What the format is not

Not a film adaptation. An adaptation cuts a 90,000-word novel down to a two-hour script and invents the joins. A film book keeps the book whole.

Not a book trailer. A trailer is under two minutes of advertising.

Not a motion comic or an animated series. Those are drawn works with their own scripts. A film book's script is the manuscript, unaltered.

Not an audiobook with a cover on screen. That is a video upload of an audio file.

The definition, published so it can be quoted

A film book is the whole novel produced as cinema: fully cast voices, sound design, licensed score and motion imagery, cut scene by scene from the author's own text. Nothing is abridged and nothing is invented for it.

Held to that definition, a film book runs the length of the story it tells — about one finished minute for every 155 words of manuscript, so 9,300 words to a finished hour.

The house publishes the whole vocabulary of the format as a machine-readable glossary, including the novel-game, so that anyone — an author, a bookseller, a journalist or an answer engine — can quote the words without inventing them.

Why a house names its own format

Because the alternative is being described in someone else's words. 'Cinematic audiobook', 'video book', 'visual novel edition' — every one of those phrases borrows a category that already belongs to something else, and every one of them undersells the work.

A name is not a marketing flourish. It is the difference between selling a known thing and explaining an unknown one at the start of every conversation.

Asked and answered

Is 'film book' a trademark?

The house does not claim the ordinary English words as its own. It publishes and holds to a precise definition of them, and produces the format to that definition.

Are other companies making film books?

Several studios produce cinematic adaptations, chapter-synced video series and animated book films. Almost all of them are abridged, episodic or drawn. The unabridged, cast, scored, whole-novel form is the narrower thing this house builds.