Real-Life Horror: Author Solutions’ Book-to-Screen Prices

author solutions book to screenOn Monday, I noticed Author Solutions started touting its 2007 Trafford title, The Foreign Pawn written by Lee Yagel. Seems the book was optioned by Anarchy Management (what? seems legit to me), so Author Solutions, never wasting an opportunity to push an overpriced yet mostly useless marketing service, wrote a press release about it bragging that:

“The Cold-War period novel, written by Lee Yagel and published by Trafford, resulted from adding Author Solutions’ Book-to-Screen coverage services to his publishing package.”

(Dare you to diagram that sentence in your free time, by the way. It doesn’t say what I think Author Solutions intended it to say.)

Anyway, I imagine having a book optioned is pretty exciting for an author. Even though it’s no guarantee your novel will ever make it to the big screen, it does mean that someone wants the right to purchase the screenplay at some point down the road. And that’s cool.

The full truth about book options—something you won’t likely get from an Author Solutions employee—would probably temper the average writer’s enthusiasm, though.

Someone out there correct me if I’m wrong, but I think most options last between 1 and 3 years and option payments are nothing close to a windfall. Nope, odds are you won’t be paying off that 30-year mortgage. Also, plenty of book options just die. Nothing ever comes of them, and the rights just anticlimatically revert back to the author when the term of the option expires.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing and no one really gets hurt, unless you’re delusional enough to pay Author Solutions $859 to $16,299 for the privilege of such disappointment.

The Price of Trafford’s Book-to-Screen Marketing Services

Just in case you think I’m making up those ridonkulous numbers, here are the prices for all Book-to-Screen services taken directly from the Trafford website today. (iUniverse, AuthorHouse and other Author Solutions imprints have similar services.)

Hollywood Gatekeeper: [typography font=”Ubuntu” size=”14″ size_format=”px” color=”#c72222″]$859[/typography]

Hollywood Audition: [typography font=”Ubuntu” size=”14″ size_format=”px” color=”#c72222″]$2,149[/typography]

Hollywood Storyteller: [typography font=”Ubuntu” size=”14″ size_format=”px” color=”#c72222″]$3,749[/typography]

Hollywood Topliner: [typography font=”Ubuntu” size=”14″ size_format=”px” color=”#c72222″]$16,299[/typography]

Book-to-Screen PitchFest New York 2012 and Book-to-Screen PitchFest New York 2012 with Video through Trafford cost $1,999 and $3,499 respectively.

The Screenplay Treatments

One of the the things the Hollywood Storyteller package will get you is a treatment. According to Trafford, a treatment:

“is a thoroughly developed guide that outlines how a screenwriter would adapt your book into a fully-developed screenplay.”

Coincidentally, someone claiming to be a former freelancer with ASI, left a comment on the post, “Author Solutions & Jared Silverstone: Now With 99% More Bullshit”, explaining that these treatments are used to sell overpriced adaptations for screen. Well, here, just read for yourself:

Gawd — these guys. I had a pretty surreal experience freelancing for their ‘book-to-screen’ program. They had me adapting self-published manuscripts into treatments, which they apparently would then use to try and upsell their clients on exorbitantly overpriced screenplay adaptations. The whole thing reeked of selling snake-oil to people who didn’t realize that spec screenplays, regardless of quality, almost never get past the dreaded ‘intern readers,’ much less optioned, much less produced — whereas ASI assured that these adaptations would ‘most likely’ get produced, and with A-list Hollywood stars to boot.

Also keep in mind, the majority of these authors would insist upon one-to-one adaptations of their manuscripts (most of which had clearly never been edited), which typically yielded sprawling, 3-hour scripts that would be line-budgeted for 100+ million bucks.

What nonsense. Even better, ASI’s in-house ‘editors’ would inevitably return my treatments with a list of corrections that, at best, were arbitrary and, at worst, would themselves be rife with grammatical and syntactical errors. A few were riddled with spelling errors. Corresponding with editors who can’t spell does not exactly inspire professional confidence.

But I had to quit because I was continually corresponding with poor folks who seemed honestly to believe that this was their ‘big break’ into Hollywood. It seems ASI even set up their own production company so they could claim that ‘other companies’ have a ‘first look’ deal with their screenplays. Shady.

Now might be a good time to plug that self-publishing services directory I launched during Writers’ Week, you know, in case you’re looking for some alternatives to Author Solutions.

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