Storyscaping

First, a clarification that changes everything about how to read this book: Storyscaping by Gaston Legorburu and Darren McColl isn’t a fiction-writing book. It’s a marketing and branding book, written by advertising executives, about how brands can build immersive, story-driven experiences to connect with consumers. It sits on a writer’s shelf only by the accident of having story in the title, and reviewing it means judging it as what it is, a business book, and then asking what, if anything, a writer can take from it.

As a marketing text it’s a competent entry in the crowded brand-storytelling genre, arguing that companies should stop interrupting people with ads and instead create worlds and experiences that customers want to participate in. That’s a reasonable, if not especially novel, thesis in the advertising world.

The actual argument

The book’s core idea is the storyscape, an immersive, omnichannel brand experience that surrounds the consumer instead of broadcasting at them. Legorburu and McColl, both from a major digital agency, argue that the old model of the standalone advertisement is dying, and that brands must build connected networks of experience, across digital, physical, and social touchpoints, that let customers engage with a brand the way they engage with a story. They offer frameworks for designing these experiences and case studies from brand campaigns.

For a marketer or a business owner, it’s a serviceable strategic overview, though one heavy on agency jargon and self-referential case studies.

What a writer can use

For a novelist or a craft-focused writer, the book offers almost nothing directly; it’s not about writing stories, and its lessons about narrative are shallow compared to any real craft book. But for an author thinking as a businessperson, building a platform, a brand, and a relationship with readers across a website, social media, newsletters, and books, there’s a usable crossover idea.

The notion that you build an immersive world around your work that readers want to inhabit, instead of just shouting buy my book at them, is smart. Plenty of authors do nothing but shout, and readers tune them out. The idea maps onto how the most successful author brands operate. A writer running their career as a business can extract that principle, even though the book targets corporate marketers.

The one idea worth stealing: emotional connection scales

If a writer reads this book at all, the part to take seriously is its argument that people bond with brands the way they bond with stories, through emotional connection and a sense of participation. Stripped of the corporate framing, that’s a sound observation about human attention, and it applies directly to how an author builds a readership.

Readers follow an author they feel connected to, whose world and voice they want to spend time in, and who makes them feel part of something instead of merely marketed to. The book’s instinct that you create something people want to enter, instead of something you push at them, is the right instinct for an author building a long-term audience, and it’s worth extracting even though the authors are talking about soft-drink campaigns and car launches instead of novels. The principle survives the translation; the tactics don’t.

The limits for this audience

The caveats are significant for a writer. It’s a corporate marketing book, dense with the jargon and the self-promotional case studies of the advertising world, and most of it concerns problems, brand ecosystems, omnichannel campaigns, consumer engagement metrics, that have nothing to do with writing fiction or even with an individual author’s platform. The story framing is largely a metaphor borrowed to dress up marketing strategy, not real engagement with storytelling craft.

A writer who buys it expecting help with their novel will be baffled, and even one mining it for platform-building ideas will have to dig through a lot of corporate crap to find the useful material.

Is Storyscaping worth reading?

Judged as a marketing book it’s a reasonable, if jargon-heavy, take on brand storytelling. Judged by what a writer needs, it’s mostly off-target, valuable only for the single transferable idea that an author can build an immersive brand world around their work.

It deserves a place on a writer’s shelf only for the author-entrepreneur interested in platform and brand, and even then as a source of one principle instead of a manual. For the writer focused on craft, it’s the wrong book entirely.

To me it’s one good idea buried in a book’s worth of agency talk. The author-entrepreneur can dig it out; the craft writer is wasting money.

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