By Arianna Reiche
I am not a typical scout.
I built Bo-sco after some fifteen years moving between books (editing a lit mag, publishing my debut with a Big Five, teaching on a prestigious MA, working through slush piles of small presses like McSweeney’s) and screen (developing original IP for streamers, handling shopping rights across teams in the US and UK, leading narrative design for ‘hybrid’ video-games). At some point, across all of that back-and-forthing, I became obsessed with the question of how IP moves between the two worlds, and why the same pipeline that produces extraordinary adaptations also leaves so much high-potential material entirely untouched.
Standard book-to-film scouting usually pays attention to forthcoming titles, established agency relationships, the books already humming with big buzz. Which is a reasonable way to work, with a logic that’s great for the right players. But in a strange way, it both thrives on – and ignores – some core challenges among producers: They love to read; they don’t have time to read. They want to take risks; they need the risk to feel validated before they take it. They’re drawn to original voices; they need the perfect comp before they can hand it upstairs.
And I’d add that producers, right now, are not exactly coy about what they want. Grounded, realist sci-fi is having a sustained moment; so are procedurals and true crime, and, interestingly, anything set in an office. In the US market particularly, anything overtly political is hard to sell right now; the instinct is toward the universal and the escapist. These are real constraints, but they’re also a fantastic set of invitations.
Bo-sco has one core offering: IP reports covering seven ‘hidden-gem’ titles each month, delivered directly to subscribers’ inboxes. Each report is crafted from deeply informed media intelligence, yes, but also on the harder-to-name thing that happens when you’ve read widely and weirdly enough that well-trained instinct starts doing work that pure analysis can’t. The material I look for is deliberately off the standard acquisitions track: deep backlists (we’re talking the stellar, baffling thing that barely made a splash in 2003), both translated and untranslated work from international markets, estates that aren’t the obvious ones, small presses and regional lit scenes whose cool-factor makes them difficult to penetrate. And – a personal favorite! – unusual digital IP, the kind of forum lore and internet-native narrative that gave us Zola and, more recently, Backrooms, a piece of “creepypasta” that’s now become an A24 almost-summer blockbuster.
Those under-explored sources are what get Bo-sco’s team, and our subscribers (who pay a fraction of the price of a retained scout for our monthly reports), so excited: the cultural ignition that appears when you pay attention to the hidden corners and unlikely spaces. And the idea that this kind of digression is somehow antithetical to market-informed production decisions is, I’d argue, total hogwash. Built-in audiences don’t guarantee adaptability – what they tell you is that a particular appetite exists and is looking for somewhere to go. The wave of “weird lit” on BookTok doesn’t necessarily mandate another weird-lit bestseller option. It means a readership primed for formal strangeness and uncanny premises could be activated by something they’ve never heard of.
Like, perhaps, estate title The Unicorn from Bo-sco’s first-ever report: Iris Murdoch’s bonkers and phantasmagoric 1963 novel about a beautiful aristocrat locked in her castle after trying to kill her husband – and the cult-like devotion she inspires in her staff, including new arrival Marian who’s been hired as a governess for a child that doesn’t exist. Euphoria meets Bluebeard.
The same logic applies to period. The current early-aughts and Y2K nostalgia among Gen Z and Gen Alpha opens up titles that have been sitting unnoticed, without violating that rule the data keeps telling us: that viewers aren’t desperate for period right now; they want to see clothes that they recognize. Enter something like Randall by Jonathan Gibbs, a backlist title from small but mighty press Galley Beggar Press, which appeared in our second report. It’s set in the world of Goldsmiths and art student parties in the late 80s and 90s, and veers into London’s anarchic YBA scene at the turn of the millennium.
That same insight from viewer analytics is also great news for that aforementioned realist, near-future speculative item on commissioners’ wish lists. Case in point: Luiza Sauma’s cult novel Everything You’ve Ever Wanted, following a 20-something woman who wins a lottery to live a peaceful, but livestreamed, life on a distant planet. After an option expired it’s become available, and I frankly can’t believe that a budget-conscious, mid-size studio keen on contained environments hasn’t jumped on it.
Watch the market. Take risks. Deep-dive into your own obsessions. I promise, a successful project can do all three.
Arianna Reiche is the award-winning author of Warden / Star and At the End of Every Day. She has a background in screen development and media research. She has worked with Netflix on development projects.