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Several bestselling authors came together to discuss what makes a successful screen adaptation during a panel at BookCon in New York City on April 19
Robinne Lee, author of The Idea of You, noted that adaptations needed to strike a “balance” between attracting a “wider” audience but also keeping true to the book
Andy Weir, author of Project Hail Mary, said that writers can be biased when it comes to on-screen adaptations
Translating a book to screen isn’t easy — and authors know this better than anyone.
Bestselling authors Andy Weir, Robinne Lee, May Cobb and Emily St. John Mandel — each of whom have had books adapted for the screen — weighed in during a panel at BookCon on April 19 on what they think makes a successful screen adaptation.
“Personally for my work or just in general, I feel like we all know that there’s going to be a lot of changes because there has to be to adapt to a new medium. So I feel like if something sticks to the spirit of the source material, that’s successful,” said The Hunting Wives author Cobb.
Lee — who wrote The Idea of You, which was adapted into an Amazon Prime film starring Anne Hathaway — agreed with Cobb, adding that adaptations needed to strike a “balance” between attracting a “wider” audience but also keeping true to the book.
Robinne Lee attends 13th Annual Women In Film in 2020.
Credit: Rodin Eckenroth/FilmMagic
“I think it’s important to keep the spirit of the book and to ideally, when you are creating something for the screen, whether it’s a large or small screen, you’re manufacturing something for a larger and wider audience,” she said. “But ideally you’re not going to alienate those who fell in love with the book.”
“So it’s like a balancing act of how can I be true to what readers fell in love with and still create something that’s going to appeal to a wide audience?” she continued.
It can be eye-opening for authors to see the new version of their work, according to Mandel, whose novel Station Eleven was adapted into an HBO Max limited series. She shared that she thought it was “surreal” seeing her book on the screen for the first time, especially since she “was not deeply involved in the adaptation.”
“It was only about two months before everybody else saw it. And I was like, ‘Wow, they changed every single plot point, every single one,’ ” she recalled. “But they did retain the spirit of the original, so it felt to me like a successful adaptation.”
As for Weir — who wrote Project Hail Mary, which was recently adapted into a film starring Ryan Gosling — he noted that it can be tough for authors to give their opinion on what a successful adaptation would look like, given how biased they are as the creator.
“You’re asking a bunch of writers what we think the most important aspect of page-to-screen adaptation is so we’re going to skew heavily toward staying true to the source material because we made the source material,” Weir said.
Novelist Andy Weir during the ‘Spotlight on Andy Weir’ panel in Illinois.
Credit: Barry Brecheisen/Getty
“So we tend to define the adaptation in terms of, ‘How closely did you stay to my story and how much did you mess it up?’” he added. “So we have our bias on this.”
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But by all objective metrics, they’re doing just fine. Project Hail Mary has grossed over $573 million in the box office as of April 20. The Hunting Wives also became the top-streamed series in the U.S. shortly after its August 2025 release, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
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