Conn Iggulden’s Genghis Tests Whether An AI Made TV Series Can Pay

Conn Iggulden has heard the price of adapting his Genghis Khan novels before. During one of several Hollywood options on the books, a producer told him, “All we need to do now, Conn, is find half a billion dollars and we’re good to go,” Iggulden says in a video interview with me.

On Tuesday, Authors First, a New York book-to-screen studio, came out of stealth with more than $10 million in seed funding. Its first title is a six-episode adaptation of Iggulden’s novel Genghis: Birth of an Empire, which goes on sale at a later date. The company says production costs about $4,000 per finished minute. Iggulden has final cut and shares in the revenue once the company recovers a capped portion of its costs.

That changes the question facing a book like this. Cost no longer decides whether it reaches the screen. Demand does, and founder and CEO Robert Hamwee says he does not yet know how much of it there is.

When The Author Has The Last Word

Final cut, the right to approve the version that is released, usually stays with the studio. Novelists who sell screen rights typically give up any say in the finished work. “I know of a lot of authors who sort of come out of the film of their book going, ‘Well, I don’t know what that was. It certainly wasn’t mine,’” Iggulden said in a video released by the company.

Iggulden had largely given up on seeing Genghis reach the screen. The novels begin with a family abandoned in one of the world’s most hostile landscapes and eventually expand into battles, armies and an empire. Previous attempts never got past that scale.

Before production, Authors First showed him what that world and its characters could look like on screen. Early images of the characters and landscape led to months of biweekly video meetings with the production team as the first six-episode season took shape.

Some of the most consequential decisions were small ones.

The Math Behind A $14.99 Season

Turning Readers Into Buyers

“It is a bet,” he says. “We just, we don’t know.”