Over its first year in business, Range Media Partners’ boutique publishing firm Range Literary Publishing has been quietly working with talent to build out its debut slate. On Tuesday, RLP celebrated with a very big announcement: the release of a book sequel to “Donnie Darko” from filmmaker Richard Kelly.
It’s a bold first novel project that perfectly exemplifies RLP’s mission: supporting Range’s new and existing talent in the publishing business while identifying projects with strong potential for adaptation in film and TV.
“What it came from was the idea, the reality that so many of the artists that we all love, regardless of medium that they’re working in, a lot of them want to write books,” Range Literary Publishing chief Jeff Speich tells Variety of launching Range’s publishing arm last year. “I use the term innovation loosely because I don’t think of myself as someone like that. But I will say that the innovative thought that I had in the middle of the night a long time ago was the notion of linking a real publishing house with a production and management company. We are the only one that has that capability. Certain other companies have relationships, of course, with big publishers and have had those kinds of relationships. But what I thought would be interesting would be the idea of we’re actually the publisher. We are in house doing that on behalf of not just clients but non-clients in a way that is really geared toward the author and the artist.”
