How I pitched my romance novel to Netflix (and what happened next)

Step one: Write a racy surf romance

A dozen years ago, I moved to Australia for work. Specifically, to help expand the Australian arm of the company I worked for—a high-pressure job that had me climbing the ladder and working long hours. But since I had my pick of towns near our Gold Coast HQ, I did the only reasonable thing: I chose to live in a place called Surfers Paradise.

By day, I was in the corporate trenches. And even earlier in the day—as in, up at 5 am and staring out at the glittering Pacific—I wrote a breezy romance novel.

The view from my living room with the literal breeze coming in. Of course I wrote a romance novel.

The corporate gig allowed me to pay off the $22,000 in debt I’d racked up getting an M.A. in fiction. But I was creatively starved—and, at the same time, too drained and brain-fried to attempt anything super ambitious or literary, even though that’s where I hoped to end up someday.

A chapter-by-chapter genre experiment felt like just the ticket. I wasn’t a romance reader then (and I’m not now), but I was surrounded by gorgeous surfers, respected the fantasy—and lived by one rule: when in doubt, throw in a sex scene.

Eventually, I found I had an entire novel. In 2014, I published it on Wattpad, only not under my real name. I didn’t want anyone from my corporate life finding out. It was just a secret creative outlet. No expectations.

And then—as sometimes happens with stories on the internet—it caught a wave.

The novel ended up drawing half a million reads. Wattpad selected it as a featured story. One sex scene even got excerpted on Cosmo’s website. (A career climax, if ever there was one.) For a very brief, very surreal moment in the mid-2010s, my racy surfer romance was kind of a thing.

Plucky slumming quasi-heiress lands in Oz, gets mistaken for an escort, hijinks and hot surf instructors ensue. Emily Henry has nothing to fear.

Still, I figured that was the end of it. A fun side project. A little validation.

Fast forward to 2019. I was living in Los Angeles by then, and one day, out of nowhere, I got an email from Wattpad.

They were actively developing IP and asked if I’d be willing to write “coverage” for my own book—to pitch it as a movie, basically. Sure, why not?

Since I had actual producer friends (one of the fringe benefits of living in LA), I showed the pitch doc around. Things snowballed from there. Suddenly we had a director attached, a producer attached, and other production companies asking for meetings. We schmoozed, we built a pitch deck, and for a couple of months, the momentum felt real.

And then, because Hollywood is nothing if not ridiculous, an absurdly good-looking soap opera actor—the kind of guy so handsome you physically cannot look directly at him, but have to stare at the air an inch off his face—got attached as a producer, too, and he personally pitched my surfer romance to Netflix.

For real! My beachy Wattpad story made it all the way to Netflix’s conference rooms. Puts the WHAT??? in Wattpad, at least for me.

Part of the fun was getting my first real taste of how the Hollywood sausage gets made. We were batting around ideas for casting—who would play the leads if the deal went through. Someone threw out an “up-and-comer” named Sydney Sweeney. Then another person chimed in with a name I didn’t recognize, and when I asked who that was, they shrugged and said, “Someone we can actually afford.”

Did Netflix buy it?

Reader, they did not. They passed—and instead bought another journalist’s memoir about learning to surf and falling in love.

Close enough to sting. Different enough to laugh.

Here’s why I remember the experience fondly, not bitterly: It taught me how much of publishing and Hollywood is about at-bats. You take swings. Some connect. Some don’t. That same year, 2019, I sold my first nonfiction book to a major publisher—not the project I most fervently believed would sell, not the one I had the flashiest meetings about. Just the one that actually went. Because that’s the nature of this work: A creative career is, in basically the best-case scenario, a string of tantalizing near-misses, the occasional unlikely win, and the manic, mostly unfounded—but sometimes correct!—belief that if you just keep swinging, something will catch. In fact, someone just texted the other day, asking if they could take the surf romance to a meeting at [rival platform] and I said of course, because who knows? Maybe this time it’ll float.

Speaking of pitching, the other thing I learned is how wildly underrated pitching is as a skill. Being able to sell an idea—clearly, compellingly, whether in two minutes or two sentences—is its own form of power. It’s why some smart writers now build their own pitch decks to sell novels to publishers. It’s why I recommend Good in a Room to every young and hungry type I meet, no matter their medium. And it’s why I’m grateful for the surreal experience of having a soap opera star pitch my Wattpad surfer romance to Netflix though I never could look straight at his unfairly symmetrical face.

The project didn’t go. But it gave me practice, reps, a dinner party story, this post—and my next romance novel idea, in which a bored writer posts a story online, Hollywood comes knocking, and the soap opera actor/producer falls in love with her despite her Old Navy blazer and resting “What’s the WiFi password?” face. (Netflix, call me.)

So, could you get Hollywood momentum via Wattpad? Is there still gas in that tank?

Maybe, yeah. Wattpad continues to actively develop stories for film and TV, and they’ve gotten better at it since my little surfer romance made the rounds. But even if that weren’t the case, it remains true: You never know where even a lighthearted creative outlet might take you.

You could post a story online with zero expectations—just to keep yourself sane between spreadsheets, to experiment, to play—and find yourself, a few years later, fielding Hollywood meetings you never imagined. It’s happened to plenty of Wattpad writers before and after me. Anna Todd famously parlayed her After fanfiction into a five-book publishing deal and a multi-film franchise. Beth Reekles wrote The Kissing Booth in her bedroom at 15; it became a global hit on Netflix circa 2018. My surfer romance didn’t go the distance, but I remain convinced that sometimes the best thing you can do for your creative life is to take a weird swing, post the thing, and see what happens.

Thank you for reading, as always. Here’s to that weird thing you post—the one that changes everything.

Cat