What a film book is, before you begin

A film book is not a trailer and not an adaptation. Your sentences stay as you wrote them; the production performs them. That single decision governs everything downstream — casting, pacing, picture and length.

Because the text is not condensed, the runtime is arithmetic, not opinion: a 90,000-word novel is roughly 9h 41m of finished picture, and 50,000 words is roughly 5h 23m.

The six stages of the build

Text locked: the manuscript is read whole and set as law. Errors caught here cost nothing; errors caught after casting cost the most.

Cast: a narrator plus distinct voices for the speaking characters. Voices are added in blocks — one block per two voices — because each voice is another full pass of the book.

Atmosphere: room, weather, distance and threat are designed per scene. Effects are added in blocks of five.

Score: licensed music chosen against the manuscript, cut to its turns and mixed beneath the performance — a flat $1,500 for the choosing, cutting and mixing.

Picture: imagery is cut to the sentence, scene by scene, so the eye is never ahead of or behind the voice.

Master and deliver: mixed, mastered and handed over as files you own outright, with a provenance record published beside them.

What it costs, published

Base production is 12% of the word count. Worked out: 50,000 words is $6,000, 90,000 words is $10,800, 200,000 words is $24,000.

Cast and atmosphere are 1% of word count per block — per 2 voices, per 5 effects. Nothing is bundled and nothing is hidden; the Forge shows every line before a Charter is sealed.

The listening edition of the same performance is priced separately at 7.000000000000001% of word count when commissioned alone.

Doing it yourself

It is possible. Expect to solve four hard problems: consistent casting across hours of narration, sound design that reads as place rather than decoration, music you are actually licensed to publish, and picture cut to prose without drifting off the sentence.

The unglamorous killer is length. A single novel is many hours of finished material; amateur builds usually die in the middle third, not at the start.

The order of the work

1. 01Lock the textRead the manuscript whole and freeze it as the production's law.
2. 02Cast the voicesAssign a narrator and distinct voices to the speaking characters.
3. 03Lay atmosphereDesign room, weather, distance and threat scene by scene.
4. 04Choose the scoreSelect licensed music, cut it to the book's turns and mix it beneath the performance.
5. 05Cut pictureCut imagery to the sentence so the eye stays with the voice.
6. 06Master and deliverMix, master and deliver owned files with a published provenance record.

Asked and answered

How long does a film book take to make?

It moves in the six stages above; a full novel is a production of months, not days, because the whole text is performed rather than excerpted.

Do I need to rewrite my book first?

No. If you are rewriting, you are making an adaptation, not a film book.

Do I keep the rights?

Yes. The masters are yours in perpetuity. The house forges; it never owns your story.

Can I start with one chapter?

Ask the house about a single-chapter build before committing the whole book — the same practice the Novel-Game offers with its Proving Chapter.