If there's one thing that authors are frustrated with, it's optioning their book for a movie, and having it sit around for years doing nothing.
At the Frankfurt Book Fair recently, producers, along with agents, warned authors that most bestselling books don't translate into great movies.
"A screenplay has around 20,000 words in relation to some novels, which have more than 100,000," screenwriter Bernd Lange said.
"For every hundred books optioned for movies, I doubt that more than five get made into films," said Julian Friedmann of Blake Friedmann 
Literary, TV and Film Agency.
While there are great exceptions to the rule like "Lord of the Rings," "The Da Vinci Code," and "Harry Potter," the majority of the time it is a problem of adaptation that is the reason for so few attempts.
While action, thriller and comic books are the easiest to turn into a film, literary novels have to be changed so much and edited that some characters that are key parts of the book couldn't even be included in the movie if it was made. Even the lengthy "Lord of the Rings" had to keep out a major character in the first movie; and that's even in the extended director's version.
"Film rights often go into a black hole," producer Danny Krausz said. "Production companies take the rights but they often don't have the talent to see it through."
It may be better in our day to keep our rights and see what the changing entertainment landscape brings us.
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