Young Adult and Children's Stories

The following post was commissioned the International Association of Business Communications ( IAB...

The more the audience can participate in your storyworld, the greater their emotional connection.

By now you’ve heard the buzz about transmedia storytelling, right? Stories that reach fans across multiple delivery platforms, like those created by the big entertainment franchises (Star Wars, Batman, Glee, American Idol, Halo, Harry Potter and more).

Or the big consumer brands, whose inventive story-centric experiences have deepened customer engagement (like Coca-Cola, Audi, Old Spice, Mattel, Wrigley and Levi’s).

Or a new class of independent experience designers who are pioneering this art form with more imagination than money. They are tapping into the power of new digital platforms, devices and social media.

All of which is leading many marketers to believe that transmedia storytelling is the future of brand building and consumer engagement. By using these new techniques, marketers expand their brand campaigns across various media, reach new audiences, deepen engagement, and delight in the story and its messages....

Read Wired's review of Iron Man 3 in comic book format with art by illustrator Jim Rugg.

"Want to see one of the most progressive portrayals of women in a blockbuster movie this year? Then go see Iron Man 3...

According to director Shane Black, this script-flipping wasn’t an accident, but rather a deliberate attempt to address the stereotypes faced by female characters in film. “It was important, especially to take the curse off the damsel in distress thing,” Black told Wired. “I have a hankering for empowered females trashing stuff.”...

...Iron Man 3 passes the Bechdel Test, a benchmark created by cartoonist Alison Bechdel to gauge gender bias in entertainment using three simple criteria: Are there more than two women in the work? At any point, do they talk to each other? If so, do they talk about something other than a man? It’s a litmus test that a surprising number of movies fail–including the feminist-friendly Joss Whedon’s Avengers–but Iron Man 3 passes with flying colors...."

Author: James Carter 

"Go where your audience is and fashion a story you believe will engage them."

"Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking at the first StoriesLab conference at Center for Social Media at American University in Washington D.C. StoriesLab is a project of StoriesLead and co-presented by Pride Collaborative. The focus of the day was the evolution of storytelling across multiple media platforms. And it was one of the most energetic conferences I’ve attended in a while.

Often, I find myself at conventions or conferences, and I rarely get an opportunity to meet other participants or engage in the work, itself. StoriesLab shattered that paradigm by offering not one, not two, but three interactive working sessions to help its attendees understand this unwieldy notion of multi-platform storytelling.

Dan Sonnett, owner of Sonnett Media Group, LLC, kicked off the day talking about the evolution of story. Starting at the very beginning with cave paintings and ending with his own work, including Half the Sky, the online extension of journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's book of the same name Half the Sky: Turning

Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, Dan chronicled how stories have changed over time. His work was a solid introduction on how to spread a narrative that started in a book into other forms like games and interactive websites....."

If you've never really noticed the absence of women in Star Wars (or movies at large), consider yourself living proof of how the limiting narratives of culture and media can warp our expectations....

Yes, Princess Leia was a smart, resourceful woman who had action hero chops of her own. She wasn’t just a princess waiting around in a castle for men to save her — despite the infamous scene where she ended up in a metal bikini as a sexy slave to a giant space slug.

But the fact remains: If you count up all the significant female characters who appear in the originalStar Wars trilogy, the list reads as follows … Princess Leia. The only other two women with names and speaking parts in all three movies are Aunt Beru, and that Rebel Alliance representative at the end (who no one remembers until they’re forced to come up with more women)...."

"I recently had a Skype with Andrea Phillips, author of A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling, about her latest Kickstarter project, The Daring Adventures of Captain Lucy Smokeheart. I’ve known Andrea for a few years now, meeting at various transmedia events, meetups and occasional evenings at the bar, and wanted to get her personal take on creating a project from scratch. I was also curious about her influences and decision to use Kickstarter.

The first question I asked Andrea was to have her explain Lucy; she paused for a moment and decided it was best to start with her inspiration for the series first:  “Let me sort of back up a bit and tell you why I’m doing anything at all. Last year at SXSW I was talking to Adrian Hon, and giving him my age old gripe of, I do this really amazing marketing work, but I’m terrified of the day marketing people stop calling me and I don’t have any income anymore. So I’d really like to build some sort of a direct connection with an audience so that I have something to rely on under my own steam.” She paused for a moment before continuing, “and, well, Adrian looked at me and said ‘what are you going to do about that’ and then he walked away to get his coffee.” In a panic, Andrea says she needed to think of something to tell him by the time he got back, which led her to commit to making another project, Felicity. Over the course of the year she made slow progress on working towards her promised goal of building a connected audience, but now with Felicity firmly in the hands of her agent, she decided it was time to focus on a new project and to fulfill that promise...."