In my day job in higher education, I am, like many others, winding down for the holiday season. But in the book world, we seem to have stumbled into a particularly busy time for news. So expect more than one story from each column this week. I begin with particularly exciting news for indie authors looking to extract the maximum return from all of the rights they own in their work. Ingram has just gone live with its Mediascout program.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
The concept behind Mediascout is a familiar one. It’s a database of literary titles designed to function as a showcase and resource for media companies looking to develop new projects for the large and small screen. Ingram says the database contains two and a half million titles. And the key point for us is that this includes a quarter of a million from indie authors, presumably titles that have been published through IngramSpark.
Indie Titles and Screen Potential
This streamlining of the rights exploitation process is not new. Sadly, the opportunity to get seen by famous Hollywood producers was too often the enticing headline used to lure authors into vanity press traps. More recently, the notion of idea-to-screen has been given a more legitimate and highly successful twist by the likes of Wattpad and Naver Webtoon. Fingers crossed I am soon reporting on the successful acquisition and production of screen titles acquired direct from indies through Mediascout.
Spotify Expands Audiobook Reach
Also on the subject of increased opportunities through existing platforms, Spotify has announced a major expansion of its offering. It is moving into non-English-language audiobooks, beginning with French and Dutch. It has begun by announcing a €1 million investment in producing a catalogue of titles. Spotify claims it is seeking to address a slow adoption rate for listeners in these languages that is, in part, the result of high production costs. And whilst it acknowledges the importance of human voice narrators, digital narration will be part of the strategy it adopts in order to expand in this area.
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