Culture Street

'TaleFlick' is a new joint venture which offers a library of searchable books for adaptation across film, TV and digital media.

Producer Uri Singer of Passage Pictures and George Berry, previously of Netflix and Apple, said the database “bridges the gap between the written word on paper and the spoken word on screen by paving the way for storytellers around the world to shop their content to the entertainment industry”.

The platform is for all content including published books and short stories and the submission fee is $88 (£67) to cover curation, which makes the content available for one year on the website. Authors will retain all rights to their books, but will give the Los Angeles-based company the chance to bid on their dramatic rights and present their stories to studios and production companies.

Berry “saw an opportunity to offer the studios a better way to access original content for their ever-growing audiences”, according to a TaleFlick spokesperson.

Singer, the founder and c.e.o. of Passage Pictures, a production company based in Los Angeles, develops, produces and finances projects  “with commercial appeal”. His recent screen projects include  The King of Oil by Daniel Ammann, which is now attached to John Krasinski’s Sunday Night Productions with Matt Damon to star.

Singer said: "As a producer, I’ve learned the importance of finding strong content and having a reliable source that can provide it. TaleFlick allows Studios and Producers, like myself, to find stories that otherwise would not have had a chance to be seen.”

According to research commissioned by the Publishers Association and produced by Frontier Economics, film adaptations of books grossed 44% more at the UK box office and a full 53% more worldwide than films from original screenplays.