By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, January 2011
In late January 2011, the Hollywood Book Festival announced a call for entries to its sixth annual literary competition. Books would be judged across 14 categories, but two of the stated criteria stood out: the storytelling ability of the author, and the potential of the work to be translated into other media.
Then
The Hollywood Book Festival was one of a network of city-branded book competitions that operated as paid-entry literary competitions. The “Hollywood” branding explicitly foregrounded adaptation potential as a judging criterion.
Fleischer’s FishbowlLA framing was gently skeptical — joking that FBLA might enter Gogol’s Dead Souls just to see how it fared against an adaptation-potential rubric.
Now
The books-into-screen pipeline that the festival’s judging criteria implicitly anticipated has expanded enormously. The streaming-platform demand for adaptable IP has made adaptation potential one of the dominant considerations in contemporary publishing acquisition.
The 2011 criterion that Fleischer found amusing has aged into being a straightforwardly mainstream way the industry now thinks about book value.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.