Hey there,

I have so much to tell you …

And it’s totally my fault for waiting this long.

The last time you probably heard from us here at Sterling & Stone was during our State of the Industry podcast series … like two years ago.

We are all seriously sorry about that. We recorded several followups, but they were always out of date by the time we could release them. Me, Johnny, and Dave have been recording episodes of a new podcast for over a year, waiting to launch it until we finally catch up with you. Now our show is a weekly joke.

But our silence is not without reason. And we have been thinking of you.

More and more all the time.

I’m only finally getting around to emailing you because the weight of a wonderful deadline is now bearing upon us.

In two weeks, me, Niamh, and Bonnie will all be in my office (while my wife Cindy makes us guacamole and tacos), choosing a group of writers and storytellers to join our studio here at Sterling & Stone.

If that sounds interesting, then please keep reading for color and context. If it doesn’t, you might want to read on anyway, just to hear where the hell we disappeared to (hint: it’s somewhere we thought it would take a lot longer to get to!)

If neither of those sound intriguing, then you can safely skip to the P.S. where we have a little announcement.

Adios until next time, if you’re out of here, and thank you for reading.

Still here? Awesome. Let’s dive in to what we’re doing and how it might apply to you, starting with this trio of Bill Gates quotes.

“To win big, you sometimes have to take big risks.”

“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”

And most relevant to this email:

“Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.”

We’ve been in the business of taking oversized risks since the beginning, but a decade ago I could only dream about the things S&S has achieved in the last six months. And this nice little run is just the start.

Sterling & Stone recently celebrated its ten year anniversary. It’s been one hell of a journey …

Writing Yesterday’s Gone with Dave to outsmart the system, starting the podcast with Johnny, followed by the pure creative glee of writing anything and everything with him … life in the early days was a gas.

Then we turned a business built on story into one focused on education, staying fiercely determined to deliver lessons in our own unique way, despite the reality that swimming upstream is always expensive.

Eventually, our creative glee eroded.

We had to evolve, and then evolve yet again.

I’m growing more familiar with this story all the time.

Two or three times each week, Niamh and I are on calls with production companies who are looking for existing IP that they can turn into movies or TV shows, for the battalions of streamers in dire need of content to fill their cannons in the relentless wars for attention.

An executive will say something like, “We’ve been hearing a lot about Sterling & Stone lately, and we’ve been really excited to meet you guys. Can you tell us a little more about your company?”

This question usually follows a few minutes of friendly small talk. We used to chat about Niamh’s shitty internet when she lived in Ireland, but now that she’s moved to Austin we talk about life with too many scorpions.

(I’ve lived in Texas for ten years now and have seen exactly two scorpions. Niamh sees at least two a day, she even found one in her coffee maker! A producer on one of our calls joked about making a movie called The Pied Piper of Scorpions).

I always go first, because I’m a rambler, as evidenced in that last parenthetical.

Niamh follows, adding clarity to my enthusiastic retelling of our origin story. This usually takes five minutes, and we have infinite versions, dependent on who we’re talking to. Some executives lean in when I start talking about algorithms, and others not so much.

But everyone is always interested in the end of the yarn, when I talk about how Sterling & Stone transitioned from being a publisher to an IP incubator with a publishing arm.

The story always starts with something like, “This is our first year in the film and television space, but we’ve been a publisher for ten years. Sterling & Stone has its roots in copywriting and journalism. I was a consultant, with a thriving business trafficking in relationships and ideas, finally out of debt and making excellent money when I figured, Hey, there are going to be a lot of Kindles under a lot of Christmas trees this year, and on December 26th people will be looking for content. Assholes in traditional publishing were charging $15 for the download of the same James Patterson book I saw for $8 at Target. So I went cold turkey on my copy and consulting business, and made a hundred-something-dollars the next month writing Yesterday’s Gone with Dave.”

I talk about how the best of times ensued, and how we took a turn into education, where the learning and teaching were equally infectious. Attention and impact were an intoxicating cocktail, so it was all we drank for too long. Until our goblets were finally empty, and we stared across our stone table at each other, hungover with the reality that the fiction market had shifted, and it would never be like it was again. Then I finish with something like:

“So, after realizing that we’d gone from being in the ideas and relationship business back into the SEO and algorithm business, we knew it was time to evolve. Turn our ten year plan into our two year plan.”

Then I’ll nod to Niamh and she’ll efficiently harness the executive’s fascination with a tight explanation of how Sterling & Stone works with production companies like theirs.

In the last four months, we’ve set up two TV shows and a feature film.

That’s in addition to Johnny’s Fat Vampire, which just made a big splash at ComiCon as Reginald the Vampire, coming to SYFY on October 5, and starring Spiderman’s Jacob Batalon. Johnny is planning to get this picture blown up so he can hang it in his living room:

(Johnny wants me to tell you that he’s not really putting that picture in his living room.)

We’ve also had more creative opportunities in wider spaces come in to us in the last six months than in the last six years. Opportunities to tell bigger and better stories.

We never meant to disappear. But keeping the studio afloat while we were completely reinventing our business model required all of our energy and focus.

Our second leap was even scarier than the first one.

Going from copywriting into fiction and only making a hundred-whatever that first month was hard. But this time, after already pulling the plug on education, we had to yank the cord on Amazon exclusivity to make the move to film and television, because production companies are rarely interested in even looking at Kindle Unlimited books.

And with this second leap, we had so many more families to feed.

So we formed the Bermuda Triangle.

You’ll learn a lot more about the Bermuda Triangle when you listen to our Ask Us Anything call (oops, just spilled the beans on that P.S.). This version of the Bermuda Triangle is the leadership team of me, Niamh, and Bonnie, not the area in the Atlantic where ships mysteriously disappear.

Johnny and Dave are both full-time artists these days. Niamh and Bonnie are the ones helping to make it possible for our storytellers to all have a thriving creative life.

There are few subjects that the Triangle has discussed more than how to expand our StorySpace (that’s what we call our writers room) and invite more storytellers into the S&S family.

We have reached the point where there is more opportunity to tell stories across a variety of media types (and with some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry) than we can handle without adding more qualified writers and storytellers to our company.

And that’s where you come in.

There are a tight dozen of us in the studio now.

And three times that many who tried to run with us and didn’t make it.

Your odds are not good.

But it’s one hell of a ride on the unicorn for those who can stay on the animal. And all of our best collaborators and storytellers have always come from you, our audience.

For example:

One of our storytellers joined our studio after attending a genre therapy event in our Clocking Out days. She just celebrated her 75th birthday, and her first Sterling & Stone-designed novel series is currently in discussions with several production companies to become a TV show, in partnership with a writer who has worked on The Vampire Diaries, Umbrella Academy, and The Witcher. All she had to do was what she’s already best at, by writing the novels.

One of our storytellers met us at a Stone Table Signature Session. He designed the pitch deck that made our studio look A+ in a world where we are quickly earning an impressive reputation. Hollywood is a visual world, and every single producer that’s seen this deck has been blown away. He’s an artist and an author. But he mostly wants to write comedy, which is about as easy to sell on Amazon as good Mexican food in Ohio. Hollywood, on the other hand, loves a great comedy pitch. We get asked for comedy every day in meetings. Now he plays with two different kinds of art whenever he wants, making gorgeous decks that have Hollywood drooling, and writing comedy books that could become sitcoms someday.

One of our storytellers attended our inaugural Summit. She sold the first screenplay she ever wrote, from an adaptation of a book by me and Johnny. Her script is now a TV show in development with a production company behind one of the biggest blockbuster series of all time, and an S&S crush from day one. Her next screenplay isn’t yet finished and has more than twenty production companies vying to get their hands on it. She is a remarkable thinker and creator, but also a serious introvert, and without a studio like ours to support her the way she supports us right back, the creative and commercial successes she’s experiencing now would remain forever out of reach. This one is win-win with an exponent.

One of our storytellers also sold his first script, same as that last storyteller. Our management team could barely believe it was the first screenplay he ever wrote. Not surprising for us, we’ve known he was born to write scripts ever since he turned in his first novel draft. We met him at a WorldBuilder event several years ago, and he remains a prime example of raw talent turned to gold. His writing queue is full for the next year, and he’s even fuller, waking up every morning to a dream come true. A few weeks ago, he said that Sterling & Stone’s anniversary (July 17) means more to him than his own birthday these days.

One of our storytellers just finished collaborating on a project with one of Oprah’s favorite contributors, and a regular feature on her brand, another is poised to dominate middle-grade, and yet another has a potential show runner figuring out ways to adapt his Amazon bomb into a TV series. Because a strong story that failed as an ebook could be a diamond in the rough for the right collaborator.

Niamh runs this place right alongside me, and we only met because she came to our final mastermind ever, after we swore we’d never hold one again. Now we hold them all the time, though it’s usually just the two of us. She gives form and fluidity to the most viable of my ideas and discards the rest. Niamh has also built the systems that are sending our ability to tell stories at scale into the stratosphere.

Dave is doing better than he ever has, and with all of our story boxes closed, he’s loving having a pen name he doesn’t have to tell anyone about.

Johnny loves himself even more than he used to, and it’s showing up in the quality of his work. We also have our story boxes all closed, and are reaching for new heights with our creative collaboration.

Johnny wishes we found Niamh five years earlier.

I don’t. Because everything that happened was supposed to happen.

A few years ago — the first time I was going to send an email like this — I was brainstorming the strategy with one of the storytellers in our studio at the time. We were discussing the importance of sending the right message in a recruitment email — that professional storytelling is hard work.

Writing is going to the gym. And too many wannabe authors treat it like going to a spa.

We referenced one of the most famous recruitment ads of all time, written by Ernest Shackleton when the explorer was looking for men to accompany him on a journey to Antarctica. If you believe the rumors, which I will always choose to do when it comes to this story, the ad read:

MEN WANTED for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in case of success.

I love finding new context from old ideas, so let’s change that to:

STORYTELLERS WANTED to pave a Yellow Brick Road that will lead to infinite possibilities, one difficult brick at a time, learning from unflinchingly honest feedback, waxing on and off by writing entire novels that might very well never get published, in order to relentlessly develop their storytelling perspective and skillsets, always giving more than they take from the studio, honor and recognition in case of success.

We are looking for storytellers with a strong work ethic, a high level of competence, and a total lack of ego. That is the formula to thrive here.

It’s a lot to ask. But Sterling & Stone can offer the same something that surely kept Shackleton’s crew cozy while exploring the coldest part of our planet.

As Niamh put it last week when we were taking five minutes after our final Friday call had ended, using the breather to celebrate the hell out of the way things are going right now, while also remarking on the brute force determination of our climb:

“Even at its hardest, and sometimes it’s REALLY hard, it was still better than where I was. At least with Sterling & Stone, I’ve never been lonely. It’s the ride of my life.”

If working fast, laughing hard, and letting the journey take as long as it takes to reach the promised land sounds fucking incredible to you … you might be a glass slipper fit for our studio.

If you’re interested in applying, you can do so here:

​Apply to join the Expedition!​
​Note: If you've applied for Sterling & Stone in the past, this is a NEW application. Please apply at the above link to be considered for this round of storyteller acquisitions.

Bonnie touches down in just over two weeks, so the deadline for consideration is September 4th.

I’m already picturing the three of us eating tacos while discussing our applicants. If you’re a part of that future memory, thank you. And if not, thank you for reading.

We can’t wait to see what you do!
Sean (and all the storytellers at Sterling & Stone)

P.S. We will be holding an Ask Us Anything in October. There is so much story over the last couple of years, and a conversation with fellow storytellers sounds a lot more fun than yet another one-way podcast.

If you have a question, simply reply to this email and we’ll add it to the list!

P.P.S. If neither a studio spot or an Ask Us Anything is for you, then I am very sorry for wasting your time, and I hope that one of these articles from one of our storytellers will make up for it. She lives in Kenya and is always dropping fascinating links in our Slack. Here are her last three:

​https://archive.ph/SmOlK​

​https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-18/brain-computer-interface-company-implants-new-type-of-device​

​https://www.cnet.com/science/biology/features/chasing-ghosts-unlocking-the-mysteries-of-human-hibernation/​