What’s the story with Storythos?

Hi, I’m Jackson, and I run marketing like you do.

For years I couldn’t make anything that really moved the needle. There’s so much noise out there these days competing for the same attention. It was starting to feel hopeless, like my whole career was slipping through my fingers.

All I wanted was to make one thing that actually worked. Something that would make me feel like I knew what I was doing.

Boss after boss pushed me towards demand gen. Anything creative, like storytelling, got filed under brand, the sort of things that entertain rather than sell. “Serious” marketers steer clear of those sorts of things.

And I was fine with that.

Because like them, I believed storytelling was an art, and a natural talent I didn’t have. So I told myself I didn’t need it.

“Story is the soft stuff. It’s what you do if you have the budget to spare and the time to waste.”

* Me, for years.

Then the pandemic hit, and I was stuck at home with nothing to do. So I decided to challenge myself, and do something I’d always wanted to do but never believed I could. I decided to write a novel.

It was bad. A sci-fi story about time travelling twins. But I finished it, and I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of anything.

I wanted to try again, but this time I didn’t want to go in blind. I started reading everything I could about how stories are built. Yorke, McKee, Booker, Storr, Cron, Snyder, Campbell, and King… I read all the most popular books on storytelling out there, and the more I read the more I came to believe something.

It wasn’t magic. It was just a skill, and many titans of fiction had already created the roadmap for learning it.

Suddenly I was facing a choice. Keep writing books, or take what I’d learnt into my day job as a marketer?

Giving up the writing meant giving up the thing that had just made me prouder than anything in my life. It also meant moving from my own private hobby to my professional life, exposing myself to real people, my bosses and colleagues, and more importantly, our audience. Writing a bad story that only I will read is one thing. Writing one that will be read by everyone my livelihood depends on is another thing entirely.

It was terrifying, but I made my choice.

The first piece of pure story I tried was a post on my company’s LinkedIn. It was the highest engaged thing we put out all quarter.

I started using my day job as a guinea pig and built my own system for simple and effective storytelling in marketing. It’s all here, boiled down into what I call the 10 story parts, and the 4 story monsters you build with them.

Storytelling is 100% a skill anyone can learn. I built Storythos so you don’t have to take years to learn it like I did.