What Kyndred Makes
Part 3: Books
My wife is an author. She indie published her novel The Girl in the Zoo and the first two volumes of her Strange Chronicles series under our production company, and she’s working on more. Meanwhile I’m about ten books behind on the nightstand but I just finished Project Hail Mary, which I enjoyed enormously and has me thinking about what this post should actually say.
Andy Weir writes prose that does what only prose can. The interior monologue, the rhythm of a solved problem laid out in a character’s voice, the cumulative weight that builds across pages. The recent movie adaptation handled the material beautifully with changes that worked for the screen and really leaned into the feel good elements without getting bogged down by some of the finer details in the book. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE those details in the book, but leaving some of that out gave the film the tone it needed and the pacing to keep audiences engaged. The book gives you something the film can’t and the film gives you something the books can’t. Both formats can be excellent on their own terms, delivering a unique experience best suited to the medium.
That’s where I want to start with books at Kyndred. Every story has a format that suits it best, and the best ones can travel between them without losing what made them work in the first place. The kinds of books we want to build a home for are the ones that earn their readers. Contained worlds, character-rich premises, prose that lives in your head longer than it spent in your hands.
The Humans by Matt Haig is one of those for me. So is The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin too. Different writers, different genres, but they share something. They make a whole world out of a small one, they trust their readers, and they don’t waste a sentence. I want a hundred more of those. From writers we might already know and writers nobody knows yet.
I love big sprawling worlds too. The Stormlight Archive, the Lightbringer series, His Dark Materials, The King Killer Chronicles. Fantasy that takes years to read and lives with you for years after. Books are one of the few formats where scope is set by the writer’s ambition and the reader’s appetite. A novel that takes a thousand pages to land is welcome here just as much as a tight novella that finishes itself in a single sitting.
Then there’s the cross-medium piece, which is one of the things I’m most excited about.
A novel proves character depth, narrative voice, and the architecture of a story world in a way a pitch document or a sizzle reel never can. When that book finds its readers, the case for adaptation gets a lot easier to make. And when adaptation works well, it works because the source material has room to breathe in another format. Catch-22 had a strong film in 1970 and then got the room to expand when Hulu turned it into a six-episode series. No Country for Old Men is one of the cleanest novel-to-screen translations in modern cinema because the Coens trusted Cormac McCarthy’s structure. Station Eleven, Silo, Foundation, The Martian. All of them work because the people adapting them respected what the book was doing first.
The reverse works too. A series or a film with a story world worth deepening can grow companion novels, prequel books, character-driven side stories that live in print and audio. Same canon, expanded reach, more for the audience to live inside. That’s what cross-medium means at Kyndred. Story worlds that earn the next format because readers and viewers asked for them.
Books are also where the writer is the most exposed and the most in control. There’s no production crew between them and the page. The voice is the whole event. The taste of a publishing list, meaning the books a publisher chooses to back, tells you everything about what they actually believe in. That part is on us. We know what we love and we know what we want to champion. Original fiction with craft and ambition, literary or genre, standalone or serial. Books that complete themselves on the last page or earn the next one.
If that sounds like the kind of bookshelf you’d want to live with, you’re in the right place.
Kyndred Studios. The Studio for Everyone.
Your Turn
What are the books you keep rereading? What is the one that stuck with you long after you closed the cover? What is the book you wish more people knew about? What are some books you wish had been adapted to either a film or series? And what film or series do you wish expanded its world through books?
Tell me in the comments. Kyndred is building a slate with its community and this is part of where that conversation begins.
Next up: music.
Thanks for reading.
-Lauer
I think it might just be the fact that few people have actually read the book or its sequels xD or they just veer completely away from the source material- there was a French adaptation last year with Eva Green as Milady. I feel like Mask of Zorro would be a better comp where the comedic elements don't overpower the drama. That the sequel has not been adapted- which features a failed attempt to rescue Charles II from his execution- just boggles my mind.
The Three Musketeers. I still don't get how studios haven't turned this into a money-making franchise- there's so much material in the sequels to cover at least 6 films. And because it takes place over 20 years, it can be made like the Before trilogy, every few years or so at leisure.