Depending whom you ask, books might be more important to film and TV producers than ever before. With the international SVOD pipeline demanding an unprecedented volume of scripted content, tapping into source material that has a proven audience, ready-made storyworlds and in some cases name recognition is becoming an increasingly smart play for content creators looking to exploit inspiring IP.

So Playback magazine went to the source, hitting up four Canadian publishing companies about the trends they’re seeing, hot properties on their roster and what’s falling out of fashion. You read it here first! In part four we chat with House of Anansi about properties that would translate well to the screen and trends in the space. See what Scholastic, Wattpad and Harlequin had to say.

House of Anansi: Spinning out book-based IP into multi-season

With TV currently being the overwhelming medium of choice for producers, the page-to-screen adaptation game is changing, says Barbara Howson, VP sales and licensing at House of Anansi.

More so than in previous years, TV producers are looking to option a single book in order to create multi-season series that tell new stories within the parameters of the original IP (such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale). “I think it’s been the streaming services that have caused the shift – they’re the ones that have the money and they’re the ones that are pushing to get really interesting programs out there,” she says.

This lets producers tap into an existing audience already familiar with an author’s work, but doesn’t limit them to canonical material, creating new – often longer-running – avenues for storytelling.

Another example of this on Anansi’s roster is Ian Hamilton’s Ava Lee crime novels, about a deadly and determined Chinese-Canadian forensic accountant who uses unconventional means to recover huge debts for her clients, says Howson. Toronto’s Strada Films optioned the property as a film initially but has since proceeded with developing it as a TV series (no broadcast details as of press time).

House of Anansi has previously been involved in option deals for The Breadwinner, which was optioned by Aircraft Pictures and is set for release later this year as an animated feature, and Lisa Moore’s Caught, which CBC unveiled at its 2017 Upfront presentation.

Recommended (un-optioned) pick:
– Into the Sun, by Deni Ellis Béchard – set in Kabul, Afghanistan 10 years after 9/11, a Japanese-American journalist sets out to discover who planted a car bomb that killed three of her acquaintances.

Why it’s worth a read: Into the Sun is a relatable contemporary tale of a terrible crime in a war zone, says Howson.

– I was Cleopatra, by Dennis Abrams – the provocative fictional memoir of an acclaimed boy actor in Shakespearian London.

Why it’s worth a read: I Was Cleopatra is the first novel from biographer and historian Abrams. “Think of it as Wolf Hall [the fictionalized historical novel by English author Hilary Mantel] for teenagers,” says Howson.

– February, by Lisa Moore – set 25 years after the real-life sinking of the Ocean Ranger oil rig, widow Helen O’Mara’s mind keeps being cast back to the Valentine’s Day storm that claimed the life of her husband.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer 2017 issue of Playback.