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Storyteller Uprising (The Book) reads like a manifesto, loudly declaring that storytellers are ready to reclaim their earlier prominent role in society.

With major companies such as Microsoft now employing Senior Directors in Storytelling, the insight that storytelling will be a core compentency for anyone looking to rise above the information noise is prescient and perceptive.

The Storyteller Uprising is bookended with personal narratives about working in mainstream media and then breaking out and declaring storytelling independence.

These stories drive the book forward and provide credibility, but one storyteller does not an uprising make, or one stone thrower an intifada.

By adding more stories and storytellers, the book’s format would more closely reflect its content, and strengthen its case. (Cue a chorus of voices, commenting on the book’s major themes through story.)

As Brent Friedman remarked in his MediaSpace interview, it can be powerful to keep the opening of the story you’re trying to tell to a minimum, then provide background context where needed. Both the overall book structure and the structure of the individual chapters include extensive expositions to provide a detailed backdrop against which the latest developments are playing out. But keeping the focus on what’s new might be more effective–after all, that’s what we want to know, why we are reading the book. The core message (how do you build trust, how can you be persuasive in the new media environment) seems too buried and could, again, use more stories that exemplify the various ways in which these conundrums are resolved in real life.

Finally, I would advocate approaching Storyteller Uprising with the same bold attitude of other endeavors: go epic or go home. The old-fashioned style of argumentation that many academics hang on to for dear life has its merits, but in this case I’d argue it would be more powerful to use storytelling to make the core arguments of the book.

This storyteller manifesto has the potential to be an important document. I’m looking forward to seeing it transformed into an enhanced e-book, or even (why not?) into transmedia storytelling.