such practice was prohibited by law.”
Also, Web developer Sarah Zachrich Jeng sold her debut novel, The Other Me, to Jen Monroe at Berkley. The two-book, North American rights deal was brokered by Joanna MacKenzie at Nelson Literary Agency. Berkley compared the book to Netflix’s Russian Doll and the novel Dark Matter, and said it was bought after a 72-hour exclusive. The Other Me, the PRH imprint added, is “a genre-bending story about a frustrated artist who accidentally steps into a new reality where she never pursued her dreams.”
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Avon US is closed, but Avon UK is open to unagented submissions -
So, I’m not sure if Avon UK publishes any U.S. authors; and if the do, obviously, it’s the exception, not the rule. If you’re a UK author (or an author from the Commonwealth), this could be a great opportunity. They seemed on the lookout for books by authors from Canada, Ireland, Australia, India, and Africa. They might even be open to stories set in the UK, despite where the author’s from. In any event, it’s worth digging into.
According to The Bookseller, Avon Books snapped up Little Bones, a “top-class” thriller by N.V. Peacock through its open submission process. The publisher picked up world rights for the title, which will publish in e-book on 31st October with a paperback to follow in December. There will also be an audio edition with exclusive bonus content featuring podcast interviews with characters from the story.
It seems like UK publishers are very eager to get submissions in the door. I found this article a little while ago:
Dash, a new digital-first commercial fiction imprint from Hachette-owned UK publisher Orion
…which also references another relatively new, UK digital-first imprint opening up called, One More Chapter.
Final Thoughts
There’s lots to unpack here, folks, that’s for sure. Streaming has had a massive impact on the acquisition and distribution of entertainment. And I’d argue, it’s the success of The Kissing Booth, which originated on Wattpad, and The Kissing Booth 2 (and there’s a Kissing Booth 3 in the works) that will enable—even more so than the success of indie film After (also originating on Wattpad)—more stories and IP to be developed in a “direct-to-consumer” model and then go straight to the screen. These properties have proven they have an audience, so studios and producers see them as less risky (and less work to market, let’s be honest), which for creators means it’s now easier than ever to create attractive IP that works for both the creator and the producer, and could even be the next big hit.
The success of Trolls World Tour going straight to digital—and in the process earning the studio $95 million in fees from nearly 5 million customers over the course of three weeks—simply can’t be ignored. Neither can we ignore the fact that Mulan will now be available, direct, to 60+ million homes upon release (driving one poor cinema owner in France to go all Sopranos on his marquee Mulan advertising stand-up).
The landscape before us is changing, at an almost alarming rate. And it’s the streamers and the streamlining of the creative process—a process that overall, I’m calling “direct-to-consumer”—that’s enabled this change. It’s a fundamental adaptation to the way we entertain ourselves and are entertained.
And this adaptation is creating opportunities, but you have to know where to look. That’s where The Breakdown comes in. I’ll do my best to be your eyes and ears (and please do share if you know others who might enjoy this newsletter!), and you do your best to create awesome content. Deal? 😊
Until next time!
~ Paula
✨ Interested in learning more about my projects or contacting me outside of the newsletter? Awesome sauce! You can reach me on any of the platforms or channels here! ✨
Apologies. I've been behind but I'm catching up. Stellar post as always. Thanks so much