The Wall Street Journal recently reported that publishers are going beyond their normal practice of selling film rights, to actually putting up money for films to be made from the books they publish.
One instance of this is a deal for Random House to invest up to nine million dollars in films made by Focus Features based on Random House books. The first one out will be "Reservation Road," based on John Burnham Schwartz's 1998 novel. The plan is for Focus to make two or three such films each year.
Random House gets to have a say in selecting screenwriters, directors, and stars. Of course they hope to make a profit on their investment, but they told the Times' Jeffrey Trachtenberg, "We're doing this primarily to sell more books as movie tie-ins."
The Times pointed out how lucrative such tie-ins can be. Patrick Susskind's novel, "Perfume," was selling 13,000 a year before the movie version came out. That jumped to 100,000 copies in 2006.
