Books Aren't Being Written to Be Read Anymore.

Almost every other book seems destined for the screen. From glossy YAs like The Summer I Turned Pretty to campus dramas like Off Campus, stretching back to reimaginings of classics like The Odyssey.

But now it raises a sharper question: are these novels being written less as literature and more as blueprints for adaptation? Increasingly, authors appear to craft stories with an expectation that an agent or studio will eventually scoop them up, while Hollywood leans on these ready-made narratives to feed its content machine. In this climate, the novel risks becoming less a work of art than a commodity engineered for its screen potential.

Books as Blueprints

There is nothing quite like the book community. The dissection of an author’s intent, the debates surrounding hidden meanings, or the deep‑dive into fan casts of beloved series. For me, the book always comes first. Long before a film adaptation, you set the tone, the scenario, the characters. The voices in your head are stitched together from your own imagination.

Scrolling through Instagram recently, I discovered that one of my top‑rated reads, Lucy Score’s Things We Never Got Over, had just been given a series order by Prime Video. A few swipes later, I realised almost every book I’d devoured in the past year was headed for screen treatment: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Boys of Tommen, The Windy City Series, and more. Which begs the question: why? Has Hollywood run out of original content, now leaning on authors to roll out ready‑made stories? Or is this simply BookTok’s influence, with studios tapping into viral fame to lure audiences from Goodreads feeds to theatre seats? 

The numbers tell their own story: five of the top ten grossing films in 2024 were book adaptations, and every BAFTA Best Film winner from 2020 to 2025 came from a novel. According to the Publishers Association, nearly half, 48%, of all original UK and US drama series released on Disney+, Netflix, and Prime Video between January 2024 and June 2025 were adapted from books.

Of course, not every book is destined for adaptation. Titles like Not Quite Dead Yet or The Song of Achilles remain untouched. But look at the Goodreads Reading Challenge’s top five for 2026: Hail Mary, Dear Debbie, The Correspondent, Heated Rivalry, My Husband’s Wife, all already optioned or in production. So what’s the criteria? A BookTok sensation? A certain threshold of reviews on Goodreads or Amazon? 

From TikTok to BookTok 

Much like TikTok’s influence on music, publishing is beginning to bend toward virality. Some artists craft songs with hooks designed for short‑form videos, snippets engineered to spark dances, memes, and millions of shares. Doechii admitted to The Forty‑Five that “the business is like, ‘This is what’s going to be the future and you should do this because it’s what the algorithm wants’.” Adele, in contrast, pushed back in an Apple Music interview: “If everyone is making music for TikTok, then who is making the music for my generation? Who is making the music for my peers? I will do that job gladly.”

In a 2025 Rolling Stone article, it was reported that 200 million TikTok videos created using the Global Top 10 songs in 2024 led to over 8 billion Spotify streams, proof of how algorithm‑driven virality now dictates industry success.

Take PinkPantheress, who built her career on 12‑second TikTok clips, amassing millions of followers and eventually a Coachella set this year. Similarly, Jason Derulo’s “Savage Love” went viral through a dance trend, expanding his reach far beyond traditional radio. And then there are artists like Olivia Rodrigo, Justin Bieber, and Taylor Swift, whose existing audiences guarantee virality regardless of platform.

Draw the line back to books, and the pattern is striking. Just as musicians tailor songs for algorithms, authors now seem to write novels with adaptation potential baked in, stories primed for Hollywood’s content pipeline. Entertainment for the next generation may not be about originality, but could it be about engineering virality? The songs designed for TikTok, books designed for BookTok, all feeding into the same cycle of instant fame and commodified art?

Future of Fiction

So what does the future hold? There is nothing inherently wrong with a book being brought to the screen. In fact, some adaptations surpass the source material. One Day (which shot to number one on the UK Netflix chart upon its release in February 2024), The Woman in Cabin 10, and The Devil Wears Prada all prove that translation can elevate a story. But not every novel needs to be transferred to film. There is beauty in preserving the act of reading: the pages turning, the anticipation of each chapter, the intimacy of inhabiting a character’s inner monologue.

It’s the reader in me that resists mass production, the plotlines rewritten, happy endings manufactured, characters added for commercial appeal. The Idea of You, The Housemaid, and The Edge of Tomorrow all remind us how easily a story’s essence can be reshaped to fit Hollywood’s mould. And for producers, the appeal is obvious: the book is already adorned, the plot is already written, and the fan base is already built. The majority of the work was already done before the cameras could begin to roll. Books deserve protection from becoming mere adaptation commodities, because sometimes the truest artistry lies in leaving them on the page.

Adaptations should not be the new commodity. If novels are valued solely for their potential at the box office or streaming platforms, we risk creating a feedback loop where literature is stripped of its artistry and reduced to raw material. Books are not merely content pipelines; they are cultural provocations, spaces for imagination, intimacy and deeper conversations about complex issues. 

The challenge for our generation, and the one after, is balance: embracing adaptations that elevate stories while resisting the urge to engineer every BookTok sensation for Hollywood. Because if the novels we love and critique become commodities first and works of art second, we risk losing the very magic that makes us read in the first place. 

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Photo © Zendaya and Robert Pattinson in The Drama, Directed by Kristoffer Borgli