Jordan Moblo, whose Instagram account Jordy’s Book Club boasts nearly half a million followers, has the look of a Hollywood executive with the personality of your favorite high school English teacher. When he's not bookfluencing, Moblo is the EVP of creative acquisitions and IP management at Universal Studios, a unique role that positions him as the first link in the chain behind Universal’s TV adaptation acquisitions.

Moblo talked with PW about serving as a “matchmaker” between studio executives and publishers, the opportunity in self-published books, and why romantasy has yet to make the leap to the screen.

Your role in the industry is pretty unusual. How did you end up here?

In 2019, I was working at 20th Century Fox Television—they had just merged with Disney—and was looking to move into traditional development, but there weren’t that many openings. They came to me and said, "You love books. You love reading. If you see anything that could be right for adaptation or one of our producers or executives, let us know.” And so I kind of just started doing the job I do now, which is reading a lot of books, identifying great stories, and playing matchmaker in finding a book that sits at the intersection of what our producers and executives and buyers are looking for.

I also started my book Instagram account around the same time, where I started posting about my love of books and posting reviews. I think that that platform gave me the opportunity to meet a lot of people in publishing, whether it was authors or editors or agents. The two of those things kind of came together at this great intersection that allowed me to elevate what I was doing in creative acquisitions and tackle what was almost a blind spot in the marketplace.

In publishing we have literary scouts, whose job it is to essentially identify promising books and authors before they’re big. Do you identify with that label at all?

We work directly with literary scouts. We have a book scout at Universal, and most companies that have someone doing what I do are either considered a literary scout, or they also work with a literary scout. I don't consider myself a literary scout. What they do is very specialized—at least at Universal, they're looking at all the new projects that are out for publishing, backlist gems, books that are maybe falling out of option at another company. Whereas, I consider my team almost like matchmakers within the company. The executives and the producers will come to us and say, we’re looking for domestic suspense, or we’re looking for multi-generational family drama. And then it’s job of my team to go out there and find maybe not the best book or the highest literary material, but the book that best meets the needs of the executive and the producer.

What genres or types of books are you most excited about right now?

I'm very excited to start to see LitRPG permeate the marketplace. I acquired Dungeon Crawler Carl back in 2023 when it was still basically just an audiobook and self-published novel, and so to see the success of that genre really start to explode this year has been very exciting and rewarding.

I really love multi-generational family dramas [too], and I don't know if we've seen as many adaptations of those. They're really nice stories, but I think unless there's like a dead body at the center of it, sometimes they're more difficult to adapt.

How do you identify which books will make good TV shows?

I read hundreds of books a year, right? I’m gauging anything I read against so many other things that I've already read, and I think, first and foremost, I'm looking for a great story, something that captures my attention. I think a great character is one of the other first things I'm looking for—maybe a character we haven't seen on screen before, or a character that subverts expectations. A lot of the time, that comes from an author’s voice, and I can usually tell within the first couple chapters if the voice is very distinct and unique. I'm also looking for if there’s an opportunity to tell the story in subsequent seasons, or whether it’s strictly going to be one season of TV. How many cards are there to turn over throughout the book? Would the episodes lend themselves to cliffhangers?

At the end of the day, we also have to budget to be able to make a show that is authentic to the source material, so I’m also looking at the scope of the story. If I'm looking at romantasy, for example, it's like, how many castles are there? How many characters are there?

For books that have published already, we’ll look at things like Goodreads and Amazon reviews to see what fans are responding to. I think there are some genres where the fans really want to see a one-to-one conversion—they want to see an adaptation that is exactly like the book that they have envisioned in their minds. On the other hand, I think there are some books that are hidden gems, where the writer or actor or director can put their own spin on it in a way that’s not going to upset a core fan base, and also bring new fans to the material.

Since you brought up romantasy, why do you think it hasn’t really gained traction in Hollywood? Do you think there’s still a chance we’ll see some romantasy TV hits?

We haven't heard a lot of news about romantasy adaptations, but I can tell you behind the scenes that a lot of them have been acquired and are in various stages of development.

I think it's difficult to adapt romantasy because there’s such a high expectation with that fanbase that you’ll deliver exactly what is on the page. The budgets tend to be much higher for those shows, and so there's also a higher expectation of delivering something that is going to do incredibly well. With [Sarah J. Maas’s] A Court of Thorns and Roses, for example, there are huge sets, there’s a huge cast of characters, and there are really intricate costumes.

When I was at Disney, I was part of the team that optioned ACOTAR for Ron Moore. I think that maybe one of the reasons we haven't seen one is because, a lot of times in TV, we're waiting for the first of something new to premiere and be a test case before the doors open to other projects getting made. I think once we see something like [Rebecca Yarros’s] Fourth Wing—which feels like the closest to going into production and airing of all the [romantasy] books—I think that will probably open the floodgates.

Is there anything that’s surprised you about the book publishing industry?

What’s been surprising in the years I’ve done the job is seeing all the different ways that an author can find their way into publishing. I look at something like the rise of BookTok over the last eight years, which I've gotten to watch become this massive machine that brings a lot of new people into reading. It's great to see someone like Freida McFadden or Colleen Hoover or Kennedy Ryan, who are all dabbling in the self-published space, find great success as a result of TikTok or a different avenue that wasn't afforded to them when they started writing.

We're really excited about Kennedy Ryan’s Before I Let Go, which we optioned a few years ago and that just was greenlit at Peacock. Kennedy is a great example of an author who was still kind of up-and-coming when we met her, and she was such a dynamic person and had done so much in the self-publishing space that we were fortunate enough to actually make a first look deal with her. The deal is basically just, we want you to tell us more about independent publishing, especially in the romance space, and introduce us to authors who may not have had access to the traditional publishing pipeline yet who we could work with.

In your opinion—not necessarily through the adaptation lens—what are the three best books of 2026 so far?

Chloe Benjamin’s Under Story, because I was just so blown away by the character journeys, and the world-building is mind-blowing. I think Josh Silver's Fruit Fly was the surprise of the summer for me. It subverted all my expectations, and it's a great example of the voice being so clear on the page that you know almost immediately that this is going to be something dark and twisted and special. And I think Jordan Harper’s A Violent Masterpiece is some of the most brilliant dark writing I've ever read. If you love crime noir, it is maybe one of the best crime noir books in the last few years.