Plotting Success

I’ve been making my full-time living as a storyteller for 15 years.?

I’ve helped countless storytellers earn more for their stories while having more creatively-rewarding lives.?

Since I started telling stories online in 2008, I have:?

• Built a high traffic blog
• Started a ghostwriting company
• Created multiple high-traffic websites?
• Wrote copy that moved millions in product sales?
• Founded a publishing company (Sterling & Stone)
• Co-hosted the world's biggest self-publishing podcast (in its time)
• Sold millions of books and multiple scripts in a full spectrum of genres
• Co-founded a premium ghosting firm (Invisible Ink Media) that services celebrities, thought leaders, and entrepreneurs

Plotting success isn't about luck; it's about crafting a compelling narrative and sticking to it.?

I tell stories every day, so every day my businesses get slightly bigger and incrementally better.?

But after all this time, the Plotting Success newsletter is the first place I’ve ever had to directly share all the efforts and results of my various storytelling businesses.?

At the Digital Writer, I delivered everything I knew about writing online. Then I founded Sterling & Stone and closed my Digital Writer site so I could co-host The Self-Publishing Podcast instead.?

That show birthed The Smarter Artist: four years of live events, aborted writing software that was ahead of its time, and multiple bestselling nonfiction books, including the perennial seller Write. Publish. Repeat.?

We shuttered our education department to focus on fiction. With the door closed.?

During the last few years, Sterling & Stone has transitioned from a publishing company to an IP incubator with a publishing arm and got a Hollywood management team. We more than tripled our roster of storytellers to a total of more than forty and growing, with new personalities and perspectives to enrich the character of our work.

Film and television is a phenomenal business for business-minded storytellers to be in, but the money is slower than dialup.?

So we expanded the ghostwriting we had been doing for years into a sister business that could cover our quickly blooming overhead, and grew our studio roster again.

Invisible Ink Media got me onto LinkedIn.?

And once I was on LinkedIn, well, of course that gave me a great excuse to start a story-business newsletter.?A place to talk about all the flywheels.

Flywheels are powerful mechanisms that harness their own rotation to generate ever-increasing energy and speed. Never about one grand gesture, they are the accumulation of consistent actions generating significant momentum over time.

Sterling & Stone has a trio of primary flywheels: publishing revenue, IP sales, and ghostwriting. All three are turning faster (and faster) by the day.?

Currently, I’m turning seven myself, and in the Plotting Success newsletter, I’ll share the what, why, and how of it all, so you can build some storytelling flywheels for yourself.

Here’s a sneak peek at the seven flywheels I’m currently turning:

1. Sterling & Stone: Our core business: IP in all its forms (shorts, novellas, novels, scripts, etc)

2. Invisible Ink: The ghostwriting arm, helping others while generating consistent revenue for the mothership

3. Short stories: I am in charge of the production and launching of our short story initiative (big ambitions for this one)

4. Scripts: Our biggest growth area, and after 200+ novels, the most exciting for me personally?and much of our studio

5. Sean Platt: Despite writing and publishing for a decade, this is the first year we are focusing on “Sean” as an author brand?

6. LinkedIn: I’m still learning to use this platform well, so this is a massive growth area. If it’s one for you too, then we’ll be getting better together.

7. Campfire/Mystery Box: This is my nonfiction newsletter. Different from Plotting Success, it’s a choose your own adventure with a lot of storytelling. I add to the sequence each week, and at this point, I have no plans for the adventure to end.?

Starting next week, we'll dive deep into each of these flywheels, with actionable strategies I encourage you to steal. By focusing on one or two of these areas, you can maximize your results and tailor the takeaways to your own talent, ambition, and level of experience.

I look forward to being part of your story!

Sean