Novels
A novel as a tie-in to any successful major film release is considered an important marketing strategy. If a film is based on a novel, the novel is generally reissued with a cover based on the film's poster (sometimes with pictures from the film included) but if it is an original screenplay or based on a novella or short story a novelization is often commissioned to fill the marketing niche. Novelizations have been published since at least the 1920s; for example, the 1928 film The Fleet's In! starring Clara Bow was novelized by Russell Holman. L. Frank Baum's Tik-Tok of Oz (1914) and The Scarecrow of Oz (1915) might be deemed novelizations, as they are based on the musical play The Tik-Tok Man of Oz (1913) and the feature film, His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz (1915), respectively, which were adaptations of earlier Oz books, Ozma of Oz (1907) and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), respectively.
There is also a smaller market associated with novelizations of television; the television series Star Trek, for instance, was adapted by James Blish into a set of short stories which were bundled to create saleable books. The practice was repeated by Alan Dean Foster with the Trek animated series to create the Star Trek Log series.
Several critically acclaimed literary authors have also written novelizations including Arthur Calder-Marshall, William Kotzwinkle and Richard Elman. Best-selling author Ken Follett early in his career also wrote a novelization.
Read more about this topic: Novelization
Famous quotes containing the word novels:
“I have just opened Bacon’s “Advancement of Learning” for the first time, which I read with great delight. It is more like what Scott’s novels were than anything.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programmes, or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)