Screen test: Look what they've done to my book!
Book-writing is a very different art from writing screenplays. So what happens when an author's cherished creation finds itself in Hollywood's tender embrace? Charlotte Cripps, writing in The Independent, asked nine novelists how they cope.

A bestselling or award-winning novel does not necessarily make a good blockbuster movie – The French Lieutenant's Woman, anyone? – but how do novelists feel when their books are being turned into films?

This is a good time to pose that question, with Toby Young's How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, directed by Robert B Weide, coming out on 3 October, followed by Chris Cleave's Incendiary, directed by Sharon Maguire (24 October) and Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk's Choke, directed by Clark Gregg (21 November).

The novelist Rose Tremain, for whom the film version of her 1990 Booker-nominated novel Restoration (out in 1995, starring Meg Ryan, Hugh Grant and Robert Downey Jr), was "a huge disappointment", says that she couldn't sit through the film again. But other adapted writers often find themselves basking in the glory of rampant book sales.

These include Ian McEwan, whose 2001 Booker-nominated novel Atonement was last year transformed into the Keira Knightley/James McAvoy box-office hit, directed by Joe Wright. According to Nielsen BookScan, Atonement sold 661,827 copies before the movie came out last year. After the film's release, sales of the tie-in book total 642,595 so far – so the film has doubled sales of the book.

Soon to be released as movies are Audrey Niffenegger's Time Traveler's Wife, directed by Robert Schwentke and due out in the United States in November. Richard Yates's classic Revolutionary Road, due for American release in December and directed by Sam Mendes, reunites Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio for the first time since Titanic. And the sixth instalment of JK Rowling's Harry Potter saga, The Half-Blood Prince, is now scheduled for release next summer.

Other books in the movie pipeline include next year's version of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, directed by Peter Jackson. Tim Winton's Dirt Music, directed by Phillip Noyce, is due out in 2010. And firmly on the movie "to do" list are Life of Pi by Yann Martel and Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre.

The film tie-in editions produced by the publishing houses for the big movie adaptations can sell in enormous numbers, as well as boosting sales of the regular editions. According to Random House, the tie-in edition of Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) sold more than 330,000 copies, and sales of the standard edition picked up by 50 per cent at the same time. The tie-in of Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001) sold more than 300,000 copies, and the standard edition sold more than 250,000 copies that year.

This is a fascinating story, to read it in full link here to The Independent online.