Bo Bennett On Books Becoming Blockbusters

HOST: It's good to have you back, Bo. Seventeen episodes in, and I want to start with something you said a few episodes back: that the only real failure in your pipeline is producing a wonderful book that looks fantastic and doesn't get any sales. BookToScreen sounds like your first answer to that failure that doesn't involve the book staying a book at all. So, what is this, and why now? GUEST: Well, there's actually been a lot of services that we've used in the past that offer similar results, um but didn't actually produce any, at least not that I know of. Um but I wanted to create something that gave people the opportunity to get their books out in front of the audience who has the means and the desire to actually take that book and turn it into a screenplay or a a movie or a a series. Because I mean, let's face it, that's what producers do. They look for the next best thing and they find it in the most odd places. You don't need a $2,000 a month agent to to go out and shop your book around. I mean, that's that's not something that uh that's required. What is required is a presence, is to have your book out there where people looking for it could actually find it. And that's what we offer at uh book to screen. HOST: Presence is definitely key, but when you say 'put your book out there,' what form does that take? Are we talking about a script, a movie treatment, or something else entirely? I'm curious about the actual product. GUEST: Right. So, everybody, at least all of our customers, our authors start with a book. So, you have a book and as you know a book is very different than a screenplay or a movie or a series. So, the missing step is to be able to turn that book into a screenplay. Or at least get it ready to pitch somebody who can turn it into a screenplay. This was the missing piece that that we were trying to patch using professional writers prior to AI. Now, professional writers, don't get me wrong, they did a great job in um but they had to read the whole book, they had to write it and it would cost like literally over $1,000 to get this done. The problem is the economics of that and the math. You're spending potentially thousands of dollars to to get your book out there and get it in the right format so people will look at it. But the chances of it actually getting discovered are very slim. And that's the honest truth. I mean, there's so many books out there that your book it's just it has not the best chance of getting discovered. Of course, we try to increase those chances and we certainly do by having it on this platform. But honestly, your chances are still very small that you're going to get called by a major Hollywood producer in order to buy your book for millions of dollars. Um however, what drastically changes is the economics. Now, you could for $9 a month, $29 a month depending on the package, uh a $200 if you want to have a whole screenplay written, you could get your book out there and the economics change completely. And it's a no-brainer to get this done because uh even even the opportunity that somebody a Hollywood producer could take your book and buy your book and buy the rights to it. I mean, that's that's like a major, major win. So, it it's a small investment. And that's what we do. We don't just put it out there, but we use the the best AI to do all the writing and the preparation and the pitch line and the story lines and everything the producers are looking for. Again, even write the screenplay. They of course, they may change it. They probably will if they do buy it, but at least they have something. They have something to present to their higher ups and something to present to the team to be able to discuss it and that's what we provide. HOST: So, the big breakthrough here is the cost. You've made it affordable for authors to essentially create pitch packages with storylines, pitch lines, and even full screenplays. But, I'm curious about the mechanism. How does the AI actually do that? Does it look for things like dramatic structure, character arcs, or other visual elements? What's the underlying process? GUEST: I'll be honest here, I don't know exactly what the AI does. I give it very specific instructions. And those, well, let me rephrase that. I give it very generic instructions with a specific goal, a specific objective. And that objective and goal is to make the book as attractive as possible. For the target market, which is the Hollywood producers. So with that, AI constructs everything that it needs. And it's, it's probably not one formula. It might be different according to the book. But it does read the entire book and makes those judgment calls on the spot. How to present this material in the best possible light. That's what it does and it does it very well. HOST: That's fair. Sometimes the 'how' is less important than the what, especially when the 'what' is disrupting an existing industry. Professional coverage and script writing have been paid services for a long time. Do you see this competing directly with those human readers and writers? And how do you expect them to react? GUEST: Well, I think it's going to compete with a certain level of the screenwriters, maybe like the lower level screenwriters that would take on these kind of jobs. I don't, at least immediately, seeing this taking over Hollywood, for example. I think that the human element and in order to perfect it is still very important. And maybe um again, I I don't know exactly how Hollywood works, but I'm assuming that they have teams of writers and there are higher people on the team and lower level people on the team. I think that the lower level people on the team are in trouble. And of course, that's going to that's going to cause a problem down the road because the lower level eventually become the higher people, the higher level people. And without the lower level, then there's not going to be any higher level people. But I think it it the the more advanced screenwriters could use AI to get the basics done, to get the the skeleton, and they could fill in the gaps where it needs to be done. And that's kind of what we're doing with with this site. We are we are creating the skeleton screenplay, something that is a good starting point. It's not the finished product. It's a really good starting point for some producer to take, put their team on it and perfect it the way that they want it. HOST: I see. So, it's more of a tool to help indie authors get started in that other world, creating a basis for collaboration, rather than fully replacing the human writer. You've said across these episodes that publishing a profitable book is the hard part. Does BookToScreen move the needle on profitability, or is the screen rights world so different that you're essentially building a lottery ticket machine for authors? GUEST: I would say it's closer to the latter. Uh then the former and that is this we're not talking about um we're not talking about the publishing process here. Publishing has already been done. Uh what we're talking about is we're talking about getting the book now out in front of a completely different market. So the the author has their revenue stream and their income from selling books and that's pretty much a guaranteed. There's no there's really no um I I can't say there's no risk because there's always risk involved. But you're going to make some money, whether it's going to be a couple bucks a month or it's going to be thousands of dollars a month. You've got to make something with publishing. This is different. This is a completely different beast. You're not talking about the ranges. You're not talking about the range of a few dollars to a few thousand dollars. You're pretty much talking about either nothing or potentially millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, we're talking about the extremes in the book to movie industry, the film industry. We're not talking about the uh the the the middle ground where most people would would sit. And I think that might be changing in the coming years as um as AI helps filmmakers, more independent filmmakers make films more inexpensively. So they're going to be more open to different projects and there's going to be a lot more of them and they're going to be looking for a lot more material. So I see a huge huge uh benefit for writers in this area in the coming future. HOST: Before we go, for listeners who want to follow up on what we covered, where can they find you and the work you're doing? GUEST: As usual, you go to archyboy.com. That's where you can find all my businesses. Besides that, specifically what we're talking about, we're talking about uh booktoscreen.pro. And that's where you can put your book up and list it and just sit back and wait for Hollywood to come calling. Or wait for nothing to happen. But at least your book is there and that's what we're going for. HOST: Thanks for joining me again, Bo. I love that you're approaching this problem from a completely different angle, making screen adaptations accessible to indie authors. And thank you for tuning in. Let's get you back on soon, Bo; we've still got about twenty-something sites on that list, and after today I'm genuinely curious what comes after screen. Until next time — that's a wrap.