It’s a rags-to-riches story every artist dreams of: Your unknown but brilliant intellectual property gets picked up by a publishing house or movie studio and transforms into a best-selling book series, film franchise, television show, theme park attraction, and merchandising empire. It happened to J.K. Rowling. It happened to Stephenie Meyer. And in this age of multi-billion-dollar transmedia franchises that tell stories across multiple media platforms, it could happen to your story world.
But what if you don’t want to spend years waiting to be discovered by a book agent or Hollywood executive? What if you want to take control of your enterprise from day one, assemble a creative team, and set up your own meetings with movie producers and IP buyers?
Then you might want to take a page from Josef Bastian’s story and learn how he created Folkteller LLC, a transmedia entertainment company that supports his multiple creative endeavors. Through this multimedia content platform, Bastian has launched his award-winning YA fantasy book series Folktellers: Excerpts from an Unknown Guidebook. And with help from transmedia partners, Carl Winans, Stephen Sadler, Amy S. Weber, Patrick McEvoy, and Ahmet Zappa, Bastian has partnered with Hollywood heavyweights to adapt the book series into a live action TV show.
Now the creative producer of his own transmedia enterprise, the Folktellers Universe, Bastian seeks to open his story world to other artists, storytellers, musicians, and game designers who can expand his original vision. And while some transmedia franchises develop through chance, the Folktellers Team is building their transmedia story universe intentionally, as they grow their brand and intellectual properties.
But while things may be moving quickly for Folkteller LLC, it wasn’t always this way. In fact, it took fifteen years of planning and networking for Bastian to create his story world. Yet it’s this preparation that makes Folktellers such an attractive property for production companies and gives this creative team an edge in fast-tracking their transmedia projects.
I spoke with both Josef Bastian and Stephen Sadler to learn the behind-the-scenes story on Folkteller LLC and hear their views on how modern stories should be built. Their insights reveal that creating — and protecting — a solid story world canon is vital in ensuring your franchise’s integrity as you build partnerships, establish an audience, and release your transmedia story universe to the public.
How Resurrecting an Old Legend Launched a New Transmedia Franchise
In 2008, Josef Bastian lost his job in Detroit, Michigan at a time when the recession caused many people to lose work. During this period, he came across the local Detroit legend of the “Nain Rouge” (Red Dwarf) a supernatural creature from French folklore who appears as a harbinger of doom before bad events. Intrigued, Bastian worked with co-founding partner, Carl Winans, to resurrect the legend as the Nain Rouge, a middle-grade fantasy book series that ties the red dwarf to Detroit’s economic hardships. The stories follow two teens who discover they are linked to a Nain Rouge curse that drains both their town’s prosperity and their lives.
When the books took off regionally, Bastian, feeling the story could attract new readers as a comic book, partnered with Patrick McEvoy, a Marvel Comics artist to adapt the stories into the graphic novel Nain Rouge: The Red Legend. Funded by a Kickstarter program that raised $20,000 and published by Caliber Comics, the experience showed Bastian the possibilities of telling stories on multiple platforms.
Interested in further exploring the power of folktales and the people who keep them alive, Bastian came up with the concept of the Folktellers — dimension-hopping guardians who travel the multiverse to drive back the Shadow People, evil creatures who feed on powerful stories. By reciting stories of power, Folktellers ward off the Shadow People while also inspiring the people who need to hear the tales.
Bastian conceived of an entire series of middle-grade Folktellers stories and grew interested in telling his story across multiple media platforms. Seeking out thought leader and CEO of transmedia production company Starlight Runner Entertainment Jeff Gomez, Bastian asked for advice on how to turn his concept into a transmedia story world. Gomez, who’s helped Disney, 20th Century Fox, and other studios develop their transmedia story worlds, agreed that Bastian had something, but urged him to finish creating the canon of his story world before releasing it.
“Jeff told me that once the canon’s out there, you’re going to give other writers and artists a chance to work on the platform and build off of that — but you need to have your foundational work done,” Bastian recalls. “Because if you don’t, then the story world will lack a center, and can splinter off in too many directions. You need the canon as your nucleus to ground the world you’ve created.”
Taking Gomez’s advice, Bastian spent the next several years finishing what became the first of two separate book series, each eight books long. He fleshed out the mythology of his story world, adding elements such as Guardians and Travelers who journey alongside Folktellers. The first series focuses on Aaron Anderson, a teenager training to be a Folkteller, while the second centers on Zinnia, a different Folkteller, whose adventures cross with Aaron’s. At one point, the characters enter the universe of the Nain Rouge, connecting all of Bastian’s story worlds into a shared universe.
“Taking my time was good because there were a couple times that I wrote myself into a corner and if the books were out, I would have eliminated my ability to go back and change things in the early parts of the series,” notes Bastian. “The goal was to create that canon, that foundation, but also not to close it off with a happily ever after. I wanted to give the reader closure, and a meaningful pay-off, but show you can still take the story in any direction you want. It’s really that rich of a world.”
Thanks to this approach, Bastian produced a wealth of creative content. Getting that content out, however, would require additional support.
Finding the Right Creative Connections to Develop Folkteller LLC
Once again, Bastian partnered with McEvoy — now Senior Art Director for Folkteller LLC — to provide illustrations and cover art for Folktellers: Excerpts from an Unknown Guidebook. However, finding additional partners to help accomplish his goals proved challenging.
“I was in the wilds of Detroit , which isn’t known as the entertainment capitol of the world,” he states, recalling the challenge of breaking into the entertainment world from the outside. “I needed to get my elevator pitch tight. I needed to talk to people in the publishing industry. I needed to talk to people in the film industry. In television. In gaming. You hear nothing, and then you get a few people who say, ‘Okay, that’s interesting.’ Or ‘Oh, I know someone.’ You’ll get a few leads, follow up on those leads, and sometimes they lead to a dead end and sometimes they lead to another lead.”
One lead who became much more was Stephen Sadler who attended one of Bastian’s investment pitches. A Detroit-based inventor whose digital platform IntensifyDigital has been used in over sixty social media movie campaigns for Hollywood studios including Disney and DreamWorks, Sadler realized Bastian had written enough content to support an entire fictional universe. Seeing an opportunity, he encouraged Bastian to immediately bring his story world to film and television.
“I’ve never seen anyone write like him,” Sadler says of Bastian. “He’s just finished the sixteenth book in the series. This project is a long-term investment of time and money. To do something like this is big. It’s not for the faint-hearted. But the people you meet makes it worth every minute of it.”
Leveraging his Hollywood contacts, Sadler introduced Bastian to figures in the entertainment industry, including musician/producer Ahmet Zappa and Charles Segars, producer of Disney’s National Treasure franchise. They brought other people into their team, including entertainment lawyers, sculptors, screenwriters, and composers who developed additional content for Folkteller LLC, including pitch bibles, TV series treatments, and even a theme song, The Story of Us All, produced by III Worlds Music Group (2 Fast 2 Furious, xXx: State of the Union) and Death By Lipstick Productions.
“When it comes to team-building, I believe the people need to have the same type of mentality and vision for [the project] to be successful,” says Sadler. “With me, it’s a slow process. I meet someone, I spend time with them. I make friends with them and once I’m friends with them, they become part of the team. I won’t just hire someone and go, ‘Hey, let’s see how this goes.’”
Bastian is of a similar mindset. “I have them read my books and then I ask them what they got from the stories. And if I hear the echo from them, it’s ‘Okay, you get it.’”
Gaining a team that can put together so much collateral marketing material enables Bastian to send out the most relevant materials when pitching or promoting his projects. While this multi-media marketing approach is useful for generating buzz online, it’s essential when pitching Folktellers to IP buyers.
Pitching Folktellers to Film and TV Production Companies
“When you pitch to Netflix, it has to be quick,” Sadler emphasizes. “It’s not something where you can go into the detail of everything. You have to catch their attention very quickly — and if you do, then you get to the next level. It’s not like one and done. They vet you, and if you’re vetted, you go to the next level.”
Bastian agrees, remembering it was a struggle just to get people to read even his condensed material.
“We’re out in Hollywood and you get your big meeting and they give you five minutes,” he states. “And they’re like, ‘You sent us this beautiful pitch bible, but we didn’t read it. And the books — we’re never going to read those. So, what do you got?’ And you’ve got five minutes to convince them to enter your story world.”
One effective way Bastian found he could pitch his story world was to convey it through a medium IP buyers understand — visuals. This meant showcasing the artwork and character designs created by Patrick McEvoy. It also meant working with film veteran, Amy S. Weber to produce live action trailers of the Folktellers books to show what the stories could look like on television.
“And what happens is, if they like it, they’re like — tell me more,” he says. “So, you tell them more and they’re like, ‘We need to look at your pitch bible.’ And then they read it. And then they’re like, ‘You know what? I’m going to have a couple of my assistants read that first book.’ So, you have to condense, condense, condense to the point where they’re not even looking at what you just condensed because they’re looking at you just talking. But if they are interested, you need to have everything ready. And if they get to the point where they’re actually reading something, you’re pretty far down the road.”
One thing that gave Folktellers an edge was that the books had already been written. This made the series different from even certain popular TV shows.
“When we met with Netflix, one of the things they asked was, ‘Is this series done? Because we do not want to get into a situation like a George R.R. Martin Game of Thrones where the series isn’t done and we have to figure out how to wrap the series up,’” Bastian recalls. “So, if you’re an author, they want to know if your series is done if they’re going to buy. Because if the book series takes off and the TV series takes off, eventually they got to meet somewhere – the ending’s going to have to be close to the same.”
Bastian finds this desire for completed content is driving producers to purchase and reboot classic TV series for today’s streaming service audiences who will gladly binge-watch entire seasons of a new TV show, particularly one with an existing following. This growing appetite for serialized content is also something Sadler believes Folktellers can satisfy.
“Harry Potter is not set up for serialized content,” he states. “It’s set up for long movies. But the way Josef writes his books, it’s more like the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew series. And streaming services are all looking for something that’s lasting. They don’t want something that will end after a couple episodes or even one season. They’re looking for something that’ll help get them more subscribers and make more money.”
Understanding this aspect of the entertainment industry is key to selling an IP. Bastian, who’s written his own article on Netflix corporate culture, reflects on the high-pressure, high-stakes nature of the industry.
“Netflix hires their buyers out of Harvard and Yale — Ivy League schools. These are twenty-somethings with MBAs, and they have a background in data analytics. And [Netflix] will say, ‘Okay, you’ve got a $200 million dollar budget this year to buy properties in these genres. And here are all the data analytics tools. So, you’re making the decisions. But you’re accountable for them too.
And the thing with entertainment is — you don’t know if something is going to be great. You might have a quality storyline or pitch, but it could get produced poorly. So much can go wrong and so much can go right and it’s not in your control. And that’s how the industry is. Everyone is crazy busy and they’re making decisions on the fly even though they have all these tools for data analytics. And whatever happens in the world could push you up the ranks or push you down. And unfortunately, as a creator and someone who’s not in the industry, that’s what you’re up against.”
Nevertheless, as the creative producer of his own transmedia universe, Bastian and his partners also feel adamant about protecting the brand identity of Folkteller LLC, which has led them to make some unexpected decisions.
“We’ve turned down funding,” Bastian admits. “We’ve also turned down projects. Early on, they wanted to make the Nain Rouge into a horror movie. You definitely could — it’s very dark — but Folkteller LLC can’t put its name on an adult slasher/horror film. We turned down a couple million dollars early on.”
Connecting with and Expanding the Folktellers Audience
As the Folktellers Team work to develop the Folktellers TV show, they’re also focused on reaching out to and expanding the target audience of their story world — middle grade readers and fantasy fans. The first two books in the eight-book series, Phases of the Moon and Cave in the Rock have been published and are available on Amazon with a third book, Shadows on the Silver Strings, set to be released in Fall 2021. To help promote the books, Folkteller LLC has put together a Storytelling for Literacy Program that allows Bastian to go into schools with a unique transmedia educational program.
“We had special ‘Folkteller Kits’ with little Oscar trophies, runner-up Oscar trophies, a rolled up red carpet, and all the books packaged inside,” Sadler states. “They went to the classroom and the students would read the books and at the end of the books they’d create a YouTube video and give themselves an alternate ending based on whatever character they liked out of the book. And then we’d do a contest and we’d walk them down the red carpet.”
By providing the tools that enabled young readers to create their own Folktellers stories in a digital video medium, Bastian and Sadler make their audience active participants in their story universe, while encouraging both literary and digital literacy. The student-produced YouTube videos promote greater engagement between author and audience while expanding Folktellers Universe content and creating greater brand awareness. Such strategies will become more important for Bastian as he makes the move from content creator to creative producer.
Moving forward, Folktellers has created a free, homeschool version of their “Folkteller Kits” to address the needs of at-home educators. They also plan on creating more digital platforms to help other artists learn the steps for creating additional digital content and sharing stories. This includes Folktellers LLC’s plan for resurrecting obscure folklore and legends or “Cryptofolk” through multiple transmedia platforms and sharing them with a global audience. Visitors to the Folktellers website are encouraged to share stories and local legends that they’d like to see in the Folktellers Universe where characters regularly travel to different countries and worlds to experience myths and legends firsthand.
Owning Your Story World and How to Protect Your Intellectual Property
During his visits to schools, Bastian offers a key piece of advice to students on the power of storytelling:
“Every day you get up in the morning is an opportunity to tell your own story because that’s what life is – the story of us all. It’s up to you to decide: What will MY story be? What story am I going to tell? We are all the makers and tellers of our own stories. And as human beings, we need to own it, and be accountable for ourselves, while respecting the stories of others. Because if you don’t, someone else will tell your story for you. And you won’t like it.”
It’s a powerful message — and one that Folktellers are heeding as they take ownership of their own intellectual property.
“We own all of our IP,” states Bastian. “Everything that we have is copyrighted and trademarked. We’ve paid the intellectual property lawyers to secure all that. We own our name — Folktellers LLC — and all before any dollar was made. It’s not cheap to do, but it’s really important. Otherwise, someone could just take your creative work. As a writer it’s easier to protect your copy because those protections are more apparent. But I feel that when you’re looking at intellectual properties and franchises, it shows you’re serious about what you’re doing.”
Sadler agrees, adding that it’s particularly important to take ownership of how a brand is promoted on social media.
“We have ‘Folktellers’ with an ‘s’ locked down on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, everything. Why? Because we want that to be our digital footprint and we don’t want another brand to hijack that. And I think that’s the most important thing these days. You have to lock down everywhere because you don’t know where your audience is or where it will be in the future. And as new platforms come out, you should be looking for those and immediately lock down your name because if you don’t then someone else will do it and what ends up happening is that they start controlling your narrative — and it’s your narrative.”
It’s a considerable investment of time, money, and manpower. But as the Folktellers Universe continues growing, it’s also another step in this entertainment company’s mission to maintain its own vision.
“There’s nothing wrong with being patient and making sure the opportunities you’re taking are the right ones for that intellectual property,” Sadler emphasizes. “Because if some group decides to pivot and go in a different direction and all of a sudden, your IP becomes something not in line with what your story is, it stops being about what you’re creating. So, be patient. Control the narrative. Control the digital footprint.”
