Hoards of American and European agents, producers and executives are descending on the Kensington Olympia today for the enormous London Book Fair (LFB), but whether they can find what they were looking for is another matter.
There is a quiet sense of optimism in the TV and film industry this year as distance grows between the present and the lows of the U.S. labor strikes and American co-pro crisis. LBF attendees – hitting Olympia for the final time before it switches to the ExCel centre on the other side of London in 2027 – will be keen to discover the next Normal People, Lessons in Chemistry or Heartstopper.
Possibly the buzziest TV show right now, Heated Rivalry, is of course based on Rachel Reid’s book, and with projects including Stephanie Bain’s revenge thriller Wits (described as a potential “book of the fair” by one drama producer and several agents), gothic vampire re-telling Wuthering Frights and TV writer Raelle Tucker’s debut Obscura on show, there are deals to be done.
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For many who we spoke to ahead of the event, however, there is a chasm between what’s hot in publishing and what’s hot in the world of TV and film. This chasm, they say, is having quite the impact on getting adaptations to screen. BookTok, the corner of TikTok followed by millions of fans worldwide that can make or break an authors career, is playing a key role.
“There is a huge divergence between what TV is calling out for right now and what authors are writing,” says Hannah Griffiths, who oversees literary adaptations for SAS Rogue Heroes and Wallander maker Banijay. “BookTok values romance, yearning and romantasy, and that’s not what TV wants.”
TV and film, Griffiths says, is placing stock on domestic thrillers and procedurals with a twist – think The Housemaid, The Girlfriend and All Her Fault – which are less in vogue on the publishing side.
For Sanjana Seelam, one of WME’s agents responsible for adaptations, publishing and the TV and film industry are “right now not totally aligned.” She adds that networks and streamers “want muscular conspiracy thrillers like The Day of the Jackal, but they are only on [publisher] backlists. It’s harder to find [new thrillers] in publishing right now.”
There’s one core reason for this. “Romantasy is still dominating,” says Seelam. “Every buyer has one they’re taking a step with and the industry is watching closely.” CAA book-to-screen specialist Michelle Kroes similarly adds: “Romantasy has been on trend and so popular with publishers for a couple of years now. Hollywood was slow to respond, but every studio has their project now. They are waiting to see what comes of it.”
Blending high-stakes magical adventures with passionate love story, romantasy has been dominating the charts for several years now, but not one has made it to screen. As one drama producer describes, the market is “saturated” and the stories “hard to adapt.”
Hulu was worked on Sarah J. Maas’s wildly popular A Court of Thorns and Roses, but this has, for now, been scrapped, while Netflix is slowly making a version of Callie Hart’s Quicksilver. Prime Video has for a long while been prepping a TV adaptatiokn of Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing with Michael B. Jordan. Legendary Entertainment, meanwhile, is slow prepping Alchemised, the romantasy that started out as Harry Potter fan fiction. Alchemised joins All The Young Dudes as fan fiction about the world’s most famous wizard on show at LBF.
Jason Richman, partner and Media Rights Co-Head at UTA, says studios are still calling him about the romantasy, but concerns remains “Romantasy is still a hard sell for media rights,” he says. “If something gets made and is popular then who knows. People understand it’s a viable trend, but we’re all waiting to see if Fourth Wing happens. If it was a hit, there would be an avalanche of interest.”
Emily Hayward-Whitlock, Head of Literary at London agency The Artists Partnership, shares a similar view. “Until Fourth Wing gets made, it feels like there isn’t such a market for romantasy in TV,” she says, adding that buyers instead want “procedurals – but procedurals in the books world feel quite derivative, often branding themselves on pre-existing works.”
One procedural did emerge as the big winner of the Frankfurt Book Fair, the publishing world’s previous big-hitting event, which saw a heated auction featuring a whopping 21 bidders doing battle for Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s Tower of London-set We Are the Dead. A24 won out for that one.
Seelam is remaining positive and is happy to trawl through backlist for other opportunities – noting that as far as she knows WME is the only agency with a dedicated librarian. She believes “the pendulum will swing again” so that TV, film and publishing do soon come together more closely.
‘Heated Rivalry’ effect
That pendulum may be righting itself already with the breakout success of a certain queer hockey romance, adapted from the successful book series, which is already breeding similar shows.
Telling the story of a love affair between two top ice hockey stars, Heated Rivalry, which started life on Canada’s Crave and now airs around the world, including on HBO in the U.S., is all anyone in the biz can talk about.
“It’s hard to make romance on TV work but then of course Heated Rivalry comes along and everyone says, ‘You can do it,’” adds Banijay’s Griffiths. “This is a convergence of the two industries’ interests right now and will be felt on backlist.”
The success of Heated Rivalry therefore represents one area where publishing and screen are aligned, according to Yasmin McDonald at CAA’s book department in London. “Everyone is looking for love stories in whatever format they come,” she adds. “Whether weepy, sexy or romantic, people want entertainment to feel hopeful and joyful. That is one area where the two spaces are not diverging.”
Another voice advocating the Heated Rivalry effect is Jazz Adamson, Media Rights Agent at UTA-owned Curtis Brown. “It is definitely true,” she says. “We’ve been getting requests for romance with a twist, alongside the evergreens like thriller and crime.”
If the screen industries and publishing do feel far apart, we are being told about deliberate attempts to bring them back into line. One large book publisher, we understand, has launched an IP department in which ideas inspired by TV are developed in-house and then farmed out to authors to pen books based on those ideas. Another deal that we understand is cooking is between an American studio and a distinctive author. Rather than adapting this author’s previous work, we understand the studio has commissioned him to write a short story for which it will own the adaptation rights, but he will retain publishing rights. “That is an incredibly smart way of building out a relationship,” says one agent in the space.
The trend for short stories as the basis for IP adaptations is certainly alive, with one U.S. dealmaker attributing it to High Side, the package based on an unpublished short story by Jaime Oliveira that brings A Complete Unknown’s James Mangold and Timothée Chalamet back together, with Chernin Entertainment attached.
“That was perhaps the trend of 2025,” says UTA’s Richman. “There are still short stories that are selling out in the market.” UTA will be pitching a short story from Nine Perfect Strangers author , The Price of Honey, which is due to launch as an Amazon Original Kindle Single in April.
Another gathering buzz is The Decorator, which we hear is a 28-page short story CAA is representing at LBF. The story, from Cody Behan, has hints of Industry, following a high-end interior design firm where one ambitious designer finds herself in the crosshairs of her boss, setting up a game of cat-and-mouse that thrusts the business into the spotlight.
While these spec stories do involve agents and producers getting involved in the writing process at a much earlier stage than normal, CAA’s McDonald says: “This comes out of organic conversations with authors who we’ve been working with over long times on ideas they’ve been mulling over, and you are encouraging them to write in that space. It’s not that people are reverse engineering in a pragmatic way, but working with authors to get their material out there.”
One agent, who chose to remain anonymous, says the short story trend “is a direct reaction to the fact that what’s really working in publishing is romantasy and female-driven suspense, but that doesn’t lend itself to returning series. What film and TV seem to want are big, dynastic soaps and that’s just not something that publishing is responding to at the moment, unfortunately.”
American money in the market
More generally, American co-pro money is slowly coming back into the market – BBC drama boss Lindsay Salt recently told us that particular storm has been “weathered” – but this remains slow and Normal People-sized deals are fewer and further between. “Books really are a sprat to catch a mackerel,” says Griffiths. “A big writer is only going to be got [for an adaptation] with either an amazing book or a guaranteed bestseller, or an auction so noisy that all the big players are aware and show their hand.”
In place of the declining American dollar has come international co-pros, according to Hayward-Whitlock, who believes “out of the U.S. co-pro crisis came creative solutions.” Producers from Italy, France and Spain have been getting in touch about material, she adds, even enquiring about books that aren’t set in their home country but could be reset with a bit of creative thinking. “Now more than ever, creative partnerships are key,” she adds.
Helen Manders, a translation rights agent at CAA, concurs, and says the international impact is also being felt in the other direction, with U.S. and UK studios open to foreign-language books more than ever. “There is more interest in international voices,” she says. “Previous Fairs were focused on more Anglo-American voices. Our catalog is a more diverse list of authors: Two Italian writers, a Serbian writer, Japanese authors and we’re talking to a Korean author. Buyers are responding to that, and the need has come the other way.” She points to Veronico Raimo’s Non Scrivere Di Me (Don’t Write About Me), which follows a young woman who finds out her problematic former boyfriend has died and blames him for her current predicament as a waitress angry at the world. “It’s quite literary, but the Italian publisher has sold 100,000 copies,” says Manders.
One adaptation exec, who spoke on condition of anonymity, feels Americans are not only making less co-pros but are also cutting out the middle person when it comes to seeking European projects. “The big American studios want to intercept projects at source,” explains the exec, who says UK agents and producers are therefore being bypassed. “There’s much less of a sense of collaboration. I would make the case that if an author wants more access to the adaptation process, some creative involvement, and a view of what’s happening along the way, then it is much easier to have people based in the UK.”
Nonetheless, WME’s Seelam, whose team first discovered Prime Video hit 56 Days at the London fair, sees LBF as a great opportunity to get British, American and European colleagues together in a room. There’s clearly significant buzz building.
“Everyone is congregating here,” says Seelam. “These fairs are amazing for relationship building and identifying voices. What we find now will be on air three years from now. That’s our plan, and it is critical.”
There’s a general sense that market conditions mean adaptation buyers could be tempted into something new. “There is a wealth of material on the market and auctions all over the place,” says CAA’s Kroes. “The volume is here like it hasn’t been for a while.”
Kroes and McDonald say the speculative fiction space, the ‘what-if’ world encompassing everything from alternate history to magical realism, is driving business, especially where it is relatively grounded. They cite Julie Buxbaum’s The Past Selves Club, in which a woman named Hazel Stein inexplicably finds herself on a party bus hurtling through space-time with seven other versions of herself aged between eight and 88 once every ten years.
“It has an emotional core,” says CAA Manders. “Anyone would finish it in tears.” Kroes adds: “There is such an appetite for that – it gives you escapism but can be for everyone.”
Curtis Brown’s Adamson says that Stephanie Bain’s Wits is “our hot book of the market, and goes to show that even if a book goes against what people say they want, there can be buzz. If it gets a really good publishing deal, it will cut through.”
The story, which we hear C&W Agency’s Clarie Conville sold to John Murray after a heated auction, is set in the world of restoration theater in 17th century London, but follows some rather familiar tropes and has traces of Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite. It follows two rival female playwrights, one of whom finds her work being plagiarized by a man and other dealing with a Puritanical firebrand preacher who disrupts her work everyday. They decide to team up to take out the other’s adversary.
“There’s a wink at what it’s like to be a woman throughout the ages, so it’s pretty fun,” says one market watcher with knowledge of the book. “It’s challenging for film because of the period, but it would be the kind of thing that you could put together with two actresses.” Curtis Brown’s Nick Marston will be selling adaptation right at LBF.
“‘Ocean’s 11’ at the Vatican“
Another book generating buzz from the Curtis-UTA stable is White Smoke, penned by sci-fi author Nicholas Binge under the pseudonym Nick Bruckner. UTA’s Richman has been shopping it alongside Alex Cochrane from Greyhound Literary, and we hear it has triggered a seven-party auction.
“I’m billing this one as Ocean’s 11 at the Vatican,” says UTA’s Richman. The story follows a rag-tag group of misanthropes who attempt to rob jewels from the Vatican. “The hope is it will kick of a series with the same group of characters,” he adds. “It’s really fun thrill ride with a commercial pop to it, and is super character-based.”
Last year, the LBF was held to the backdrop of a shellshocked Hollywood, which has only just started recalibrating from the 2023 labor strikes as the wildfires of January 2025 torched homes and destroyed lives. This year, while the sense of disconnect between publishing and screen is evident, and media mega-mergers threatens to upend the industry again, there is also more optimism.
“From a media rights perspective, it’s a different vibe at the start of the year to 2025,” says Richman. “It’s kicked off in a big way and hasn’t let off. Our group is super busy across the globe. There are new projects in development despite the disruption of Paramount acquiring Warner Bros/ Discovery, and we’re still seeing offers from Warner, Paramount and Netflix.”
He’s acutely aware there is new money in the market, thanks to the billion-dollar break fee Paramount just paid Netflix over the WBD deal. With a glint in his eye, he tells Deadline: “As we’ve told Netflix when they’ve made offers, they have an extra $2.8B to spend.”
Heated Rivalry or no Heated Rivalry, that’s an enticing thought for all at LBF.