If you’re like me and love stories, I’m sure you relate to the experience of finishing a great piece of content and wishing you could have something else, anything, that would allow you to exist within that world for just one more millisecond. Many times, I end up watching or reading the same thing over and over again, trying to drink up as much of it as I possibly can, searching for hidden clues I’ve never noticed before. I argue that doing so does not diminish the quality of the work, does not detract from the artfulness of the story, so why do so many people believe that taking a film or television show and adapting it to a book format, makes that book a meaningless endeavor? Novelizations were once a prominent genre with works such as Arthur C. Clarke’s novelization of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Alan Dean Foster’s Alien. Stigma keeps the genre and its authors from reaching the heights they should. There is an incredible art to expanding on the world and characters of a film or television series, allowing for deeper explorations and understandings to accompany the highly visual experience of a film. Books allow a reader to truly become one with its characters. Sure, a film can draw a viewer into its world with its visual and audio immersion, but a book can transport a reader directly into a character’s mind, allowing a reader to see the world through that character’s eyes. Though there are many that might not know what novelizations offer—or perhaps that they even exist—novelizations are a worthy genre whose authors supply greater insights into and inspire fantastical imaginations about the storyworlds people have come to love. So why are they so underappreciated?

There are two persistent arguments that lend some insight into why novelizations are not considered a real genre, or as successful as they once were, despite the fact that they are still published and read by millions. The first is that with the invention of DVD and streaming, novelizations’ existence is no longer a necessity. Before, when a film was released in theaters, the only way a viewer could revisit that work was through novelizations. Today, the rapid pace of DVD releases or direct to streaming have all but eliminated these barriers novelizations overcame. However, novelizations still persist because of fans’ desire to feel connected to stories and their characters (Suskind 2014), as I described in my experience above. There is also the argument that novelizations exist simply to milk profits on already established works and are therefore soulless, passionless projects without true originality or creativity. It is true that in recent years large publishing houses have had a propensity to focus on celebrity books, or content with a built-in audience and easily created hype, because they are less financially risky. This response is largely because, as public corporations, the publishing houses experience financial pressures from shareholders (McCreesh 2023). Rather than the primary focus being on an author and their content, priorities have shifted towards marketability and profitability. Will this book be able to sell big in order to justify the expense to those who have a stake in the company? This is the prevalent question dominating the “Cosmodemonic Publishing” landscape as Gerald Howard, a retired book editor for Penguin Random House, called it (Lozano 2023). At the end of the day, publishing is a business and profit is essential for the birth of original stories into the content diaspora. But, I think sometimes the control we allow materialistic things to hold over the process of art, impedes the evolution of creativity itself. 

It is easy to see how this framework could also equate to novelizations of films, and indeed many of them might be created simply to make more money without thoughtful consideration to the storytelling, but there will always be books of this kind that permeate the market. And just because someone doesn’t find value in the work there, doesn’t mean that no one else will. There will always be content that perhaps lacks the true heart and passion of great works, but there will also always be writers who think and dream in the storyworlds of the characters they love—and who deeply desire to contribute meaningfully to the source material. I, for one, cannot wait to see what they have in store. 

— Olivia Germino

SOURCES:

• Lozano, Kevin. “How Has Big Publishing Changed American Fiction? | The New Yorker.” The New Yorker, November 1, 2023. https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/how-has-big-publishing-changed-american-fiction. 
• McCreesh, Shawn. “Markus Dohle’s Big Flop.” Intelligencer, January 12, 2023. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/markus-dohles-failed-bid-to-eat-simon-and-schuster.html. 
• uskind, Alex. “Yes, People Still Read Movie Novelizations . . . and Write Them, Too.” Vanity Fair, August 27, 2014. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2014/08/movie-novelizations-still-exist.