Looking for a Book to Adapt? MediaScout Wants to Spark Your Next Discovery

If you’ve ever tried to track down the rights to a book — or find fresh material that Hollywood hasn’t already picked over — MediaScout may be exactly what you need.

The new service from Nashville-based Ingram Content Group invites producers to pay $149 a month to not only learn who owns the rights to millions of books, but also to uncover hidden treasures — even self-published gems that haven’t yet hit the mainstream. You can’t read books on MediaScout, but you can read summaries, and filter by particular subjects and audiences to find exactly what you’re seeking.

We talked with Margaret Harrison, Ingram’s vice president for digital services, about Ingram’s branching out to appeal to production companies looking for a “spark” — namely fresh, unique, unexplored stories they might not find otherwise.

The company hopes to end the days when producers or their teams spent hours scrolling sites like Goodreads. MediaScout can dramatically cut down the search time for better material, and eliminate the labyrinthine process of figuring out who owns it. 

The service is now live after a recent round of beta testing, and ready for anyone who needs a good story.

MovieMaker: So MediaScout can help if I read a book, love it, and want to know who owns the rights — or I want to search for books I haven’t yet read.

Margaret Harrison: Yes, both. MediaScout is run by our company, Ingram Content Group, the world's largest book distributor and book services company, and so we have information about millions and millions of books. We built this service on top of the world's largest and most comprehensive information service about books. So if you're looking for a specific title, yes, you can put in an ISBN, which is an identifier for the book, or you can put in a title and author and retrieve information about a very specific book, if that's what you're looking for. 

But we also have a production company that pitches ideas to major studios, and they were one of our beta testers. So maybe I'm looking for a coming-of-age story with an African-American protagonist, and I'm appealing to an audience of women between the ages of 35 and 55. I’m looking for that spark. Previously, the way I might do that is to try to sift the internet, looking at bookstores online. 

During our research, we heard from producers and studios manually reading thousands of reviews on Goodreads. Previously, the way to find that spark was either through a ton of time and manual effort, or it was serendipity, where you just might get lucky. Or, you know, maybe you work with an editor with a specific publishing house that pitches you content. 

And the challenge with that is then you get a pretty homogenous point of view, right? We have a challenge in publishing right now where we still have a lot of white editors, and we have a lot of stories that are being told through, or being filtered through, a specific lens. And so I think with MediaScout, we have, first, a wonderful opportunity to democratize access to stories from a variety of perspectives. And second, it's a comprehensive resource to really expand the limits of your imagination and kind of creative intuition.

How MediaScout Helps Find Rights Holders

MovieMaker: So a producer can search for a book, get the rights, and then hire a screenwriter to come in and adapt it. 

Margaret Harrison: That's exactly right. Ingram has an extensive catalog of traditionally published books, but what's also unique about Ingram is that we also run the second-largest self-publishing service, called Ingram Spark, and so you can also gain access to this treasure trove of previously undiscovered voices. These are debut authors, and writers and creators that maybe were not able to break through in traditional publishing. 

We carry hundreds of thousands of self-published titles, in addition to bestsellers and traditionally published works. One of the things that self publishing has done for our industry is it has really removed the barriers to publishing. There are tens of thousands of new books published every year — new stories being put out into the world — and it can be really hard to to tap into and find those sources of new content beyond just the best seller lists.

MovieMaker: The tracking-down rights component alone is so interesting — when I just saw Sinners, I got curious about “Crossroad,” maybe the most famous blues song, and tried to figure out who actually owned the rights — and it was incredibly complicated. I imagine that it’s similar for books, especially older books. 

Margaret Harrison: It's a huge challenge in music. Paying out royalties is really something here in Nashville, and we hear a lot about it in the book industry. Ingram has been in book distribution and in the book industry for over 60 years, and we have decades of relationships with publishers, and then more recently, with self-published authors, and of course with booksellers, libraries, and now with literary agents and rights representatives. So it's been a very natural expansion for us to begin partnering with rights representatives on the agent side.

MovieMaker: Can you talk about how Ingram makes money from this? What are the costs to use MediaScout, and are there any costs if you’re an author trying to promote your work? 

Margaret Harrison: Our suppliers are publishers and literary agents, and they do not pay to supply the information. If you're a studio or production company, then you are paying for access to MediaScout. There’s an online registration process that’s super easy. You plug in a credit card, and it’s $149 a month for a license to MediaScout, and that gives you access to all of the information in the site. 

MovieMaker: So many producers have told me about their trouble tracking down material. You seem like the perfect company to do this, given your resources. 

Margaret Harrison: We do have an extensive catalog and database. There will certainly be gaps, and so there's an interactive feature within MediaScout, where if you are looking for a rights holder and we don't have the information, we have an instant rights request button you can click on that goes immediately to our team here in Nashville. And we will go and track down that information for you, and you'll get a notification when we track it down. 

And likewise, if there are any titles that are missing, we can track them down as well. Because we are so central to the book industry as a leading distributor, we’re in a really great place to be a hub for the industry, to quickly access and share information about books and their rights holders.