Trend Spotlight: Following Hollywood

While perusing USA Today’s list of summer books, I noticed a number of books that are of the genre I will term Sex and the City fiction. These books tell the stories of single, professional women living glamorous lives in New York. The books detail the women’s professional and romantic lives—or at least this is how they are marketed. The books coming out this summer are released at the same time as the Sex and the City movie—which opens this week in theaters. Sex and the City fans have been waiting four years for the return of Samantha, Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda. This audience will be all the more ready to receive a print form of a similar story line via books.

On a grander scale this showcases the parallels between different forms of media. By releasing these similar books this summer, both authors and publishers will benefit from the marketing and hype of the Sex and the City movie. I don’t think it coincidence that on the day of the movie’s premier, Chasing Harry Winston by Lauren Weisberger, author of The Devil Wears Prada, will be released. Chasing Harry Winston is summarized by USA Today as a “novel about a trio of best friends in Manhattan.”

Authors can apply this same tactic to their own manuscripts and book release periods by watching for big movies about a year before they are released. If your manuscript matches the theme of upcoming movies, send it to every agent and publisher who specializes in that genre just as the movie buzz is starting to pick up.


Chasing Harry Winston
By Lauren Weisberger
Simon & Schuster
$25.95
May 27, 2008







How to Be Single
By Liz Tuccillo
Atria
$24.95
June 10, 2008







Industry Trend Spotlight by Adriel Gorsuch, Indigo Editing, LLC