A new medium · Pre-beta open
A new form of entertainment sits between the audiobook and the streaming series, and almost nobody is making it yet. The author's words, carried by the audiobook, stay the spine. A thirty-chapter novel becomes a thirty-episode season — and the audience starts watching at chapter one instead of waiting years for a premiere that may never come.
The problem
An independent author can reach readers in print and listeners in audio on their own terms. The screen — where stories find their largest audiences — comes by invitation, takes years, and often cuts subplots, merges characters and rewrites endings to fit a runtime.
| Format | 2025 U.S. market | How an independent author gets in | Time to audience |
|---|---|---|---|
| Books | $21.7B in trade revenue | Self-publish, or sign with a publisher | Months |
| Audiobooks | $2.43B in sales, up 9% — 750,000+ active titles, 157M U.S. listeners | Narrate it, hire a narrator, or license the rights | Months |
| Film and series | The largest audiences in entertainment | By invitation: an option deal, then development, financing and production | Years, if ever |
| Aardvark Studio | A market that did not exist | Build a small team and adapt it chapter by chapter | Chapter one ships first |
2.3 million
U.S. titles self-published in 2021.
45
Notable book-to-screen adaptations on Goodreads’ 2024 list — a curated list, not a census, and still the right order of magnitude.
+53% / +58%
Book-based films earn 53% more than original screenplays; book-based TV dramas draw 58% more viewers.
Audiences want these stories. The bottleneck has never been demand — it is that there are only so many greenlights, and a book needs one to be seen.
AI, and who stays in charge
The AI does the heavy lifting: it extracts characters, sets, scenes and beats, drafts images and composes storyboard frames. A person makes the creative call at every stage — the head of story curates the breakdown, designers approve the characters, the director and cinematographer shape each frame, the editor sets the pacing and signs off.
Your choice of AI
Pick your provider — including models that run entirely on your own machines, so nothing leaves your hardware.
No training by Aardvark
We never train models on manuscripts, audiobooks or generated art. Run it locally and the work never leaves your team.
The voice stays licensed
The audiobook’s licence holder extends its voice rights to the series. No voice is used that was not cleared.
Rights stay with the story’s owner
Aardvark is not a party to the deal. The author and the team agree rights and revenue — and an author can assemble that team themselves.
What it opens up
For authors
A screen adaptation stops being a lottery ticket and becomes a third revenue stream beside print and audio — built on the chapter structure you already wrote, with every episode sending new readers back to the book. Back catalogues get a second life.
For creatives
Visual artists, composers, sound designers and editors get a steady supply of finished stories to interpret, without waiting for a greenlight that may never come.
For new talent
A core team of about ten — head of story, director, storyboard artist, cinematographer, production and character designers, composer, editor, audience lead — can bring a book to life season after season. Most of those seats are open to people who would otherwise wait years for a first credit.
If just 1 in 1,000 of the 2.3 million books self-published in 2021 were adapted, that would be 2,300 new series — about fifty times the notable adaptations Goodreads listed for 2024. Each one needs a team.
The toolset
One manuscript becomes a book, an audiobook and a visual series, with a podcast building the audience before any of it launches. Aardvark Studio itself — the reading of the book that everything else works from — is free.
VisualBook turns a book Aardvark Studio has already read into a long-form video storybook — not a trailer, not an audiobook with a cover on it, but the work itself, seen and heard, scene by scene. It casts each character to a visual identity that holds from frame to frame, breaks scenes into beats and beats into shots, and assembles the approved frames against the narration until a chapter is something you can sit and watch.
Breakdown and casting
Characters, sets, scenes and beats extracted from each chapter, and one visual identity per character that holds from frame to frame.
Storyboard
Beats composed into frames from the approved characters and sets, in the tone of the beat — each one reviewable on its own.
Assembly
Frames lined up against the narration with continuity checked against the story bible, and chapter markers already in it.
LookBook — add-on for VisualBook
Make the look your own: point it at images or video you have already shot and it trains a casting style from your own material. Built once, above every book.
A published podcast episode
Builds the audience, before launch
A promotional podcast cut from the book — including episodes on an author’s earlier titles, so momentum is already there when the next story arrives. Build your own hosts: a persona is a speaker with a point of view and a reading shelf, speaking in a voice you enrolled yourself from audio clips you have the consent to use.
Everything in LitCaster
A finished book
Where the manuscript gets written
World-building and continuity for a whole series — the codex, the timeline, the maps, the reveal ledger of what the reader knows and when. If you have kept a world in something like World Anvil this will feel familiar; the difference is that the manuscript lives here too, and its story bible is what guides the adaptation.
Everything in LoomwrightJoin the pre-beta
We are looking for adventurous authors, creatives, and future producers and directors ready to build a team and rewrite the rules. Build sample content before the beta opens, work out the kinks with us, shape what gets built next — and earn a credit on the first samples made in a new medium.
No customer stories here yet
Nothing on this site is a testimonial, a benchmark or a case study, because none has been cleared for publication. The market figures above are other people's measurements and are attributed below. When there are numbers of our own worth quoting, they will be quoted with the hardware they were measured on.
Sources
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