Before The Underwriting was a book. It was a series.
The Underwriting initially appeared as a 12-part transmedia serial on a website funded by investment from a few [extraordinary] angel investors. The “E-Series” gained a significant international audience whose response was, for its creator, the stuff of much skin-tingling. Here's how it worked...
In the midst of all of this, I got connected to Sloan Harris at ICM, who saw me through the experiment before getting the manuscript to Tara Singh-Carlson at Penguin Random House. Tara ultimately acquired the 12 episodes and helped me turn them into a bona fide novel, to be released on May 26, 2015. Meanwhile, twenty foreign publishers picked up the rights, and two of them — Bokfabriken in Sweden and Luitingh-Sijthoff in the Netherlands — ran with the serialization, much to my delight.
My first conception of The Underwriting, way back in 2010, was as a television series, and so I was more than a little thrilled when Endemol/Shine caught wind of it and picked up the TV rights, with whom I’m currently writing the pilot for its silver screen adaptation.
Now that it’s said and done, I feel very convinced of business models that test stories online before adapting them into traditional media, of the opportunity technology and social media present to expand storytelling beyond the page, and of the need for more smart-but-not hard fiction that explores and articulates the experience of the 25-40 year old urban professional. But most of all, I feel grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to play and experiment in this world, and really, really excited to do it again.
