Literature with a cinematic pedigree has a long history on bookstore and library shelves. In the past couple of years, film distributors A24 and Mubi have made their own forays into the book world, as has production company Somesuch, with everything from lavish art books to horror movie tie-in novels.

Somesuch is best known for its on-screen work including Harris Dickinson’s Urchin, which debuted at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It’s had a literary presence for more than a decade via the journal Somesuch Stories, which over the course of eight issues has published writing by the likes of Iphgenia Baal, Tara Isabella Burton, Toby Lloyd, and Rita Bullwinkel. (A ninth installment is in the works.)

The company’s publishing arm, Somesuch Editions, released its first novel, Kimberly Campanello’s Use the Words You Have, last year. Its second novel is due out in June: Now Burns Blue by Cenac Rollins. Suze Olbrich, the imprint’s editor, calls it “a very London tale of romance gone awry with potentially tragic consequences as relayed through multiple interlinked perspectives over a two-year period.”

The publisher’s most recent project is Flor de Jamaica, a book of photography from filmmaker Jazmin Garcia that pubbed in January. “It’s our first photography book, which is something we’ve always wanted to do,” Olbrich notes. “Somesuch Stories is now fiction and visual arts, and we’re keeping these two things going as a publisher.”

Logistically, the production of Flor de Jamaica was a complicated undertaking. “There are four different paper types, there are transparencies. The designer [Symrin Chawla] and Jazmin were consistently in different time zones,” Olbrich says, but she acknowledges that “it’s a privilege to have the time and resources to configure the ideal aesthetic.”

Flor de Jamaica is emblematic of a trend among studios’ publishing endeavors: a willingness to experiment with form. Mubi Editions’ next publishing project, due out in February, ties in with Kelly Reichardt’s 2025 heist film The Mastermind. Rather than a single volume, the imprint is releasing a box set of four booklets that cover the making of the film and include an essay by author and critic Lucy Sante.

“We’re treating The Mastermind as a cultural object in its own right,” says Mallory Testa, Mubi’s publishing marketing director, of the set. “We’re inviting readers to engage more deeply with the film.”

A24 has 16 books scheduled for 2026, half of which tie into A24 productions. These include a novelization of showrunner Brad Caleb Kane’s Friday the 13th prequel series Crystal Lake, written by horror author Tim Waggoner. (Waggoner also wrote the A24-published novelizations of Ti West’s X trilogy.) The studio also plans to release a companion book to Marc by Sofia, Sofia Coppola’s documentary about designer Marc Jacobs, in conjunction with the documentary airing on HBO. Other projects include a new installment in the 99 Crosswords series. After one puzzle collection covering TV and a second that ranges over a variety of film genres, the third crossword book will focus on an A24 mainstay: horror.

Though these imprints have origins in the film industry, they face the same challenges as any small publisher, including distribution. Olbrich says that in the U.K., Somesuch works with distributor Public Knowledge, but in the U.S., it’s been “a lot of direct sales” and a relationship with the now-defunct distributor Ubiquity. “We’re looking for better distribution in the U.S. We’d love to have the reach of brilliant publishers like And Other Stories and Fitzcarraldo Editions someday.”

Despite the hurdles, independence is freeing. “I speak to agents and there’s not much of a place for things that aren’t really commercial,” Olbrich notes. “I tell them that’s what we love, and we can take that risk, because the company’s core business allows us to build up this imprint.” She also acknowledges a connection between both sides of Somesuch’s corporate model: “How cinematic our fiction titles are, or have the potential to be, plays a vital part in our decision-making process.” And if that kind of vision helps Somesuch, as well as Mubi and A24, reinforce their aesthetic, so much the better.

Tobias Carroll is the author of five books and writes a column on books in translation for Words Without Borders.

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