Obviously books have been getting film/tv adaptions for as long as the visual media has existed. But I noticed an irritating trend that has been getting more and more common.
Over the past ten years or so, there has been an increase in adaptions of books whether it be in film or tv. With that, companies have been seeking to use the novels as marketing for their own platforms or for the films themselves. These have come in three forms: the mass market paperbacks of the covers being replaced with a poster from the adaption, a printed on sticker with the logo of the streamer or a tagline, or a line somewhere on the cover stating that it’s being adapted.
It’s fine if companies print on the back of the book the company logo but having it be printed on the cover is a way to get the company’s name into your life and is just inconvenient: replacing a novel’s potentially amazing cover art with a logo of a company that had no relation to the series prior to the adaption.
It’s also annoying when it’s printed on that the book is being adapted into a major motion picture. Not only can that tagline be shorten to: “it’s a movie now” but there is literally no need to even have it on. When that movie has finished its theatrical run, the branding for the movie will be useless since the movie wont be making a huge profit after it has left theaters. It’s just wasted space on some potentially amazing artwork.
The most annoying of this being the wheel of time books. Every paperback version of these books now in print(at least in the western side of the word) has the tagline that wheel of time is being adapted into a tv series. And every recent paperback of the series being printed with a ‘sticker’ of the Amazon logo on each book.
Another example of this is the first dune book with the success of the recent films. The recent printings of the first dune book has a printed on ‘sticker’ reminded you every time you pick up the book that the book has now recently been adapted into a “major motion picture.”
Note: yes I know this has been happening for a while now but it’s seems to be happening more and more over the past ten years
by Feisty-Treacle3451