It’s not over until it’s over (especially when billions of dollars are involved).

On her Web site yesterday, J. K. Rowling announced that she is working with Warner Bros. on a new franchise, based on the fictional Hogwarts textbook that Rowling wrote for the Harry Potter series in 2001, Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, (Scholastic), under the name Newt Scamander. Set 70 years before Harry and crew enrolled in Hogwarts, the films will feature the book’s fictitious author, a revered former Hogwarts headmaster. Rowling will write the screenplay.

In her statement, Rowling says,

It all started when Warner Bros. came to me with the suggestion of turning Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them into a film. I thought it was a fun idea, but the idea of seeing Newt Scamander, the supposed author of Fantastic Beasts, realized by another writer was difficult. Having lived for so long in my fictional universe, I feel very protective of it and I already knew a lot about Newt. As hard-core Harry Potter fans will know, I liked him so much that I even married his grandson, Rolf, to one of my favourite characters from the Harry Potter series, Luna Lovegood. As I considered Warners’ proposal, an idea took shape that I couldn’t dislodge. That is how I ended up pitching my own idea for a film to Warner Bros. Although it will be set in the worldwide community of witches and wizards where I was so happy for 17 years, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is neither a prequel nor a sequel to the Harry Potter series, but an extension of the wizarding world. The laws and customs of the hidden magical society will be familiar to anyone who has read the Harry Potter books or seen the films, but Newt’s story will start in New York, 70 years before Harry’s gets underway.”

John Oliver has received universal praise for his stint as host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, filling in for Jon Stewart, who was off directing his first film, Rosewater, but his attention to books and authors has not been up to the regular host’s.

Stewart returned last week and the book business again heard the magic words, “You gotta get this book now. It’s brilliant,” causing holds to jump in libraries and the title to rise on Amazon sales rankings.

In this case, the book was Mario Livio’s Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein – Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe, (S&S; Brilliance Audio; published in May).

Stewart really steps it up this week, with an author featured every night of the show:

Tonight — Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, (RH/Crown; RH Audio/BOT) — holds are already rising on this one, based on earlier media attention

Tuesday — Bill Dedman, Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune, (RH/Ballantine) — also reviewed in the NYT Book Review

Wednesday — David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, Hollywood Said No!: Orphaned Film Scripts, Bastard Scenes, and Abandoned Darlings from the Creators of Mr. Show,  (Hachette/Grand Central)

Thursday —  Billy Crystal, Still Foolin’ ‘Em, (Macmillan/Holt; Macmillan Audio) — the author is getting heavy media attention

The first trailer has just been released for season 4 of Downton Abbey, which begins in the U.K. on Sept, 22. American audiences will have to wait until Jan. 5, when the series returns to PBS for an eight-week run. Shirley MacLaine and Maggie Smith will be back to trade barbs, but Siobhan Finneran, who played the conniving lady’s maid O’Brien, is not returning. Among the new faces are Paul Giamatti, who will appear in the season finale as Lady Cora’s playboy American brother and the show’s first black character, jazz singer Jack Ross, played by Gary Carr.

For those who can’t wait, the official season 4 tie-in book, Behind the Scenes at Downton Abbey (Macmillan/St. Martin’s) will be published here at the end of October and promises to be “full of images from the new season.”

Also arriving at the end of October is Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey (RH/Broadway) by the current resident of Highclere Castle, where Downton is set, Countess Fiona Carnarvon. It follows the author’s best selling book about the Castle’s earlier resident, Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey (RH/Broadway; Tantor Media).

Below is the trailer:

On Today’s Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviews Piper Kerman. the author of the memoir, Orange is the New Black, (RH/Spiegel & Grau; Tantor Audio), the basis for the new Netflix series.

Gross asks Kerman how accurate the show is. She says “tremendous liberties” were taken, “dreamed up by [producer] Jenji Kohan and her remarkable team of writers.” Gross will interview Kohan tomorrow.

The series has placed the paperback edition on the NYT Non-fiction list. It is currently at #2.

Lionsgate, the studio that adapted Orange is the New Black, which debuted last month on Netflix, The Hunger Games and Twilight, has optioned the rights to Sylvia Day’s Crossfire series, for a TV series, according to Deadline.

We’re assuming they aren’t intending to try to sell it to network TV.

Meanwhile, Universal has sent out a casting call for the big-screen adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey, tentatively scheduled for release 8/24/13.

A new TV series, Witches of East End, based on the book of the same title by Melissa de la Cruz, debuts on Oct. 6 on Lifetime.

The title seems to have confused some TV critics at the Television Critics Association fall preview panel Friday, who remember the ABC series The Witches of Eastwick, which was based on the movie adapted from the John Updike novel of the same title (RH/Knopf, 1984).

For those who know the difference, TV Guide compares the correct book to the adaptation.

The Lifetime series stars Julia Ormond as Joanna Beauchamp. Entertainment Weekly offers a first look, with a photo of her in the role.

The novel, Witches of East End (Hyperion, 2011) is the first in a series that continues with Serpent’s Kiss (Hyperion, 2012) and the forthcoming Winds of Salem (Hyperion, 8/13/13).

The book that is seared into the minds of thousands of adolescents, V. C. Andrews’ 1979 novel, Flowers in the Attic (S&S) is being adapted into a Lifetime movie. Ellen Burstyn is set to play the evil grandmother who abuses her four grandchildren hidden in the attic of her mansion. Heather Graham will play the childrens’ mother.

The book’s themes of incest and child abuse may be difficult to translate into a Lifetime movie. In the L.A. Times, book critic Carolyn Kellogg begins her story, “Maybe there’s still time to stop this crazy thing.”

The book was already adapted as a movie in 1987 with Louise Fletcher as the grandmother. It was universally regarded as a flop. If the new version  is successful, there are plenty of opportunities for sequels; the Dollanganger Series continued with Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and Garden of Shadows. Since her  death in 1986, Andrews’ estate has issued  more than seventy novels under her name, with new titles arriving each year.

Actress Andie MacDowell, whose first hit was Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape, transitions to the heartwarming, as Judge Olivia Lockhart in the upcoming Hallmark series, Debbie Macomber’s Cedar Cove, based on the  series of best sellers set in a small town in Washington state. The two-hour premiere airs July 20

Three titles were re-released as tie-ins by Harlequin/MIRA in late May; three more are coming in the next months (for a full list, see our Movie Tie-ins — Upcoming or download our spreadsheet Debbie Macomber’s Cedar Cove — Tie-ins).

Cormac McCarthy’s next book is a screenplay. After several of his novels were adapted into successful movies (No Country for Old Men, The Road, All the Pretty Horses), the 79 year-old wrote his first spec script, The Counselor, which was snapped up in January, 2012 by the producers of The Road. The story is about a lawyer who thinks he can dabble in the drug business but ends up having to try to extricate himself from a desperate situation.

Directed by Ridley Scott and starring Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz, and Penelope Cruz, the movie is scheduled for release on October 25.

The screen play will be published  as a book The Counselor (Movie Tie-in Edition): A Screenplay, (RH/Vintage, 10/8/13). It was excerpted in The New Yorker‘s “Summer Fiction” issue earlier this month. Remarkably, the excerpt is all description, without a single line of dialog, as if if were a script for a silent movie.

The teaser trailer was released this week (note that McCarthy gets second billing after the director).

Diana Gabaldon revealed during a talk at the recently-concluded Book Expo that she had just signed the final contract with the Starz network for the long-gestating project to bring her Outlander series (RH/Delacorte) to the TV screen. Shooting will begin in September, she said, and if all goes well, it will begin airing in spring of 2014.

This is probably the reason that the publishing date for the next title in the series, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, has been moved from a December publication date to March 25, when it will tie in to the publicity for the STARZ series.

Below is a video of the BEA Book and Author Breakfast during which Gabaldon revealed the news. She is featured along with Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, RH/Knopf, 10/29), Congressman John Lewis (March: Book One, a graphic novel from Top Shelf Productions, 8/13) and Chris Matthews (Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked, Simon & Schuster, 11/12). Gabaldon’s segment  begins just after the 52:00 time stamp.

Gabaldon spoke about the challenge of writing books in series and her goal to treat each new title as a standalone in a BEA interview:

The BBC is about to begin filming a three-part adaptation of P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley  (RH/Knopf), a murder mystery featuring some of Jane Austen’s most beloved characters, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, who began married life in a house named Pemberley.

When the book was released in 2011, USA Today praised it saying, “Countless authors writing in a plethora of genres have tried to re-create Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, but James’ new novel is incomparably perfect.”  NPR’s Fresh Air called it “a glorious plum pudding of a whodunit.”

Matthew Rhys plays Darcy, Anna Maxwell Martin is Elizabeth and Matthew Goode is Wickham [Sorry for the earlier mistake — we said the actors are Americans, but they are all British. Thanks for the corrections!].

Deadline reports that filming starts next month in Yorkshire, with the series expected to begin at the end of the year in the UK (no word yet on when it may appear here).

Philippa Gregory’s novels in The Cousins’ War series, set during Great Britain’s War of the Roses, have been adapted into a ten-part tv series that will premiere on STARZ cable network on Saturday, August 10th at 9pm ET/PT. Titled The White Queen, the BBC/STARZ production is actually based on the first three books [UPDATE: the fourth title, The Kingmaker’s Daughter is also being released as a tie-in], which are being released as trade paperback tie-ins in early July by S&S/Touchstone.

The White Queen,9781476735481

The Red Queen, 9781476746302

Lady of the Rivers, 9781476746319

The Kingmaker’s Daughter, 9781476746326

It stars Max Irons (son of Jeremy Irons, he appeared in the movie Red Riding Hood), Amanda Hale (The Crimson Petal & The White), James Frain (The Tudors). Newcomer Rebecca Ferguson plays the Elizabeth Woodville, the White Queen. Amanda Hale is Margaret Beufort, the Red Queen and Faye Marsay is Anne Neville, the Lady of the Rivers. Gregory is an executive producer on the project.

The two teasers give quite different impressions of what to expect (see if you can guess which is the STARZ promo and which the BBC without looking at the credits).

First:

Second:

The next book in the series, The White Princess, (S&S/Touchstone; S&S Audio) will be published on July 23.

Images of Michael Douglas as  Liberace in the HBO film, Behind the Candelabra, seem to be everywhere; at the Cannes Film Festival where it premiered yesterday, on magazine covers and in reviews (even in BusinessWeek). American audiences will get their first look at the movie on HBO on May 26.

Yesterday, Terry Gross interviewed the director, Steven Soderbergh on NPR’s Fresh Air. He says he had long wanted to do a movie about Liberace, but it wasn’t until a friend recommended the 1988 book Behind the Candelabra: My Life with Liberace, by the pianist’s lover, Scott Thorson (played by Matt Damon) that he was able to go forward. “When I read that book, it sort of solved all my problems. It gave me a specific time period to deal with; there was the arc of the relationship between the two of them to give me a structure. And that’s when things really started to move.”

Tantor Media re-released the out-of-print title recently, with a new afterword by Thorson, as part of the launch of their new book imprint.  Tantor has also released an audio version, narrated by Peter Berkrot (sample here, about the media circus around Liberace’s death of AIDs). An interview with Thorson is featured on Tantor’s web site. He says he hasn’t seen the movie and will see it as everyone else does when it debuts this Sunday on HBO.

At their Upfront Presentations yesterday, ABC debuted a trailer for Once Upon A Time In Wonderland, a spinoff of the Once Upon a Time series. It is scheduled to begin this fall on Thursdays at 8 p.m. (Once Upon a Time begins its third season on Sundays).

This is a bit confusing since rival network NBC greenlighted a pilot in early January for another series also loosely based on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, called, Wonderland. Even “Curiouser and curiouser,” as Alice would say, NBC acquired that project from ABC Studios. In February, NBC announced that it was being pushed back, “because of the scale and complexity of the production, including visual effects” and would be filmed this summer for a possible mid-season pickup.

As enjoyable as rival Alice series might be, we are dubious that the NBC project will come to pass.

Below is the trailer for the ABC series:

Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., a spinoff of the The Avengers film, will debut as a series on ABC this fall on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. Director Joss Whedon presented the trailer yesterday to media and advertisers gathered in New York for the network’s Upfront Prsentations.

In October, Marvel will  release S.H.I.E.L.D.: Nick Fury vs. S.H.I.E.L.D. illus. by Paul Neary, text by Bob Harras. The publisher’s sell lines suggest anticipating “an increase in demand for S.H.I.E.L.D. product, similar to what happened to the Infinity Gauntlet coming out of the Avengers film.” and notes, this is “one of the few classic S.H.I.E.L.D. series we will have on hand for the [TV] launch.”