Publishers of classic literature are always looking for ways to introduce canonical titles to new readers. That’s what Picador VP and associate publisher Hank Cochrane and his colleagues were doing in late 2024 when they met to strategize about a refresh of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey, only to be hit with news so helpful it might as well have been divine intervention.

“Our immediate mission was to try and reestablish the Fitzgerald translation as one of the most important interpretations of The Odyssey, and as classic poetry in its own right,” Cochrane says. “When we learned about the Christopher Nolan film adaptation, that decided our timeline. We had originally planned the book for the fall of ’25 but moved it to spring ’26 to coincide with the film.”

Movie adaptations can breathe new life into the backlist. A tie-in cover with poster art from the film is the standard way to capitalize on such synergy, but there’s more than one way for publishers to make the most of the moment.

Classic style

Picador’s new edition of The Odyssey is slated for May, before Nolan’s highly anticipated adaptation hits theaters in July. In addition to nailing the timing, Cochrane and his team had to decide on a new look for Fitzgerald’s translation. They opted against a tie-in cover using promotional art from the new movie, for several reasons.

First, they couldn’t confirm that Fitzgerald’s text was the one Nolan drew from for his screenplay. (Other notable translations of Homer’s epic include those by Robert Fagles and Emily Wilson.) Also, though Picador was cognizant of “the success other publishing houses have had selling books into a Christopher Nolan film,” Cochrane says, the team knew that such success wasn’t always determined by a direct tie-in. American Prometheus, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer-winning biography of nuclear scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, got a big boost in attention and sales from Nolan’s Oscar-winning adaptation, Oppenheimer, a few years back, even though Knopf stuck with the original title and black-and-white cover image of the real-life physicist rather than swapping in a photo of actor Cillian Murphy in the title role.

For The Odyssey, “we wanted something that would represent a book and a translation that are timeless, but also something that spoke to a pop culture sensibility,” Cochrane says. The new cover sports a blue silhouette of Odysseus with archetypal accessories, including his bow and an owl perched on his shoulder (nodding to his favor with Athena). The illustration extends across the spine and onto the back cover, with more symbols referencing famous moments from The Odyssey.

As it happens, that cover is reminiscent of the first promotional images from Nolan’s film, which have focused on Greek warriors in their armor against a wide-open sky. “That’s the advantage of having already been thinking about the cover design and how to reposition the book,” Cochrane says. “It also shows that Christopher Nolan, too, has a classic sensibility. He has great aesthetics.”

Nolan’s The Odyssey was announced a couple of years ahead of its release date, so Picador had plenty of time to adjust its strategy accordingly. When adaptations get slated for streaming platforms rather than IMAX theaters, there’s much less advance notice, as in the case of another Picador title, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams.

“They don’t always appreciate how short the timeline is,” Cochrane says of the platforms. “They can just stream, but we’re a publisher and we need to print the books. So some of it is simply about what’s possible to have in stores in time.”

Even without a new cover, Train Dreams has seen a big boost in sales since the new film (starring Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones) hit Netflix in November. According to Cochrane, “sales quadrupled from November into December of last year, and that has not diminished in the first couple of weeks of this year.”

When a book’s original art has become recognizable in its own right, some publishers fear it would be counterproductive to replace. H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald’s 2015 memoir about tending to a goshawk as a way of processing grief, has just been released in theaters, and Grove has kept the original cover, with Chris Wormell’s avian illustration. Grove VP and deputy publisher Peter Blackstock believes it best represents the book.

“It helps explain the title, even in a subtle way, because it looks like it could be from a school primer,” Blackstock says. “It makes the whole thing come together as a package, as a literary object.”

On top of that, a lot of effort went into making H Is for Hawk’s cover as identifiable as it is. “When you have success with a book, you spend a lot of energy getting booksellers to recognize the cover, getting readers to recognize the cover, and getting the cover out there,” Blackstock says. “To then change it, you lose that effort in a way. It dissipates, because then you’ve got another image that you’re trying to get people to associate with the book. There’s a logic to sticking with something if it’s working.”

The approach paid off: even without a tie-in edition, Blackstock reports that H Is for Hawk’s 2025 sales were up 50% over 2024.

Fresh Faces

For many titles, a traditional tie-in cover is still effective. A big-screen adaptation of Andy Weir’s 2021 sci-fi novel Project Hail Mary is set to hit theaters in March, with Ryan Gosling in the lead role, and Ballantine released a new trade paperback edition with the film’s poster on the cover in December.

“It’s a way to reach readers who maybe haven’t heard of the book or have vaguely heard of it but need another incentive to take a chance on it,” Ballantine VP and executive editor Julian Pavia says of the tie-in cover. “There are people who don’t know Andy Weir’s name but they know Ryan Gosling. When there’s a wide theatrical release, the instant recognition factor for that poster art and that title is a huge thing for us to be able to surf on. Andy said to me the other day that there’s nothing like a $100 million marketing campaign to help sell some books.”

Pavia worked with Amazon MGM Studios not just on using the poster art for the tie-in cover but also on the all-important question of timing. “We generally like to have a tie-in on shelves a few months before the movie’s release at minimum, because we want to be taking advantage of the marketing leading up to the film,” he says. “So we released the tie-in to correspond with the release of the film’s second trailer, and that has worked out nicely.”

Before the tie-in’s release, news of the movie had begun to boost sales of Project Hail Mary’s standard trade paper edition. Tie-in sales have also been strong, Pavia says, so the different editions don’t seem to be in conflict. “We’re trying to give readers a choice of which one they want—some prefer the original and some prefer the tie-in, so I think they’re complementing each other.”

Even for well-known authors, a tie-in edition offers a new chance to make a first impression on readers. Colleen Hoover’s BookTok-fueled success has been well documented, and the pivotal novel, It Ends with Us, was adapted for a 2024 film. Regretting You followed in 2025, and this year sees two Hoover novels go from page to screen: Reminders of Him opens in March, and Verity is out in October.

Montlake’s Reminders of Him tie-in edition just pubbed. It features the familiar bold type of a typical Hoover cover plus “an image from a dedicated photo shoot that was done by the film’s producers,” says Courtney Dodson, worldwide publisher of Amazon Publishing and Brilliance Publishing. “It wasn’t a pulled production still. It does a good job of aligning with the story and capturing the blend of angst, drama, redemption, and hope. Colleen put her blessing on it as well.”

The photo depicts the film’s star Maika Monroe laying on the roof of her car, but the image is turned 90 degrees. “In the story, the car has a really important part in setting the drama in motion,” Dodson says. “So there’s that visual callback, but then purely from an art standpoint—I used to be APub’s creative director—there’s also a beautiful vertical line.”

With or without a tie-in cover, a film adaptation will draw attention to a writer’s work, whether they’re an ancient Greek poet or a 21st-century phenomenon.

“We’re just hoping for new readers to find Colleen,” Dodson says. “She’s had a great couple of years, but we’re still hearing about new people who are watching a movie and then going back to the book and reading it, and then diving into all of her catalog over the course of a couple of months. So we know there are more people out there who could find her and enjoy her work.”

Christian Holub is a freelance writer in New York City who covers books, comics, movies, and TV.

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