If you’re a Netflix user, you might have noticed they recently rolled out a dedicated hub called “Watch Your Favorite Books.” In the announcement, Netflix’s senior director of product merchandising said, “We’ve seen a real passion from fans around Netflix’s library of book adaptations.” And in fact, book-to-screen content was featured in Netflix’s global top 10 every week in 2025.
According to a CNN article, streaming has changed the landscape for adaptations because of the increased need for stories, and at the 2026 U.S. Book Show, I heard the same message: books are more important than ever to Hollywood.
The panel I attended was Optioned: A Publisher’s Guide to the Adaptation Room and included seven panelists, moderated by Kerensa Cadenas, the news director at Publishers Weekly:
- Edward Gamarra, founder, Gamarra Media
- Mary Pender, media rights agent, WME (William Morris)
- Mimi Diamond, book scout, RR Scouting
- Julia May Jonas, novelist, playwright and creator of the Netflix series Vladimir
- Liz Sarant, senior manager of IP Scouting, Netflix
- Orly Greenberg, media rights agent, United Talent Agency
- Jake Bauman, SVP of literary development, Sony Pictures Entertainment
First, Hollywood pays attention to trending stories and online fandoms
Pender, a rights agent, said traditional publishers have typically elevated women’s fiction or “book club material.” But the material that BookTok elevates and promotes, she said, is different: it’s new adult and spicier content that’s driving popularity and readership in the general market, which is what Hollywood is after.
According to Bauman at Sony, the biggest trend of all is the self-publishing and fan-fiction pipeline. Books and authors with massive built-in fanbases, built on platforms outside traditional publishing, are delivering breakout titles—particularly in romance, romantasy, and LitRPG. “Everyone’s trying to harness the power of those fandoms.” The path from Kindle Unlimited page reads to BookTok to a traditional bookstore shelf to a Hollywood deal is increasingly well-worn. Pender said, “Those [KU] page reads really do move the needle” in bringing greater market visibility books.
Some books will get optioned prior to publication
Greenberg, a rights agent, said the timing for an option depends entirely on where the book is in its publishing journey, what kind of momentum it has, and what the competitive landscape looks like at any given moment.
Sarant at Netflix confirmed that’s true from the buyer’s side, and timing doesn’t carry a bias. There’s something exciting about acquiring a book before publication—you’re in on a secret, she said, and you get a head start. But for other projects, building some readership and word-of-mouth first can make the business case easier to put forward. Bauman added that Sony has optioned books before they even had a publishing deal, as well as long after publication. “It really comes down to timing and how much conviction we have that something can work.”
One often-overlooked opportunity: backlist. When an option lapses and a book reverts, Sarant noted, that can be “a great opportunity” for a buyer who was watching from the sidelines.
Do book sales actually matter?
This elicited some of the panel’s most energetic responses. In short: It’s complicated.
Pender was the most direct: “Book sales do not matter. The power of the IP, a good story, is always going to rise to the top. It will find a home eventually,” even if it takes ten or fifteen years.
Bauman offered a more nuanced view. For theatrical releases especially, buyers sometimes need data to feel confident a book has breakout potential. When a book hasn’t been published yet, his team is essentially reading tea leaves, trying to predict whether it will become a bestseller.
Gamarra was the most colorful about it. Having worked on both sides—as a literary manager selling books to studios and as a buyer—he described book sales as “the biggest bane of my existence on both sides.” He recalled a boss who once told him: don’t bring me a book that sold millions of copies, bring me one that sold tens of millions. “If that’s your metric of success, you don’t understand publishing at all,” he said. He noted that studio executives are often genuinely surprised to learn how few copies most books sell by Hollywood standards.
What did Gamarra’s own reports focus on instead? Engagement: reviews, active fanbase, community conversation. Those metrics are equally important as book sales.
What makes a book feel adaptable?
Greenberg went straight to the intangibles: “It has to be voice, it has to be character.” She wants that feeling of picking up a book and feeling like “oh my god.” That’s what pushes the boulder up the hill. (For authors unaware, many books are optioned, but few actually make it to the screen. Many projects get stuck in development hell.) While plot and structure matter, Greenberg said that the prose and voice have to be there first.
Bauman was more systematic. He looks for a big, high-concept idea; at least one role that could attract a movie star; a connection to the current cultural conversation; and a narrative structure that can be cleanly adapted to a three-act arc.
Sarant circled back to instinct. Early in her career, she asked how you consistently know a good book. The answer she got: trust your gut. “Now, over a decade later—it’s just my gut.”
Pender added, “When people read something they really love, they really want to have someone else read it so they can have a conversation about it.” That impulse—the need to share—is a signal worth paying attention to.
How much are the authors involved? (Should they be involved?)
Greenberg, from the agent’s perspective, said the first conversation with any author client who has screen aspirations starts with understanding what they actually want: How involved do you want to be? What does your dream scenario look like? How do we get you there? If a client has those aspirations, the strategy is to build experience incrementally, starting with their own IP, and find a producing partner who will genuinely champion them through the process.
Jonas’s own advice, from her experience adapting her own work: work with smaller, hungrier companies. Pender called this dynamic “finding your Sisyphus” or the creative partner who will (again) keep pushing the boulder up the hill.
The difference between streamers and studios
Bauman said that Sony looks for projects to develop as large cultural events—films that can motivate people to leave their homes and buy a movie ticket. The bar is exceptionally high, and it applies to the broadest possible general audience.
Netflix’s mandate is different in scale and scope. Sarant described looking for projects that will find an audience in every country, or that will deeply resonate in one specific country. The volume is higher; the global proposition is part of the calculus.
Gamarra offered a different frame: old Hollywood versus new Hollywood. Studios, in his view, still tend toward personal connection to material and taste-driven decision-making. Streamers—which he characterized as tech companies at their core—analyze data and consumer behavior at a corporate level in ways that feel more mathematical than personal.
Both Sarant and Bauman pushed back on that framing. Data is everywhere in both kinds of organizations. Netflix executives still need to personally connect with a project they’re going to spend three to five years developing. At Sony, book sales are often “the closest thing we have for data,” Bauman said—and every division weighs in, trying to extract as much information as possible about a project’s prospects.
The kids and family problem
Gamarra sounded the loudest alarm on one specific area: kids and family programming. The contraction is severe. Amazon eliminated much of its kids and family executive team. Netflix commissions in the space have come down. Disney has cut its team in half. Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network are shadows of what they once were. “The adaptation marketplace has gone very downhill in the kids and family space,” he said—not just in terms of budgets but in terms of the underlying will to commission.
Why? Pender and Gamarra both pointed toward YouTube. Streamers can see where young audiences are spending their time, and it’s cheaper and easier to license what’s already working on YouTube than to develop original IP from books. Gamarra added another factor: data privacy laws prevent platforms from collecting data on children, which removes a key tool from the analytical playbook that drives acquisition decisions. However, Sarant said that Netflix is still investing in optioning books in the kids and family space.
The YA is not YA problem
The most fascinating stretch of the conversation was about YA fiction and the profound disconnect between what the label means in publishing versus what it means in Hollywood.
Gamarra said that one major streamer internally defines “YA” as targeting a 27-year-old viewer. So the same terminology describes completely different things depending on which side of the table you’re sitting on.
Bauman offered the studio perspective: YA isn’t defined by who reads it but by whose story it tells.
The commercial reality, Pender argued, is that breakout YA hits—Harry Potter, Twilight, and their heirs—became phenomena precisely because the people reading them are in their twenties, thirties, and forties, not teenagers. They discussed how the self-publishing pipeline, Kindle Unlimited page reads, BookTok—all of it is feeding an adult reader who is culturally identifying with a YA story.
Mimi Diamond, a book scout, pointed out an additional wrinkle: many self-publishing authors, when they transition to traditional publishing, have books that are about teenagers but end up being published on adult lists and marketed to adult readers. Children’s publishers can get priced out of auctions.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
