For nearly 20 years, Franklin Leonard has made it his mission to help undiscovered writers find an audience.
In 2005, he started the Black List — an annual survey of Hollywood’s best unproduced screenplays. Over the years, the Black List evolved to include a website that has hosted tens of thousands of scripts, TV pilots and plays, and became an indispensable tool for studios and producers. More than 400 screenplays that landed on the Black List’s annual survey have been produced, including acclaimed films like “Spotlight,” “Slumdog Millionaire” and “The King’s Speech.”
Now, Leonard is tackling another industry in which writers struggle, and mostly fail, to break through: publishing. He’s adding novel manuscripts to the Black List, aiming to crack the perennial problem of the slush pile.
Aspiring novelists can now post manuscripts on the Black List, where they can potentially get discovered by the literary agents, editors and publishers who subscribe to the site.
The goal, Leonard said, is to create a new avenue for authors whose work may have gone overlooked because they lack a literary agent or the right industry connections.
This lack of visibility, he said, “has really negative consequences for the writers who are trying to get their work to somebody who can do something with it, but also for the publishing industry itself, because it’s not necessarily finding the best writers and the best books,” Leonard said.
Leonard has been thinking about adding fiction to the site for the past four years. After talking to dozens of publishing professionals, he realized that some of the tools he developed for highlighting promising scripts and plays could also be used to showcase exciting unpublished novels.
He recruited Randy Winston, the former director of writing programs at the Center for Fiction, to oversee the Black List’s expansion into fiction, and to assemble a team of readers with publishing experience to evaluate manuscripts.
Like screenwriters and playwrights who use the site, fiction writers can create a public profile on the Black List for free. They can post a novel-length unpublished or self-published manuscript on the site for a monthly fee of $30. For $150, authors can get professional feedback on the first 90 to 100 pages of their novel from one of the Black List’s readers.
Publishing professionals can apply to gain free access to the site’s content. Those who are approved can browse through manuscripts and search for works by themes and subgenres. Novels that receive outstanding evaluations from readers will be showcased in an email blast to industry subscribers, and highlighted on the site, which maintains lists of the best-rated novels in different genres.
The Black List will not receive a cut if a publisher decides to buy a novel they discover on the site, or claim any rights to the material, Leonard said. The bulk of the business’s revenue comes from the fees that writers pay for evaluations and to post their work on the site.
Some publishers and literary agents who were approached about the Black List’s expansion into fiction said they were optimistic that the site would help uncover new talent.
“Publishers and readers everywhere have tried to figure out how to deal with the onslaught of unsolicited material,” said Molly Stern, the founder and chief executive of Zando, an independent press. “What I think Franklin is doing is tracking and funneling and organizing and creating opportunity for unique and worthy work.”
“He’s done all that for film, so I kind of think he can do it for books,” Stern added.
Leonard has other plans to help draw attention to talented undiscovered novelists. The Black List is creating “The Unpublished Novel Award,” a $10,000 grant for authors of unpublished manuscripts in seven genres — children’s and young adult, mystery, horror, literary fiction, romance, science fiction and fantasy, and thriller and suspense. The judges for the prize include writers and industry figures like the actor LeVar Burton, the novelist Victor LaValle, the literary agents Mollie Glick and Eric Simonoff, and Vanity Fair’s editor in chief, Radhika Jones.
The Black List is also working with a production company, Simon Kinberg’s Genre Films, which produced films like “The Martian” and “Deadpool.” The company will choose an unpublished manuscript to option for 18 months for $25,000.
Sarah Bowlin, a literary agent at Aevitas Creative Management, said the Black List could make it easier for her and other agents to find new writers, rather than “responding to a stack of queries they have not necessarily asked to see.” She also hopes that the site’s rating system will encourage publishers to gamble on debut novelists they might have otherwise overlooked.
“It could be a tool for publishers and editors to take more risks,” she said. “What is rated highly might surprise us, and I hope it does.”
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