In 2005, Franklin Leonard, then a junior development executive working for Leonardo DiCaprio, had a thought: what if it were easier for Hollywood to find good screenplays that hadn't been produced yet? So he did precisely what tastemakers in the arts and culture space do: he asked his contacts.
The result was the Black List, an annual survey of Hollywood's best unproduced screenplays that has morphed over nearly two decades into a multifunctional web platform focused on screenplay development and discovery for writers and producers alike, with the likes of Argo, Juno, The King's Speech, and Spotlight among its success stories. Now, with relations between Hollywood and New York publishing closer—and the book-to-screen pipeline bigger—than ever before, the Black List is shifting its gaze over to the slush pile.
Starting today, the Black List will accept novel manuscripts in addition to plays screenplays. Users can create a free public profile and host their manuscripts (either unpublished or self-published) on the site for $30 a month, and purchase, for $150, feedback on the first 90–100 pages from a network of readers with industry experience.
For no further costs, users can also opt in to have the manuscript considered by organizations who have partnered with the Black List, including film studios looking to option books for the screen. One such partnership, with Simon Kinberg’s Genre Films—producer of Deadpool and The Martian, among others—will reward an “outstanding unpublished manuscript” with an 18-month option for $25,000.
Industry professionals can apply for free access to the site’s databases, which are searchable by genre, subgenre, and theme. A weekly email to industry subscribers—including book editors, literary and film agents, and Hollywood studio executives—will highlight manuscripts with the highest reader evaluation each week, also broken down by genre. The Black List, Leonard stressed, will not receive a cut of the profits from any book deals made for manuscripts discovered via its website, instead sourcing its income primarily from hosting fees and reader feedback purchases.
The idea, Leonard said, was to build a tool for “the person who'd written a novel and didn't have the connections that a person normally needs to get your novel to someone who can do something with it.” He added: "We're trying to make it possible that, no matter who or where you are or who you know, if you've got something great, someone who can do something with it will pay attention."
Leading the fiction initiative is Randy Winston, who came to the Black List from his position as writing programs manager at the Center for Fiction after recommendations from numerous industry insiders, Lisa Lucas and Yahdon Israel among them. "Literally every single person I talked to said, I don't know if you can get him, but he'll know the right person if you can't," Leonard recalled. "So I reached out, and it very quickly became apparent to me that the person that I should be hiring was the person I was talking to."
In addition to the manuscript program, Winston's purview includes oversight of the Unpublished Novel Award, a new annual prize to be administered across seven genres: children's and young adult, crime and mystery, horror, literary fiction, romance, science fiction and fantasy, and thriller and suspense. Only unpublished manuscripts not under contract are eligible for the prize, which comes with a $10,000 grant in each category. A Black List user profile is required to enter.
The judges for the first iteration of the award are a who's who of book, media, and movie business luminaries, among them Kathy Belden, Marie-Helene Bertino, LeVar Burton, Dhonielle Clayton, Tananarive Due, Mike Flanagan, Roxane Gay, Mollie Glick, Radhika Jones, Annie Laks, Emily Nemens, Duvall Osteen, Howie Sanders, Eric Simonoff, Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, Tessa Thompson, and Traci Thomas.
"I’ve long admired the way the Black List has separated the wheat from the chaff in the film world and am so excited to have this new tool to utilize on the book side," Glick, the literary agent at CAA, said in a statement. Clayton, author, president and owner of book packagers Cake Creative and Electric Postcard Entertainment, and COO of We Need Diverse Books, noted that she believes the project will create opportunities to "amplify marginalized writers." She added: "Diverse creators have long faced many barriers in getting their stories told, which is why initiatives like these are needed to level the playing field and change our perception of who gets to write the Great American Novel."
Finally, Winston will also host Read the Acknowledgments, a web series live-taped on Zoom featuring conversations with book business professionals on their experience in the industry, aimed at providing writers with "a clear picture of the ecosystem that is publishing."
"There is enough out there on craft—books, podcasts, YouTube—that you can read, watch, and listen to until till the cows come home," said Winston. "We want to make sure that we're making accessible information on the business side, so people can make reasonable decisions as they start operating in that space. It's important that folks know that it's not just me writing a book then everyone doing lord knows what for me in this romantic world of books. No, it's a business, and it's collaborative."
