Converting Books To Movies: Sidharth Jain On The Business Of Selling Stories
- By Tara Khandelwal

We are at the beginning of, at least a solid decade ahead of us, where the focus will be on telling compelling Indian Stories. It’s going to be a golden decade for Indian Writers.
2019 is slated to be the year we see numerous book adaptations come to life on the small and big screens. To help writers sell their books to film makers, Sidharth Jain started “The Story Ink”, India’s First Story Company. Sidharth forecasts a bright future ahead for Indian Storytellers and thus he founded the company to act as a bridge between writers and producers, helping sell film or dramatisation rights to books written by Indian authors. Having worked in the film business in various roles at Hotstar, Adlabs Films, and Hyperion Studio USA, he has also founded the story to script development company iRock films. It is no wonder then, that in just over a year – The Story Ink has has closed 40+ book to screen adaption deals and is in the process of closing another 30-40 by March 2019. He talks to Bound about his role as Chief Storyteller at StoryInk, the relatively new business of book to film agenting, and the resurgence of using books as source material for films.
INSTINCT, INSTINCT, INSTINCT.
Do you think platforms like Netflix and Amazon are changing the way books are being written, especially in India? Are more and more writers writing with a view of making their books accessible across audiences through these multi-media platforms?
How difficult/easy was it to go from working at huge production houses like Hotstar to running and managing your own agency?
What do you forecast in the future of book-to-screen adaptations?

Written by Rheea Mukherjee
Rheea Rodrigues Mukherjee is the author of The Body Myth (Unnamed Press /Penguin India 2019) which was shortlisted for the Tata Literature Live First Book Award. Her work has been published and featured in Scroll.in, Southern Humanities Review, Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Vogue India, Out of Print, TBLM, and Bengal Lights, among others. She co-founded Bangalore Writers Workshop in 2012 and currently co-runs Write Leela Write, a Design and Content Laboratory in Bangalore, India. Rheea has an MFA in creative writing from California College of the Arts.