Episode 327 - Media Tie-ins for Fun and Profit with Jonathan Maberry
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Jonathan Maberry discusses MEDIA TIE-INS FOR FUN AND PROFIT, including what media tie-in writing is, how the licensing works, the creative constraints of writing in someone else’s world, how to find open calls and pitch editors, the career strategy of when to pursue tie-in work and when to focus on your own brand, and why the writers who treat editing as a business interaction rather than a personal attack are the ones who keep getting hired.
Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestselling author, five-time Bram Stoker Award winner, four-time Scribe Award winner, Inkpot Award winner, poet, and comic book writer. He writes in multiple genres including suspense, thriller, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and action. V-WARS (Netflix) was based on his books/comics; Alcon is developing his teen post-apocalyptic novels for film; and Chad Stahelski, director of John Wick, is developing his bestselling Joe Ledger thrillers for TV. Marvel’s BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER was partly based on his work. He’s president of the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers, and the editor of WEIRD TALES MAGAZINE.
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Summary & Transcript
Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestselling author, five-time Bram Stoker Award winner, four-time Scribe Award winner, and the president of the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. He writes across multiple genres—suspense, thriller, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and action—and his work has crossed into comics, television, and film, including Netflix’s V WARS and elements of Marvel’s BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER. In this conversation, Jonathan laid out the landscape of media tie-in writing: what it is, how to break in, and what working writers should know before they pitch.
WHAT MEDIA TIE-IN ACTUALLY MEANS
Jonathan explained that media tie-in falls into two main categories. The first is direct novelization—adapting a film or television script into a novel. His own entry into tie-in work was novelizing the 2010 remake of THE WOLFMAN, a project that required building a full gothic novel from a screenplay without ever seeing the finished film. The second category is original work set in a licensed world: writing a new Star Wars novel, for instance, or a short story set in the Aliens universe. A third, unofficial category—fan fiction—can’t be sold, but Jonathan noted that several successful tie-in careers started with fan fiction used as a writing sample to pitch licensed work.
NAVIGATING LICENSES AND RIGHTS HOLDERS
The conversation turned to the practical mechanics of finding and approaching license holders. Jonathan recommended starting with research: browsing bookstores or Amazon to identify which publishers hold specific licenses, then searching for the in-house editor overseeing that property. He described a hierarchy that runs from the license holder (often a film studio or game company) through a licensing overseer, to a publishing house editor, and finally to the writer. For properties not yet in print, he suggested contacting the vice president of licensing at the studio directly—an approach that led to his current involvement with the John Wick franchise.
Jonathan also clarified the public domain landscape, noting that what’s public domain varies by country. Sherlock Holmes and the Wizard of Oz are fair game in the United States, but James Bond and King Kong are still under license there while available in Australia. He pointed writers toward Project Gutenberg for the most accurate public domain listings and cautioned them to verify jurisdiction before proceeding.
THE CREATIVE CONSTRAINTS OF LICENSED WORLDS
Working within someone else’s intellectual property demands a particular creative temperament. Jonathan described writing for Blizzard Entertainment’s video game franchises, where characters cannot do anything in prose that they cannot do in gameplay—a constraint that requires absorbing extensive documentation before writing a single word. He noted that multiple executives will provide notes on a draft, sometimes contradicting one another, and that adaptability is essential.
For anthology editing, Jonathan described a chain of approval that can include the license holder, a licensing overseer, the in-house editor, and the anthology editor before a story even reaches the writer. He shared an example from his X-Files anthologies where stories written before the show’s revival had to be reconciled with continuity changes introduced by the new seasons—changes no one could have anticipated when the anthology was commissioned.
SPEED, OUTLINING, AND THE WORK ETHIC OF TIE-IN WRITING
Media tie-in writing operates on compressed timelines. Jonathan described completing an X-Files novel in five weeks and THE WOLFMAN novelization in seven. He emphasized that outlining is non-negotiable in tie-in work—license holders require a full outline every time—and that writers who rely on waiting for inspiration will not survive the deadlines.
His own routine involves writing three to four thousand words per day across two four-hour blocks, treating it as a professional workday that begins at the same time every morning. He recommended a rolling edit approach—reviewing the previous day’s work before starting new pages—rather than falling into the trap of endlessly revising early chapters. For unknown details that require research, he uses an inline placeholder (“EDIT THIS” followed by a note) so the draft’s momentum is never interrupted.
CAREER STRATEGY AND THE TIE-IN TRAP
Jonathan offered pointed advice about where media tie-in should sit in a writer’s career. He recommended establishing an independent voice first—through novels, short stories, comics, or indie publishing—and treating tie-in work as a complement to an existing brand rather than the foundation of one. The advances for tie-in novels typically run between five and eight thousand dollars, and writers who build their reputation primarily on licensed work can find it difficult to sell original material later.
For breaking in, he suggested that short stories offer the most accessible entry point. Writers can search for open anthology calls by Googling a license name plus “guidelines” with a one-year date filter. He also recommended joining the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers at iamtw.org and leveraging networking at conferences and through groups like his own Writer’s Coffeehouse Facebook page, where editors and established tie-in writers regularly participate.
THE BUSINESS OF BEING EDITED
Jonathan closed with advice that applies well beyond tie-in writing: take the ego out of the editing process. He noted that editing is a business function, not a personal attack, and that writers who push back on every edit or demand special treatment in anthologies quickly find themselves off editors’ lists. The writers who sustain long careers—he cited his friend R.L. Stine as an example—are the ones who treat the business side as business and reserve the personal investment for the actual writing.
This transcript was created by Descript and cleaned up by Claude; I don’t review these transcripts in detail, so consider the actual interview to be the authoritative source for this information.
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Jonathan Maberry. Hey, Jonathan, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Jonathan: I am great. How are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I am wonderful and pleased to have you here. And just to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you—Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestselling author, five-time Bram Stoker Award winner, four-time Scribe Award winner, Inkpot Award winner, poet, and comic book writer.
He writes in multiple genres, including suspense, thriller, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and action. V WARS on Netflix was based on his books and comics. He’s developing his teen post-apocalyptic novels for film, and Chad Stahelski, director of JOHN WICK, is developing his bestselling Joe Ledger thrillers for TV.
Marvel’s BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER was partly based on his work. And he’s president of the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers and the editor of Weird Tales magazine. And so I got to listen to several of Jonathan’s talks at Superstars Writing Seminars, and they were fantastic. And so he was kind enough to agree to join me for The Indy Author Podcast.
And as I was looking over his very impressive bio, I got very intrigued by the idea of media tie-in—the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. And so we agreed that we’d chat a little bit about that today. And Jonathan, just to make sure we’re all coming at this from the same point of view—
[00:01:19] Matty: When you talk about media tie-in, what are you talking about?
[00:01:22] Jonathan: So there are two kinds of media tie-in.
[00:01:24] Jonathan: One is when you’re doing a direct novelization of a movie. Like, my first exposure to media tie-in was I was hired to novelize the script for the 2010 remake of THE WOLFMAN. And you don’t get to see the movie. You actually just get the script.
So you have to build a novel based on the script, which is a lot more—there’s a lot more involved than just simply wrapping a paragraph around each line in the script. You don’t know how the actors are going to inflect or deliver their lines. You don’t know what the costumes are going to look like.
There’s a lot of information you don’t have because you haven’t seen the film. So you have to do a body of research in order to build a good, strong novel about it. And I decided, since it was my fifth novel, and I wanted it to represent my fairly new career at the time—so I did research and I wrote a gothic novel.
And that was my first New York Times bestseller.
[00:02:24] Jonathan: Now, the other part of media tie-in is doing original works in licensed worlds. So if you write a Star Wars novel, or a Star Trek, or whatever—it doesn’t have to be a novelization of an episode or a movie. It’s an original work set in that world.
And the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers was created by Max Allan Collins and Lee Goldberg some years ago. And the whole thing is to celebrate that kind of writing. There’s good and there’s bad in everything. There have been some really sketchy, questionable media tie-in novels over the years, but there’s a lot more really good stuff.
And I think one of the areas that shines best is its original works. And we give out the Scribe Awards for these types of works in a variety of categories—from graphic novels to original novels and a couple different categories, to short stories, nonfiction, and so on. Movie scripts, so on.
It’s a lot of fun to be involved in it because you get to play with other people’s toys, and they’re really cool toys. But at the same time, you have to bring originality and game to your writing while still respecting the license and so on. And you have to work within the confines of the license as dictated by the license holder.
And sometimes that gets complicated. Like, for example, some years ago I did an anthology of Aliens versus Predator from the two different movie franchises. Both were owned by Fox, so we had to go through Fox licensing. But then now Disney owns those properties. So you would have to go through Disney, and that’s a complicated process.
They’re a very difficult company to work easily with. They’re a good company to work with, but complex. And so there’s a lot of that side of it. Some companies give you extensive guidelines for what they want and some don’t. With THE WOLFMAN, I got very little guidance other than—the Wolfman was, unlike Frankenstein and Dracula, there was never an original Wolfman novel.
There were werewolf novels, but the Wolfman Larry Talbot story was never novelized. So I had to write in that while hitting certain notes and ignoring temptation to go off completely on my own tangent. And I liked the book I came out with. It was a fun book.
It respected the original source material but built on it. And when I saw the movie—which unfortunately I did not like that much—the original script was gorgeous. David Self did an amazing script. They apparently shot the original script, but then they did a bunch of reshoots to remove a lot of the character development in favor of more gory action.
[00:04:54] Matty: Not thought that was a misstep. Yeah.
[00:04:56] Jonathan: They should have just done it originally. But so my novel doesn’t actually resemble the movie entirely. And unfortunately, the New York Times book reviewer said, “I don’t like the movie. Read the book instead.”
[00:05:09] Matty: Oh, well that’s a silver lining.
[00:05:11] Jonathan: Oh yeah, it got me onto the bestseller list. But at the same time did not endear me to Universal.
Like, it’s not my fault. They’re the ones that cut the movie, and I never spoke ill of the movie when it was out. Of course, I love the cast too. So media tie-in is a pretty complex world. Most of it—probably the biggest chunk of media tie-in is short stories. There’s a lot of licenses out there that are active for that.
And there are some older licenses that are not like modern-day name brands—like Carl Kolchak, the Night Stalker, and the Green Hornet and things like that. They’re still under license or still owned. You still have to get permission and probably pay fees. But at the same time, those aren’t the high-profile ones. They’re not on the level of Star Wars, where everyone in the world knows Star Wars. But it’s fun and it’s a great way to break into the career.
[00:06:04] Jonathan: There’s a third kind of media tie-in, but it’s the unofficial type—we call fan fiction. Which is where anybody just writes a story set in one of the literary or video or whatever worlds they like.
But you can’t sell that because it’s not under license, and the license holder will sue. But quite a few people started off writing fan fiction and used their fan fiction as a writing sample when breaking into media tie-in. And a lot of folks did that during the era of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
So Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder and so on kind of broke in through the fan fiction direction, but what they pitched was an actual licensed thing, and they wound up building excellent careers. And his career is still going.
[00:06:47] Matty: It is interesting. As you were talking, fan fiction popped into my head as sort of, from my perspective, one end of the complexity or authorization spectrum. With the other end of the spectrum being like doing work with Marvel or Disney or things like that.
And then it seems like there’s a huge gap in between there that if people are thinking about—like, oh, I love this world, I would love to write a media tie-in—you sort of suggested that fan fiction might be an entrée to that. What are some other things they should be doing?
[00:07:21] Jonathan: Let me clarify. The fan fiction—you can’t sell the fan fiction. But if you want to pitch to, say, Titan, which does a lot of media tie-in books, and you’re a published author—if you go to them and say, hey, I’m interested in writing a novel. I have a pitch for you. But here’s also a sample of my writing in that world. And if you had written fan fiction about one of those licensed worlds, you can include the URL to that and it becomes a writing sample. So it serves as a writing sample to help you sell into the paid license world. Not all editors want to see it, but I’ve known quite a few, myself included, who have wanted to look at that.
Because you get to see how that person handles the license. Because you can handle it well—you bring new storytelling and nuance to that character or that license. But some people are writing adoring fan fiction, or they’re playing with it a little too much. Like, when Sherlock came out, there was a ton of erotic romance stuff that came out with Holmes and Watson.
And where it’s interesting, and people have suggested or wondered whether Holmes and Watson may have been a couple—even back then—it wasn’t written that way and it wasn’t shot that way, and that would not have been a good piece of fan fiction to use to sell. If you want to do a Sherlock piece.
[00:08:48] Jonathan: Now of course, side note there—Sherlock Holmes himself is in public domain, and any characters that have gone into public domain you actually can write about. You just can’t write about the specific version of it that’s shown in Sherlock or the new show Young Sherlock or Watson or Elementary or any of the other Sherlock Holmes shows. You can’t do that specific version, but you can do a Sherlock Holmes story just like you can do a Wizard of Oz story, because the Frank L. Baum Wizard of Oz books are in public domain.
So that is also kind of a neat thing. It’s not licensed work anymore because the license has expired, but you get to play with those characters. One caution though—when people look up what is public domain, Project Gutenberg usually has the most accurate list, but you have to be careful because what’s public domain in America is different than what’s public domain in Canada or Australia.
Or England. Other English-speaking countries don’t necessarily have the same things because they’re different actual countries with different laws related to copyright. So for example, in Australia you can write a King Kong or a James Bond story. Can’t do that in America without a license. So you have to be careful navigating the world.
But if you learn about it—and joining our organization, iamtw.org, International Association of Media Tie-In Writers—that’s a question you can ask. You can also find guidelines on our website, a lot of other things that can kind of help you move forward into that world, if that’s what you want to do.
[00:10:19] Matty: I did have a question about that—the idea of the different markets having different guidelines for what’s in the public domain. So if I were an American writer and I wanted to write about James Bond and I was only selling the story in Australia—if I got my facts right there—is that permissible, or is it governed—
[00:10:36] Jonathan: It’s where it’s published. So if another country has it as public domain, you can write for that country. It cannot be published in America—not until the rights eventually expire. And I don’t see the James Bond rights ever expiring because they keep renewing them. The original novels may expire, but they were written in the fifties and sixties, so it’s going to be another twenty, twenty-five years before even the first one—CASINO ROYALE—hits public domain.
[00:11:04] Matty: It seems as if there must also be hierarchies within the companies that you might want to approach. So maybe your first crack isn’t going to be for Disney. But how do people find other organizations that might be interested in being approached about media tie-ins?
[00:11:22] Jonathan: Well, there’s a couple different ways. You can browse in a bookstore and browse online, because you can see who’s publishing it. So if you want to do a Doctor Who thing or something, Titan may be publishing that, or Dark Horse, or a couple other companies that publish media tie-in.
It’ll say on the cover which company it is. Or you can go to any book-selling site—Amazon or indie or whatever—and just look up the book. And they always list the publisher. Now, once you know the license name—so say if you were looking up Aliens and Titan Books—you can just put in a Google search: Aliens, Titan Books, editor.
And then very often the editor’s name will pop up. Used to be Steve Saffel. He retired about two years ago, but for years he was the guy overseeing that at Titan. So if you did a search, his name popped up as the editor overseeing a lot of that.
And it changes. Editors come and go. Licenses come and go too. For example, IDW had the Doctor Who license, then Titan had it. Somebody else may have the novel rights and somebody else may have the comic book rights. So you have to—once you decide which form you’re going to do—short stories, novels, comics—you have to then find out who has the rights for that.
And usually it’s going to be in a Wikipedia search, an Amazon or Barnes & Noble search, indie bookstore search. It’ll have that information there.
[00:12:46] Matty: So you’re looking for people that have already ventured into the media tie-in world, and you’re asking to add to that catalog of works—
[00:12:54] Jonathan: Yes. Unless—
[00:12:55] Matty: —with those characters or that—
[00:12:56] Jonathan: —you have an idea for something that hasn’t been done but you think could be. And in which case, almost always the prose rights are tied to a publisher, even though the studios may own them. Like, for example, I’m doing some stuff with the John Wick license right now, and Lionsgate owns the rights to it because they make the movies. And everything that’s a byproduct of the movies is part of their license.
So Dark Horse may do the comics, Macmillan may do the novels. You have to find out who. But if there’s none of that stuff out already, you could just simply say, well, who owns the rights to John Wick? And it’ll turn out to be Lionsgate. There’s always a vice president of licensing at every company.
Or some—if it’s not a vice president, it’s somebody similar. But whoever’s in charge of licensing, that’s the person to reach out to. And sometimes that is what it takes. And I’ve had success with just simply shooting for the person who has the rights, and then they make a deal with a publisher. And with John Wick, they’re in discussions with a comic book company and a book publishing company for projects that I would be involved in.
And I kind of kicked that off a little bit.
[00:14:10] Matty: I can imagine from the creative side, it would be quite a different experience to be writing within a world that someone else has created. So you had said earlier about sometimes certain rights holders are more stringent about the guidelines they put down for what you can and can’t do with their characters.
And I can imagine a couple of ways people might come to media tie-in—one would be they just love a franchise or a world and they want to be more actively a part of it. I can also imagine there could be people who just have a knack for being able to hit that perfect balance between their own creativity but working within the boundaries that are set for them.
Are there certain creative tendencies that lend themselves easier to this kind of work?
[00:14:55] Jonathan: The more precious you are about your own work, the less you’re going to be open to doing media tie-in, because it’s not your work. And I’ll give you an example. Blizzard Entertainment, which has a lot of video games—they hire me to do short stories tied to their video games. They have a very complex set of rules about what the characters can and cannot do.
Because it’s based on the gameplay of the games. You can’t have a character do something in a story that the character can’t do in the game. You have to stay within those rules. And you may not be familiar with the rules. Like, for example, I don’t play video games at all. I have nothing against them, I just don’t have the time.
But I get hired to write video game short stories. So the license holder will send me a huge PDF, sometimes many PDFs, and then part of what earns you the fee is going through and learning about that gameplay enough to be able to write that story, and then you pitch it.
But then every executive tied to that game is going to give you notes. And some of those notes will actually contradict one another because they don’t bother reading the other person’s notes. It’s really a challenge. The editors who work with the freelancers like me have to wrangle all those cats.
And it’s one of the reasons they overpay you to write a video game short story.
[00:16:24] Jonathan: Now, if you’re writing a story for a regular anthology like an Aliens anthology, the editor is going to have to deal with a lot of the rights. Now, we may then have to vet pitches and then drafts of stories back through the licensing people to make sure that it’s not interfering with anything.
And an example of that would be the X-Files. I did three X-Files anthologies as editor, and we did those before they came back and did the additional seasons. Those last two seasons, which were like fifteen, twenty years after the show was off the air.
And when I pitched the anthology, that show was not even in development. But we pitched the anthology and coincidentally—maybe coincidentally—a few months later they decided to do a new season. And there were some things in that season that wouldn’t work with some of the short stories, because we wanted the stories to be in continuity.
Some people wrote stories that were set after the original series ended with Mulder and Scully. Well, the nature of their relationship was eventually changed and edited for that new season.
Well, that new season then contradicts that story, and the story can’t be canon. So sometimes you don’t know what you can’t do until you send it in. In the Aliens versus Predator anthology, we had a couple people who wrote very visionary stories, but we were told they can’t do that one thing. And they don’t necessarily give you an explanation of why.
And then two years later you see the movie PREY come out. Well, they were working on something that had a similar theme, but they don’t want to tell you that, because they’re not obligated to tell you. They just say, you can’t do that. Give us another pitch. You have to be very adaptable.
[00:18:06] Matty: Yeah, I can also imagine that because of the learning curve you described—like with video games—that once you’ve absorbed all that information in the PDFs, you probably want to tap that opportunity for all it’s worth. Because you get more ROI the second and third and fourth story, because you know the world now. You don’t have to be learning a whole new world.
[00:18:25] Jonathan: Right. But unlike most editing situations, with the game thing, they may have decided how many short stories they need for the new expansion of a game. Pitching more would probably not get you anywhere, because they have their own agenda, which again they’re not sharing their calendar with you.
But you can ask. You can always ask, hey, I did the story. Certainly open to more of these things. When they know that you’re open to more—and maybe five months later you ping them again saying, hey, I’m looking forward to the release of that story, and I’m certainly open for more.
Sometimes that will help them remember that you were an easy person to work with, and they will send you another project. Or sometimes it’s not in the same world though. So after I had done a Diablo IV story for that game, they liked my writing enough that they asked me if I would do a World of Warcraft story.
And now I’ve done four World of Warcraft stories for Blizzard. But I try to stay in touch with editors like that because you want to stay on their radar—more in the front of the mind than the back. Also, if you go to things like Comic-Con, either New York or San Diego, those people are usually at the Blizzard booth.
A lot of times the executives and the editors are at the booth. Doesn’t hurt to go and chat them up a little bit.
[00:19:41] Matty: It also made me think—the idea of the guardrails that you have to stay within—that I don’t know how many opportunities there would be to write media tie-in for secondary characters. Like Mycroft. I don’t know. Or Mrs.—
[00:19:55] Jonathan: Tough, tough. They did that with Buffy. There were Willow novels and Angel novels and Oz novels. So a lot of times if a character’s breaking out and you pitch a novel based on that character—
[00:20:06] Jonathan: Now, little side note—in media tie-in, you’re expected to turn that novel in fast. I’ve had media tie-in deals where I’ve had five weeks to do a novel.
Bam. This is after all the getting through all the licensing and wrangling back and forth. That’s the time that’s left. And they say, can you do it? And your answer should be yes. And then you go and do it. I did a novel about Dana Scully as a teenager.
By the time we cleared that deal, I had five weeks to do it. With THE WOLFMAN—they, for some reason, got so far into the shooting and editing of the film, and they wanted the novel out there. And that left me seven weeks to write that.
[00:20:53] Matty: Can you just describe what that five weeks looked like? Like, how did that break down for you?
[00:20:58] Jonathan: A lot of coffee. Well, the thing about writing is—some people, and unfortunately there’s a chunk of our colleagues who seem to lean into the mythology of writing. They have to wait for the muse to hit them. They have to be wearing their lucky pair of socks or whatever. And all that does is delay the actual writing.
Get your ass in the chair and start writing. Start outlining. And you will need to outline. You can’t be a pantser and do media tie-in. They want a full outline every time. Not a question. So if you’re not already a plotter, it’s a skill to add.
You may not want to do it with your own stuff, but for media tie-in, you’ll have to. Anyway. So as that process is unfolding, you have to be able to—what I did is like, okay, what can I reasonably do per day? How many words can I do? Now, I’m a fast writer anyway. I write between three and four thousand words every day, so I’ve always been a fast writer.
Last year I did close to a million words for publication. And I’ve done two years where I’m over a million words for publication. So they can give me a project like that and I could do it. But this was early in my career with THE WOLFMAN—it was my fifth book. I had never done anything shorter than nine months for a novel.
So I had to sit down and say, okay, well it’s X number of words. How many words can I do per day? I didn’t take a lot of days off during that process, but I had to take some, because you have to have a life. So I just made sure that when I sat down to write, that was my day. That was my business day.
It’s like going to work. And one of the things that helped me set my mindframe for it is—I write from home, my bedroom’s right next door to my office here. I don’t come out here in my pajamas to write. I take a shower, I get dressed for work. Because that helps me set my mind.
I’m in my chair at the same time every morning. I write for four hours. I take a lunch and exercise break, and I write for four more hours. That’s my day. And if I don’t want to do something as regimented as that, don’t become a professional. And don’t do media tie-in, because that’s what’s expected of you.
You need to just get in the saddle and ride. That’s the thing. And editing—one of the things that slows most people down is they edit while writing. The only type of editing while writing that has any real value in terms of productivity is a rolling edit where you read yesterday’s stuff, tweak it a little bit, and then go into today’s.
But some people fall back and they keep trying to revise the early parts. And the problem there is that chews up days and days of time without advancing the completion of the manuscript. And also it means that some parts of the book will have been edited more often than the later parts of the book. So you now have an uneven book.
So I keep—when I’m doing a media tie-in project, especially when I’m on a deadline—I have the file I’m working on and then I have another file I can toggle over to, another Word document of revision notes. And I’m constantly making notes to myself.
That way, when I’m done, I have a plan. And if there are little things in there that I don’t know while writing, I have a little code I put on the page in all caps: EDIT THIS, and then a note to myself. It might be—what type of handgun were the police using in London in 1895, which was a factor?
EDIT THIS, check handgun, 1895, city police. And I just move on. Later on I can do a search—like a day when I’m maybe either done with the draft or I just have a little extra time—I’ll search on EDIT THIS and then do those spot researches. And that way I don’t slow the progress of the manuscript down.
[00:24:39] Matty: When you’re doing this work as media tie-in during that five weeks or seven weeks or whatever it ends up being, is there a lot of back and forth? Or once you start, you’ve gotten the outline signed off and so you can just roll along with it?
[00:24:50] Jonathan: The back and forth is before you start writing and after you’ve turned in your draft. During the time that you’re just writing, you may get a note from the editor saying, how’s it going?—which is basically him saying, please for the love of God hit your deadline, because he’s on a production schedule that can’t be altered because it’s set by the film company.
They’re not going to alter it for a publisher. What they might do if you miss deadlines is find another publisher. So you don’t want that. You want to make sure the editor looks good and satisfies their end of the contract. And that editor will be pleased with you and likely keep you in mind for further work.
Which has happened.
[00:25:29] Matty: I’m interested in the anthologies because I can imagine the process for that is somewhat different. As an editor of an anthology, you have sort of a similar role to the VP of Rights.
[00:25:43] Jonathan: To a degree. I become another step in it. So you have the license holder, then you have the person within the license—so say the VP of licensing sets the job—then you have somebody who is kind of overseeing licensing. They’re the ones who should know that license very well and be able to answer all questions.
Then you have your in-house editor at the publishing house. Then you, and then the writers you’ve hired for the anthology. It’s a lot of folks. So when I’m doing an anthology, what I usually do—what makes it easier—looking at the anthologies by different companies, you see their different policies.
Some—like Titan—love to have a bunch of New York Times bestseller names as marquee names on the cover. That’s their big thing. They love being able to go out there with a lot of New York Times bestsellers. It’s the model.
[00:26:29] Jonathan: So in order to do an anthology, I need to reach out to colleagues and say, hey, I’m pitching—you never say the deal’s locked down until it’s actually locked down—I’m pitching an anthology on this topic. Please keep this off social media. It’s on the down low. If a deal comes through with pro rates for stories of this length, with a due date approximately X number of months out, might you be interested?
So what you have is a list of people who said they might be interested if the deal points work out. That’s the list you take to the in-house editor to pitch it. And if it’s approved, you then have to lock those people down.
[00:27:06] Jonathan: Now I’m doing an anthology right now with Henry Herz, a buddy of mine. And we’re doing one called BIG BAD BOOK OF KAIJU—giant monsters like Godzilla and so on.
We can’t use those licenses because we don’t have access to them. They’re all different companies. So it’s all original kaiju. So it’s not media tie-in, but it’s media tie-in adjacent. And when we were doing this, we sold this idea to Titan Books. They liked our list of New York Times bestsellers.
They had some other suggestions. We were able to contact some of those, get them in there. But along the way, three of our people had to bail—one for health issues, one for a book deadline that got shifted on them, and another one because of some other issue. So we lost three of our marquee names. I was able to replace two of them with New York Times bestsellers, but the third, we had to just get a simply really good writer.
[00:28:00] Jonathan: Now, I prefer not to stock my table of contents based on how many copies of books they’ve sold. I curate mine.
For the most part, I want to base it on whose writing I really admire and whose business practices I like. And so generally when I do an anthology—I’m doing my twenty-eighth now, I think, somewhere in that zone—I’ll usually curate eighty percent of the people. And if I don’t have a collaborator—I do with this one—
If I don’t have a collaborator, I’ll fish around for some folks. I’ll do a lot of reading of short stories in recent anthologies and see whose work I like and maybe try to bring in some folks I haven’t worked with before. What I don’t do is open call. Open call drives me absolutely out of my mind. I did that when I took over Weird Tales as editor.
The first issue, I curated all of it but one story, and I put up an open call for short stories. 12,421. Yeah. So I don’t do that anymore. Now I do—if I do an open call, it’s usually going to be a pitch. Give me a one-paragraph pitch, because I can read a bunch of those in a day. Reading 12,000 short stories is insane.
[00:29:14] Matty: Writers whose craft you appreciate and their business process—can you talk a little bit about what you’re talking about there?
[00:29:24] Jonathan: There are some writers out there—I will not name names—but some writers out there don’t like to be edited. They don’t like to be told that their word choice may not be the right word choice. And they get really aggressive about it. I’m not looking to get into a fist fight with somebody over the edit.
Editing takes something—the version you turn in is the version you felt most passionate about. The editing process gives you an objective view on that, and also tries to edge closer to the version of that that would likely sell the most copies. It is a business decision. Writing is art. Publishing is business. And a lot of people conflate the two.
They think rejection of a story or edit notes means that it’s a personal attack. There’s nothing personal in this business. It’s a business. The personal is when you actually write. But when you’re being edited and worked through the business part, take the ego and the emotions out of gear.
It’s a business thing. Follow the business things. And it doesn’t matter if you’re mainly traditional or mainly indie. If you’re working with media tie-in, that is trad. And so you have to follow the rules of trad in that you have to follow the business etiquette. And that’s easy enough for anyone to do.
But a lot of people—they push and push and push, or they’ll try to argue with you on every single edit. I’ve been edited—I’ve written fifty-five novels and well over two hundred short stories and comics. I’ve been edited on everything. Plus twelve hundred feature articles I did. I’ve been edited on every single one.
Editing makes your work better. But you don’t have to follow every edit note. You can say, I don’t agree with this change. I want to keep it, and here’s my reason. If you can have a decent reason, editors will have a reasonable conversation with you. If you just simply reject without reason, they’re probably going to put you on a list of—well, I’m not working with this person again, because I just don’t need it.
And also there are people who think that their stories should be given—their name on the cover, guaranteed, and their story being the first one in the anthology. There’s no one I would guarantee that slot to. And I’ve worked with some mega bestsellers. I mean, my friend R.L. Stine, who sold more books than anyone alive except J.K. Rowling—he—not that he ever would demand something like that, but even if he made a demand like that, it’s up to me as to what order the stories fall in.
That’s not his decision. Luckily Bob is a really understanding guy and has been in the business for a long time and doesn’t make those demands. But I have—
[00:31:54] Matty: Probably been in the business a long time because of that.
[00:31:57] Jonathan: Yes. And he has sold, what, three hundred million books. Now, earlier we talked a little bit about playing with other people’s toys, and I kind of got off the topic.
I want to go back to that just for a second.
[00:32:11] Jonathan: So one of the situations in which you really have to understand how a license works is working with comics. So I got hired by Marvel because of my novels. The editor-in-chief read one of my novels and hired me to write Punisher and Wolverine and other things.
And some of these characters have forty, fifty, sixty, seventy years of backstory. There’s no way to know every story that’s ever been written about that character. So the editors there give you like a general outline of—here’s what’s been going on with this character.
But a lot of it you have to do on your own. And it is a daunting amount of material sometimes. Like, when I did Black Panther, I needed to know what was the state of Wakanda, the state of T’Challa’s character. Who is he? He’d just had a really big story arc written about that part of his life.
He was with a woman, Yuriko, and she dies. And all these things have to happen. So I needed to just go do my homework. One of my exposures to this sort of thing is—
Max Brooks, who is Mel Brooks’s son, and he’s a bestselling author of WORLD WAR Z and THE DEVOLUTION and a bunch of other things. And he was editing an anthology of G.I. Joe stories. Now, when I was a kid, G.I. Joe was a twelve-inch-tall World War II action figure. But when my son was a kid, G.I. Joe was this little science fiction action story thing.
It’s a completely different world. And so I told Max—Max asked me if I wanted to do a story for it. I said I don’t know the characters. He did something that’s a little more unusual. He actually had reached out to Hasbro and they sent me a box of G.I. Joe toys, graphic novels, and DVDs. So yes, I spent a day sitting on my floor, reading comics, watching cartoons, and playing with toys for research.
Because I’m a responsible working professional. And I was able to write a G.I. Joe story for it.
[00:36:12] Matty: That is very interesting. Yeah—when the original creative product is a toy, or I’m thinking of—like, this is a little bit different, but in terms of evolution of a character, like the James Bond of today looks quite different than the James Bond of CASINO ROYALE. And that evolution is coming from somewhere.
I guess I always assumed it was coming from the screenwriters, but—
[00:36:34] Jonathan: Most of it is. But sometimes they take notes from what people have done about it. I mean, I know that there was a definite nod to the John Gardner James Bond novels when they were doing the Pierce Brosnan James Bond movies. Because he was writing them a little more differently.
And then there were some later James Bond novels—I forget who did them—where the personality of Bond was a lot rougher. And that informed some of the Daniel Craig scripts. So sometimes it goes back and forth.
[00:37:06] Jonathan: With THE WOLFMAN—when I turned in my first draft, there were a couple scenes in there that weren’t in the script. And they wound up in the movie, because they—
[00:37:16] Matty: Oh wow.
[00:37:17] Jonathan: It’s work for hire. They can do anything they want with it. And so they were doing reshoots. I don’t know if you ever saw the movie, but there’s a scene where Emily Blunt is kind of running from the wolf, and she falls down on the edge of a cliff, and the Wolfman’s going after her. She’s like, “Lawrence, you know who I am.”
Well, that’s from my novel, not the script. And it’s kind of cool. You don’t get extra money for it, unfortunately, because it is work for hire. Like, when Disney Marvel used so many of my elements from my Black Panther run on the comic back in 2008 and 2009—
They showed up as—I mean, I was the first one to put Shuri in the armor. I put her up against Namor. I created the Midnight Angels and a bunch of other things that made it into the movie. I didn’t get paid more for it. But it did—my career worlds of good. And the graphic novel that collects all the comics I wrote for Marvel with that character—the sales for that went crazy, and that was royalties. So—
[00:38:10] Matty: And are the comics you’ve worked on—are they all—like, what was the origin of those? Were they movies or—
[00:38:17] Jonathan: No, no, no. I didn’t write anything tied to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I wrote Marvel—Marvel. And also, this was 2008. They were just launching IRON MAN, the first movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So that was not even on the horizon, really. I started writing for Marvel before Disney even bought Marvel.
But so you have to do research. And again, sometimes they provide you with information. Marvel does not, which is weird. So I subscribed to the Marvel—there’s a database where you can access seventy years’ worth of Marvel comics. So I just did a lot of that. Plus I bought a lot of graphic novels, and some of them are on the shelves behind me here.
And I did my research so I could write the characters. And what’s fun though is when you’ve written some stuff in, say, your own run on Black Panther—I did a couple of things related to the vibranium, the metal that they use—and then the person who took the comic after me, and also the person who wrote Spider-Man after me—
Both used elements of my story, because now it’s part of the Marvel official canon. And so they read my stuff and said, I’ll take that element, I can build on it here. And that’s perfectly cool. And it’s fun for us to see those little echoes going through it.
[00:39:34] Matty: Yeah. I think anyone who enjoys Easter eggs as a reader would enjoy that experience—and maybe planting Easter eggs as the creator of tie-in material.
[00:39:43] Jonathan: Yep. And with comics, I’ve since gone on to do my own comics with Dark Horse, IDW, and others. And one of those—V WARS—became its own license, became a TV series, which was wonderfully fun. And another one I have, that I won a Bram Stoker Award for, called BAD BLOOD—
We’re in discussions with a company in Germany about adapting that for TV in Europe. But see, that’s my license. So I get to be the person they have to go through for continuity and so on. And I would get paid. And that’s nice.
[00:40:16] Matty: So if you want a career where you’re doing your own stuff, media tie-in should not be your first call. Establish your own voice as a writer in any form that you can.
[00:40:33] Jonathan: Novels, short stories, whatever. Indie, published, comics, whatever. Establish your voice. And then when you do media tie-in, that’s a byproduct of the brand. If you just focus on media tie-in at first to make your bones, it becomes your brand. You become a media tie-in writer. Media tie-in novels, though they will often come back to you with book after book after book to do—
They don’t pay very much. I mean, the advances for media tie-in books are in the five to eight thousand dollar range. Which, if you’ve never published a book, sounds yummy. But if you’re a working pro, that’s a lot of work for not a lot of money. So those of us who continue to do media tie-in into our career—our primary focus is our main stuff.
Our stuff. Media tie-in is side projects that are fun for our regular readers to go look at. But it’s not what we define ourselves as. And I have friends who have gotten stuck in the media tie-in world. They’ll try to get their own stuff out there, but they’re known for media tie-in, and their own stuff doesn’t sell because editors see that their biggest stuff is all writing in someone else’s universe.
It’s okay if it’s a side thing or an additional thing you’re doing, but it shouldn’t be the main thing. Second thing—one of the ways to break in, one of the best ways to break in is through short stories. If it’s an expired license and you are a writer and you have writer friends, you can create a little LLC publishing company and do a Sherlock Holmes anthology or a Wizard of Oz anthology.
Without having to pay licensing fees, because they’re public domain. And since your company does not bear your name, it is the name of your group. It does not have any of the resistance some people might have to it being indie published. Then they get to read it and find out the quality is every bit as good as trad. And then you can build from there.
The company JournalStone started sort of that way. Chris Payne was a guy who wrote a couple of nonfiction books, couldn’t sell them. He self-published them under the banner of JournalStone. Now he’s gone on to publish thousands of books from other people, including some stuff that have hit bestseller lists.
I’ve published extensively with him. But one of the quick ways of finding an active license that is doing an anthology—put in your favorite license name—CSI, Supernatural, whatever it’s going to be—in a Google search with the word “guidelines.” And then set the search for no more than a year back.
The guidelines will be submission guidelines. If there is an open call for stories and an anthology of stories in that license, that will pop up in a Google search. And a lot of people have found it that way. So it’s an easy shortcut.
[00:43:21] Jonathan: And also going to writers’ conferences. My own group, Writer’s Coffeehouse, is a—we have a free Facebook page and we do free networking and so on. You can go there and say, hey, does anybody know of any media tie-in license anthologies? Post it. We’ll start a conversation, because God knows there’s a good thirty or forty editors of media tie-in stuff who are in that group.
Quite a lot of other writers. And a lot of writers—professionals like myself—we wear a lot of hats. We’re writers, we’re editors, we’re this, we’re that. So sometimes the writers that you talk to, some of them may be editors for media tie-in, or have written novels for media tie-in and know who the in-house editors are.
Networking does a lot of good in media tie-in.
[00:44:04] Matty: Yeah, I’m a big proponent of networking in all its forms—media tie-in or not. But I love finding that as another example of that. And I know as the president of International Association of Media Tie-In Writers, is there anything you’d like to add about the benefits they offer members or the information they provide?
[00:44:21] Jonathan: Quite often, because of being the president of the group, my visibility makes me a target for license holders. Whether it’s an editor or a company will say, hey, do you or any of the people in your group know this license? I had one—I can’t name it right now, it’s under NDA—but they reached out to me and said, hey, do any of your people write in this genre, or read this sort of stuff, or play this game, or whatever?
And then I go on our group page and say, hey—if you’re a fan of this license, hit me with your background on it, your bio, and your list of published media tie-in credits. Because I want to pass it along to an editor. And I’ve done that a lot of times and gotten a lot of people paid gigs because we’re the organization.
And probably only about sixty percent of publishing, of movie studios, know that there’s an actual organization. But six years ago when I took over that group, it was about fifteen percent. So I’ve been trying to build that up—having more awareness of our group—and that brings more work our way.
[00:45:29] Matty: Yeah, that’s so great.
[00:45:31] Matty: Well, Jonathan, I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but it was lovely to speak with you. I’m so glad to have gotten an expert perspective on the behind the scenes of media tie-ins.
[00:45:40] Jonathan: It’s a lot of fun too.
[00:45:42] Matty: It does sound like a lot of fun. I think about some of the franchises I’ve loved. I was a big X-Files fan, a big Fringe fan. I can imagine it would be super fun to write media tie-ins for some—
[00:45:52] Jonathan: Well, speaking of which—I mean, X-Files is coming back. Ryan Coogler is bringing it back to TV. And as soon as that casting is completed and it’s actually in production, I will be pitching more X-Files anthologies.
[00:46:06] Matty: That’s so great. I’m going to keep an eye out for that and rewatch some of the episodes that I haven’t watched for however many years.
[00:46:13] Jonathan: Yeah, I wouldn’t pay too much attention to those last two seasons they did—the ones that they did when they came back. There were only a couple good episodes in there. And there’s a reason it only lasted two more seasons coming back.
[00:46:23] Matty: I don’t think I even watched those at all, because the whole idea of them coming back was kind of not what I wanted to experience—which maybe suggests I shouldn’t be writing media tie-ins.
[00:46:33] Jonathan: There were two or three really good ones. And some that were like—I don’t know why they even bothered. But, of course, they didn’t bother consulting me or any of my writer friends, who all said, those are the good ones, those are the bad ones.
That happens. That’s opinion. But media tie-in’s always looking for new talent. So there’s that.
[00:46:51] Matty: Yeah, it’s a great tip. And it sounds like you have some other things going on outside of media tie-in. So if people want to hear more about that, where should they go to find out?
[00:46:59] Jonathan: Well, normally I would direct them immediately to my website, but it is down for a couple of days. But it’s jonathanmaberry.com. And when it’s back up—if anyone listening to this is a writer, there’s a page on my website called Free Stuff for Writers. It has tons of free downloadable PDFs, one of my comic book scripts, all sorts of stuff. Go to that.
But also I’m all over social media—Jonathan Maberry. And Tuesday I have my new book coming out, which is RED EMPIRE, the fifteenth in the Joe Ledger series. I’m currently writing the sixteenth. And that is the series that’s in development by the director of JOHN WICK.
[00:47:34] Matty: Congratulations, and thank you very much.
[00:47:36] Jonathan: This was a pleasure. Thanks.