I got this email the other day:
I recently wrote a heady sci-fi thriller that has gotten good response
from people, but my manager calls "unmarketable". You see, apparently,
if Hollywood wants a Phillip K. Dick type of story, they go buy a real
Phillip K. Dick story. But, unless the budget is under 10mil, they
won’t touch it without his name on it. So, I was thinking, since book publishers don’t have "shootable"
constraints, would they ever read scripts with an eye on the author
building them out into novel form? I’d love to make it a novel, if I
thought others would love it to be one. Would Del Rey read a script? Would they even consider, let alone pay for, a property not in novel form?
I’m not sure your manager is right about your script. If it’s good, people will buy it. If it’s not, they won’t. My guess is that either he’s lazy or he thinks your script is unmarketable because it isn’t very good. That aside, the answer to your question is no, a publisher/editor won’t read the script. They buy books, not scripts. They don’t know how
to read a script. And most important of all, they can’t tell from a script if you can write a
book. You might be able to get way with writing a 100 sample manuscript pages and
an outline of the rest if you have a good literary agent that editors trust.