Turn Your Book Into A TV Or Streaming Series

As more streaming services come online every year, the demand for stories to also grows. Academy-honored author and adaptation consultant John Robert Marlow offers tips about what Hollywood is looking for in a series, and how to pitch it to them in a way that will have your name in the credits.

Humans have always been storytellers.

Whether gathered around a campfire, painting on cave walls, writing words on dead trees or glowing screens—it's in our blood.

Books and other storytelling formats can be noble undertakings, capable of reaching hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of people. But movies and series are the global campfires of our time.

And those fires are about to become more numerous—offering adaptable storytellers an unprecedented opportunity to get their stories on the screen. While the number of well-heeled movie buyers has been dropping as major studios merge with each other, the number of buyers for streaming / TV series is about to explode.

Thirty-three million Americans cut the cord on cable services in 2018. The reason is simple: viewers no longer need to pay inflated cable prices for content they can find on more reasonably-priced streaming services like Netflix and Amazon.

The number of streaming subscribers, on the other hand, is now approaching 200 million in the U.S. alone. Netflix has subscribers in 192 countries.

Not coincidentally, new streaming services have been announced by Apple, Disney, NBC/Universal, WarnerMedia, and DC Universe. All of these are scheduled to come online in 2018-2019.

The price of entry is not cheap. In 2017, streaming leader Netflix spent over $6 billion on content. In 2018, that figure rose to $13 billion. Amazon has announced plans to spend a billion dollars on a single series.

To compete with that, old content will not be enough.

Every one of the new streaming entrants will be shopping for new content, and spending billions of dollars to buy it.

Existing players will have to up their games as well; HBO, for example, is bumping its original content by 50% in 2019. Facebook Watch and Walmart’s Vudu have also announced expansions.

The situation is an unprecedented and seismic shift that will affect the entertainment landscape for decades to come. And what that means is this: There has never been a better time to pitch a series.

But what exactly is a series pitch, and what are buyers looking for? We’ll cover that in a moment.

But first, the obvious question: why not just sell the screen rights to your book, instead of doing a series proposal? Two reasons: money, and credits (which mean more money).

Unless you’ve already hit it big as an author—really, really big—the amount of money (and especially up-front money) you get for rights alone will be small, and you will likely have little or no involvement in the ongoing series (which again means less money).

Series proposals, like feature screenplays, answer questions books don’t: How do we adapt this into a series? What do we keep, what do we drop, what do we add, change or move around? Who do we hire to write it, what’s that going to cost us, how long will it take and—at the end of all that—will we have something worth filming?

When you walk in the door with the finished proposal, all of those questions go away. If they like it, they option or buy it. The closer you can get them to the finish line—the easier you can make their job—the more they will pay you. In addition to a source credit (“based on the book [Your Title Here] by [You]”) and payment for each episode, you will now get a “created by” credit and possibly a producer credit as well.

Each of these comes with—you guessed it—more money per episode. Because you’ve shown that you can write an engaging pilot and convey a vision for the series, you may also be tapped to write future episodes—collecting a “written by” credit and yet another paycheck.

Simply put, the longer the series goes on and the more involved you are, the more you make. It can, in the best cases, be the difference between thousands and millions.

What Hollywood Wants

Through long and sometimes painful experience, Hollywood buyers have discovered qualities that, while they may not guarantee series success, certainly make success more likely. And so whether your series proposal is being looked at by an agent, manager, producer, actor, director or studio executive, you can rest assured that they are ticking through a mental checklist as they go.

A checklist that looks rather like this…

1. Pitchable Concept

Hollywood movers and shakers may have more money than the average writer, but they have considerably less time. They want to know who and what your story is about—in ten seconds or less. If you can’t keep their attention for ten seconds, you can’t do it for thirty minutes or an hour.

This means a killer logline that contains the three essential elements of your story’s core concept: who it’s about, what their goal is, and the obstacle that stands in their way.

“A fugitive doctor wrongly convicted of killing his wife struggles to prove his innocence while pursued by a relentless U.S. Marshal.” That’s a logline. At a relaxed pace, it takes seven seconds to say aloud.

2. Relatable Characters

The biggest, most action-packed story in the world will bore an audience to tears if the characters aren’t there. The smallest, most personal story in the world will rivet the audience if the characters are relatable and/or compelling.

Ideally, different audience segments see a bit of themselves, or people they know, in different characters.

Viewers keep watching, not because they want to know what happens next, but because they’re emotionally invested in the characters and they have to know what happens to the characters next.

Fortunately, the very nature of series allows us to explore and develop characters in ways that features simply don’t have time for.

3. Emotionally Compelling Story

The main characters’ journeys must trigger the viewer’s emotions. People who sit down to watch series are seeking an emotional experience—whether that’s laughter, tension, fear, retribution, wonder or catharsis. Or all of the above.

You’re not selling a story or words on paper or screen. You are selling an emotional journey—or you’re not selling anything at all.

4. Ticking Clock

There’s a difference between a main character who sets out to find a bomb that may go off and destroy the city at some unspecified time in the future and one who must find and disarm that same bomb before it goes off an hour from now.

A ticking clock may be time-based (as in the bomb example), event-based (the character must, say, win the lady’s heart before she falls for Mr. Wrong), or both (drive a time-traveling DeLorean past a lightning strike at precisely 10:04 p.m. next Saturday night).

In all cases, a ticking clock adds tension, urgency, and conflict—creating a situation where there is literally no time to waste. A pilot or other episode may have one or even several ticking clocks; an entire season may have another. Occasionally, a whole series will have a ticking clock. “Winter is coming.”

5. Visual Potential

Some books are cinematic by nature, others not so much. Authors can climb inside characters’ heads and stay there for pages on end; screenwriters, for the most part, cannot.

Interesting things must pass before the camera, thoughts must be spoken or shown, internal struggles must be externalized or have external equivalents.

At the same time, none of this can be obvious. This is why you often see a rookie character paired with a grizzled veteran; in showing the rookie how things work, the vet also shows the viewer. The filmmaker’s art makes use of sight and sound alone. Your book doesn’t have to be visual, but the adaptation does.

6. Structure

“Classical” story structure consists of seven plot points in a specific order: inciting incident, first act turn, midpoint, low point, second act turn, climax, and wrap-up. Probably 95%+ of all commercially successful feature films are classically structured.

The same is true of series, except that some of these structures play out over multiple episodes or even seasons, while others may run their course in the space of a single episode. (The latter being far more common in network series.) Buyers are inclined to play the odds, and most series that get bought incorporate classical structure.

7. Actor-Friendly Roles

Actors want beefy roles. Series (like movie sequels) used to be looked down on, by actors and others. Cable and streaming changed the rules and are now recognized as havens of creative expression. So much so that prominent feature actors often take pay cuts to do series, because the format allows them to do things they couldn’t do anywhere else.

No one’s going to pay them $20 million for two hours of series screen time but if the series is successful, the long-term payoff can be enormous; even $1 million per episode adds up quickly.

Payment aside, actors want to be challenged. They want to dive deep and stay there, explore different facets of their characters, evolve them over time, surprise and move the audience in ways a two-hour format will never allow. Help them help you, and give them what they want.

8. Expected Length

Series have established running times. Non-ad-supported outlets have more flexibility than ad-supported, time-slot networks, but the norm is still around 30 minutes for comedy and 60 for drama. First-timers do not warrant exceptions; no one wants to hear why your series must break the mold. First, play by the rules; maybe you can bend (or break) them later.

9. Reasonable Budget

Absent raging bestseller status or a massive Hollywood track record, a newcomer is not likely to warrant the $250 million Amazon recently paid for The Lord of the Rings rights, or that series’ projected billion-dollar budget.

Even the most expensive series (LOTR excepted) get a whole season out of $100 million or so—which is about half the budget of a single tentpole action film (or one-fifth Avatar’s budget). Most series get by on considerably less.

Look at what’s hitting in the market you seek to serve and don’t bust the budget. The more it costs, the smaller the number of people and companies willing and able to make it. You can buy a decent house for what it costs to shoot two characters talking in a coffee shop and a place in Beverly Hills for the cost of a dragon attack.

10. Low-Fat Story

Books can be as long as their authors want them to be, so long as they keep things interesting; typical series episodes can be a half-hour or an hour, more or less. Because of this, everything nonessential is out the window.

Because Scene A, therefore Scene B; because Scene B, therefore Scene C. There is no time for digressions or detours that are not vital parts of the characters’ emotional journeys or relationships, or of the plot itself (and preferably both).

Does a character visit the same place three times? Can you make that two, or one? Does a character piece something together with information gleaned from five different characters? Can you condense those five characters into one? Maybe not, but it’s important to ask—and answer—such questions yourself before someone else does, and wonders why you didn’t take care of this yourself.

If you want to not only sell the series but stay on as a writer, you’re going to have to at least look like you know what you’re doing.

11. Staying Power

Can your series go the distance? Is there enough raw material to evolve and expand over multiple seasons without hitting the same note over and over, or dragging things out just to burn time? This is going to depend on the nature of the characters, situations, relationships, and conflicts established in the first season.

Feature films don’t need this. Sure, it’s nice to have franchise potential but it would take more than a hundred movies, billions of dollars and well over a century of fast-paced feature film production to match the number of hours in a 10-year network series. Your task is not the same as the feature writer’s. You must be faster, leaner, and deeper.

Now let’s move on to…

The Series Proposal

When you’re pitching a feature, you have a logline, a short pitch, a screenplay—and that’s it. If someone likes the logline (a ten-second pitch), they generally ask to see the script. If they want to know more before committing to read, they get the one-minute pitch. Once they’ve read the script, they know everything they need to know to option, buy, or pass.

The screenplay sells itself or doesn’t.

Pitching a series isn’t like that, because in this case, you’re trying to sell something that (mostly) doesn’t yet exist. You don’t sell a series you hope will go for ten seasons by writing ten seasons’ worth of episodes and then looking for a buyer. What you do instead is write the first episode—the pilot—and create a series bible to go with it.

Now, writing the first episode is an art in itself, somewhat different from writing a feature screenplay, and very different from writing a book but if you’re not comfortable tackling that yourself, you can always hire someone to help or do it for you. (Just make sure you keep the rights.)

And while this isn’t a treatise on how-to-write-a-pilot, there are a few things to keep in mind…

The length of the pilot depends on the genre; comedies typically run thirty minutes, while dramas are an hour. Page count varies. Because dialogue burns more pages per minute of screen time than action, talky tales run longer (pagewise) than action-oriented stories.

Scripts intended for networks that show commercials might be shorter than those for streamers that don’t. Generally speaking, comedies run 28-32 pages, and dramas 48- 70. Some pilots are written like short features, while others include labeled act breaks.

The pilot sets up your characters and the world they inhabit. But whereas a feature need only concern itself with a two-hour story, a series proposal has to set the ball rolling on a tale that might span (depending on frequency) anywhere from 60-220 or more shows over the course of a decade. So your pilot needs help. That’s where the bible comes in.

No one wants a series that peters out after one or two seasons. (The exception being “limited series;” more on this below.) The purpose of the series bible is to show the prospective buyer that the characters, conflicts, and situations set up in the pilot can go the distance, spinning off new and compelling stories and arcs and subplots that can go on, and on—and on.

This is why there are so many cop, medical, and legal dramas; people in these careers are constantly exposed to new people and situations, and the stakes are often life-and-death. But there are other, more unique approaches; witness Breaking Bad, House of Cards or Game of Thrones.

So, a series bible will include the following things…

A long-ish summary of the pilot episode; perhaps one page of summary for every ten pages of script—and perhaps less.

Brief summaries of all first-season episodes; a good-sized paragraph for each. In the case of a limited series, this could be as few as four to six episodes for the whole series. For conventional series, you’re looking at 6-13 episodes for a cable or streaming season, and up to 24 for network.

Keep in mind that there’s a fundamental difference between overall streaming/cable and network series structure. Networks prefer their episodes to be modular; that is, all episodes are self-contained so that any given one can be viewed in isolation. If viewers miss one episode (or three), it doesn’t matter all that much.

Streaming/cable series are another story.

With most of these, each season has an overall arc, and each episode occupies a particular (and non-interchangeable) place within it. Episodes, like book chapters, are part of one continuous whole; miss one—or view it out of order—and you could find yourself completely lost.

Write your summaries accordingly—and (unless you’re pitching a limited series) tell the story in a way that makes it screamingly obvious that these characters, conflicts, and situations have the “legs” to carry them through multiple seasons.

Speaking of characters, the bible should also include bios for all main and recurring characters. What are their essential characteristics, driving forces, and desires, fears or insecurities, obstacles? How do they relate to the other characters in the story? You don’t have to go on for pages; a beefy paragraph for each can suffice.

You may also want to indicate the show’s future direction—beyond season one—with overall or season-by-season notes. This information need not be presented with the same level of detail as the first-season info, but should nonetheless show the reader that you have a firm grasp on where things are going.

You may or may not wish to include supplementary material, which can be anything that seems appropriate for your particular project. This doesn’t mean throwing in the kitchen sink, or “padding” the proposal to make it longer. But if there are documents (real or imagined) that meaningfully enhance the proposal’s impact—put it them there.

JFK’s moonshot speech in a series about the U.S. space program, for example; FDR’s day-of-infamy speech in a story about World War Two; the Martian Constitution in a tale set on a colonized Mars—you get the idea. If the originals are too long (or don’t really exist), just excerpt the most relevant portion(s).

Finally, you’ll need a logline and one-page pitch for the pilot episode, and also for the series as a whole. Because first, you have to get their attention.

Hollywood may be a well-defended castle on a hill, but it cannot survive without constant injections of new material—stories—to keep audiences engaged.

The “streaming wars” will massively increase the amount of material—in the form of series and, to a lesser extent, streaming features—needed by Hollywood. The war is just beginning, and there is no end in sight.

For those who can tell the kinds of stories Hollywood needs—summer is coming.

Have you thought of adapting one of your books into a series script? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

John Robert Marlow is a novelist, Academy-honored screenwriter, and adaptation consultant. He is also the author of Make Your Story A Movie: Adapting Your Book or Idea For Hollywood (“A comprehensive and practical guide” — Booklist). The book distills the advice of authors, screenwriters, producers and directors whose films have earned a combined total of over $50 billion. A second edition (with a heavier emphasis on series) will be published in 2020.

The revised first edition is currently posting free on John’s Make Your Book A Movie blog, where you’ll find interviews and advice on adaptation, loglining, pitching, structure, self-editing and more.