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Emanuel
Regular Poster
Username: Emanuel
Post Number: 354
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, September 09, 2007 - 03:42 pm: | 
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Who are the richest authors that have earned their riches primarily by selling books WITHOUT selling the film rights to them? |
A_womon
Veteran Poster
Username: A_womon
Post Number: 1877
Registered: 05-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, September 09, 2007 - 05:38 pm: |
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mary monroe got a six figure deal I think it was a three book deal.
Kim Roby also got a new six figure deal i believe it was a two book deal |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 9782
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, September 09, 2007 - 09:28 pm: |
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What about Stephen Carter author of "New England White"? He got a million dollar 3-book deal. I don't know that this included film rights which is understandable because his books aren't really good movie material. |
Mzuri
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Mzuri
Post Number: 5719
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, September 09, 2007 - 09:29 pm: |
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Ms. Zane |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 5197
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 10, 2007 - 10:22 am: |
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Any book that is worth it's salt will wind up a movie--it would therefore seem that any author whose book won't make a movie is not rich
I think you have to go back to the 19th Century--Dickens, Kipling--them guys who wrote before movies--and almost all their books have been made into movies by now. |
Emanuel
Regular Poster
Username: Emanuel
Post Number: 355
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 10, 2007 - 01:50 pm: |
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Mzuri,
I believe Zane's "Addicted" is shooting this fall in Atlanta. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0802937/
Chris,
I think there are several great books that may not be made into movies because they may not translate well into movies or because they weren't marketed well enough. I don't think Ellison's "Invisible Man" was ever a movie. I also think Carl Webber's "So You Call Yourself A Man" is a fun and entertaining book that wouldn't make a good movie because of the surprise involving one of the characters. It would be tough to pull off in a movie.
Did you know there are two EJD movies? "Cappuccino" and "Friends and Lovers."
Would E.Lynn Harris classify as a rich author without a film rights deal?
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Mzuri
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Mzuri
Post Number: 5732
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 10, 2007 - 01:53 pm: |
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You said primarily. As far as I can tell she made most of her money from her books. But I could be wrong.
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Emanuel
Regular Poster
Username: Emanuel
Post Number: 357
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 10, 2007 - 01:57 pm: |
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I do believe you are correct Mzuri. |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 9795
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, September 11, 2007 - 12:23 pm: |
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E Lynn Harris is a kind of an aberration. Is he more famous than rich? And apparently no one is intested in turning his gay-oriented books into movies. |
Steve_s
Regular Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 298
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, September 16, 2007 - 03:13 am: |
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Art and commerce are two separate things and always have been. Take Kenny G. who is probably the highest-earning saxophonist in history but far from the best. Branford Marsalis, on the other hand, had the Tonight Show gig and gave it away. Didn't need that much fame or fortune. There was more jazz on TV in the couple of years he had that gig than in the entire history of televison. Joe Henderson on the couch with Jay, Betty Carter on the couch, musical guests included the Tito Puente orchestra and Charlie Haden's Quartet West, with a different guest artist sitting in every night. It's my understanding that that was all part of the arrangement that brought him there and they reneged on it so he quit.
In India, a country of one billion, 2,500 books sold counts as a bestseller. So now we're being told that a literary work of art that "only" sells 4,000 copies is somehow a failure? That, in my opinion, is a skewed perspective.
There's no end to the great writers coming out of India and in a country where cultural studies are probably more vital than anywhere in the world, the "political" issue of Indian authors writing in English and italicizing Indian words, supposedly in order to pander to western (not white) audiences, is always raised whenever an Indian author achieves some success or especially when one wins an award. So the Indian author gets it from both ends; they're inevitably accused by some Indian critics of pandering to westerners and some, but not all, westerners always agree, saying that Indian authors are "marketing displacement," "cashing in on cultural dislocation," and of course, as writers of color, especially the women with their exotic looks, have an unfair advantage over "westerners."
Kiran Desai's novel, "The Inheritance of Loss," which won last year's Booker Prize, is not a piece of fluff, it's a fairly dark work with a message about such serious subjects as globalization, the aftereffects of colonialism, and emerging nationalist movements in the third world. However, the following commentator notes the effect Desai's win will have in influencing young women to write in a culture which apparently doesn't encourge it:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/10/hullabaloo_in_the_indian_liter.html
This year's Booker shortlist includes an Indian and a Pakistani author. I read the latter's novel and participated in a month long discussion in which he answered our questions. It's a "9/11" novel which is allegorical and inspired by "The Fall" by Albert Camus. It has only sold 1,500 copies in the UK, but that's alright because I would guess that it's sold many more than that in NY alone. It's by nature a political book - its message is not one that many in the west want to hear - and its style is very different than Desai's, more pared down, not complex in language, and less than 200 pages where Desai's is 350 pages. It's an easy read by comparison but that's not to disparage it in any way.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/09/booker.html
Stephen L. Carter is the subject of a serious rant in a book of humor called "Making Friends with Black People" by Nick Adams, which if you read the customer reviews at Amazon.com, you might conclude that its appeal is mostly to African American readers, although I don't know for sure. The jokes seem funny enough, but in the short essay about literature, as I remember because I only read it once, he concludes that although Zadie Smith gets all the attention, ZZ Packer and especially Stephen L. Carter, are better writers. Probably not as good looking though. Hate to say it but that's a garden variety opinion you'll find anywhere in the UK, although it's not held by everyone.
Kellen Zant's theory in "New England White," of capturing the surplus probably has some application in the world of books. For instance, I watched Bakari Kitwana shmooze with Jabari Asim for an hour on Book-TV over the latter's recent book, "The N-Word: Who Can Use It, Who Shouldn't, and Why" or some such thing. As if "Randy" Kennedy's book weren't enough, now we have a book of race rules about the n-word, instead of that Nat Turner novel we've been expecting since '68.
I'm not the kind of person who needs or wants 100 writers to tell me how to "respond" to something, especially a book or an author. Albert Murray satirized the "social science survey technicians" of the 1960s in his 1970 polemic, "The Omni-Americans." And then we had Ross Perot who campaigned for government by consensus, or polling as a means of deciding issues.
Now Junot Diaz has written a novel whose main character is a seriously overweight man. Didn't Paul Beatty and Victor LaValle already do that? Is that a form of capturing a surplus? Like the boy soldier novels perhaps? Sorry for the skepticism but in order to read this book I'll probably have to buy it. On the other hand, I can get Daniel Alarcon's novel, "Lost City Radio" at the library for free, and I already know he can write because I read his short story collection "War By Candlelight" and he's on Edward P. Jone's shortlist of favorite young writers. And he doesn't write satire.
I think Ishmael Reed is a great satirist and most of his novels are published by a government funded nonprofit press, Dalkey (Shield) Archive.
The one exception is his most famous novel, which begins with a parody of an Elia Kazan film noir classic from 1950 which was all the rage around the time the book was published.
"Panic in the Streets" which was filmed in New Orleans, starred Richard Widmark as a public health inspector who learns that a culture of cholera bacilli has gotten loose in the city. However in Ishmal Reed's "Mumbo Jumbo," the disease is ragtime or "jus' grow'd". Oops! I mean "Jes Grew," which is more correct, like Nancy Rawles's "Sadie" who scrupulously avoids the invariant be and counterintuitively is hip to T.S. Eliot and Lionel Trilling's theory of a "River God" in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn more than a half century before they proposed it:
"We ain't never been in a boat fore that and we scared the river gods [sic] gonna get us," and "River gods rising up to carry us off." *Rolls eyes*
http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/fall2002/Finn.html
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Libralind2
Veteran Poster
Username: Libralind2
Post Number: 908
Registered: 09-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, September 16, 2007 - 01:00 pm: |
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Hi Steve
LiLi |
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