EDDIE GAMARRA: The Real Deal About Television & New Media

Hollywood is derivative; Hollywood is redundant; Hollywood is driven by brands, Eddie says. It can still be hard to predict what will work--Alvin & the Chipmunks was a big hit; Nancy Drew was a flop. There are 20 people in Hollywood who are meaningful--20 actors, 20 writers, 20 directors--and they're very busy, Eddie says.

For TV, he says, it's a little different. TV is a character-driven and relationship-driven. When considering whether your books might work for TV, think about whether you can imagine your characters surviving for episode after episode with anything thrown at them and still remaining your characters. (At the end of every episode, Homer Simpson is always Homer Simpson, for example.)

There are three ways book writers can make money in Hollywood:

• Options: A studio has exclusive rights to make your book into a film for a specified period of time (which may or may not happen).
• Purchases: The studio owns all the rights. Writers will very rarely get any involvement in a project involving their books/characters.
• Back-end: Bonuses on box-office milestones, for example.
  

--POSTED BY ALICE