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.
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Famous quotes containing the word novels:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)