#794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/1c9cf7bf1b2f8508

Boys and girls, ladies and gyms. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job every episode to deconstruct world class performers to figure out how they do
What they do, what you can use, what you can emulate. And this episode ended up being
A master class. I had so much fun with it. My guest who I have wanted to interview for years is Brandon Sanderson.
He is the number one New York Times bestselling author of the Stormlight Archive series and the Misborn Saga, the middle grade series, Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians.
And the young adult novels, The Rhythmatist, The Reckoners trilogy, and the Skyward series. He has sold more than 40 million books in thirty five languages. He has architected 40 million plus dollar Kickstarter campaigns, and he is a four time nominee for the Hugo Awards.
winning in two thousand thirteen for his novella The Emperor's Soul
That same year, he was chosen to complete Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series, which is a big, big deal, culminating in a memory of light. Brandon co-hosts with fellow author Dan Wells, the popular intentionally blank podcast.
And teaches creative writing at Ringham Young University. We did this one in person.
Which made all the difference in Brandon's massive cavernous offices.
Right next to his warehouse.
It was a hell of a ride and we covered
a lot of ground and a lot of really nitty gritty tactical advice related to
Fiction.
Business.
Publishing, innovating across the board, how he architects his record breaking Kickstarter campaign, and much, much more. You can find him.
At brandonsanderson.com. That's B-A-N-D-O-N Sanderson.com. And you can find him on X, Instagram, and YouTube at brandsanderson. That's B-R-A-N-D.
Sanderson and I definitely recommend checking out all of those. So we're gonna hop right into it, get into the meat and potatoes, a lot of varied terrain.
With Brandon Sanderson, first just a few words from the people who make this podcast possible.
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Optimal minimal.
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And I'll do those questions.
Now it is in the time.
A cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal handocella.

So Brandon, just when we were doing sound check.
Yes.
What did you do?
So when I was in kindergarten
I was taught the state song.
And
I have a good friend, uh, Mary Robinette. She worked in stage for a while. We did a podcast together when podcasts were brand new, and she would always sound check by doing the jabber walk poem, just this beautiful poetry. She'd learned to memorize a poem.
So that
they could get a sound check because people generally don't talk enough for a sound check.
And so then they come to me and I'd be like, I'm talking, I'm talking. Yeah, you've seen it. The stuff that people do. It's and then like Is that enough? Is that enough? They're like, Still some more and you're like, Oh, I'm talking, I'm talking. So I thought.
I need a thing.
But I don't know any poetry.
But I do know what Miz Suka taught me.
In kindergarten, which is the state song, and so
I just started listing off the states in alphabetical order and it became a thing. So now they sound checked me off of the list of states. You made it to New Mexico. I'm not sure I could make it past California without making a mistake.
I still hear the song in my head fifty nifty United States.
All right, well we let's leap off of that.
Do you have would you say in terms of superpowers
An unusual memory.
Or is there something just to the rhythm and musicality of that that made it stick? No, I don't think I have an unusual memory.
I have an unusual one. I don't have an uncommonly good one. How about that?
My wife always jokes, I don't forget a story.
And that I don't I don't tend to reread books. I don't tend to re watch movies because
I've seen it. I've read it.
twenty years or so I'll go back and re watch something.
But
Stories just stick with me.
I can tell you about stories that I read when I was still
A teenager.
But I will forget where my keys are.
Yeah.
Right. And I will forget people's names and I will
All of that stuff. I I joke that I've just got so much RAM and I've
filled it all with story ideas and so everything else kinda just s squeezed out the ears.
Well it seems like where we're sitting, where we're sitting at HQ. Mm-hmm. It seems like
the design of Dragon Steel and maybe the intention behind it is to allow you
to do that on some level.
Yeah, yeah. I mean
Everything.
In our company.
is built around let Brandon Cook.
And take away from Brandon anything that he doesn't have to think about.
Or you know, doesn't strictly need to. I actually think this is kind of a a Tim Ferris thing, right?
Like
My water bottle. I don't have to worry about refilling it and having ice in the morning. I've set up a system where somebody does that and I just
Pick it up and go.
The more that I can keep out of my brain that I have to track, the better because
I am
Always
constructing narrative. I'm always working on the story.
Let's give another example of productivity that I that I don't want to say I vetoed, but it was a a conversation before we started recording. How many books
Or
book plates do you sign per year?
So we need between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand
Times.
Um my signature signed.
The story is usually I'm sitting here and signing pages while I'm doing anything.
Uh, because if I have to sign my name a hundred thousand times, then
You know, you might take up the empty space. Yeah. And we actually used to once upon a time.
We've got the books.
The full books.
And I would sit and sign them.
And that's just a massive undertaking.
We couldn't do that anymore when it
Got over around.
Ten thousand?
I'd actually listen to podcasts and go sit.
And sign books and sign books and sign books. Now
We get the pages like the front page.
And we just give'em to me in stacks. If anyone wants to see it, my podcast
Exists.
So that I can sign the pages. It's the reverse, right?
I start it up because I need to sign these things and I'll just sit
It's zip through them.
Uh normally while I'm doing anything else. But
Today I wanted to give you my undivided attention. I appreciate that. And I'm gonna have a lot of super fans of yours, I'm sure.
wish and petition me that I would have asked a different set of questions, but I'm actually gonna start
with soul Korea because as I mentioned
I was an East Asian studies major, spent formative time, completely changed my life in Japan and other places, Taiwan and uh mainly China also.
Where does Soul Korea fit into your life?
So I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ, Glorious Saints. Um, a lot of us go on two year missions.
Can be anywhere, it can be local, it can be overseas. I ended up going to Korea.
You know, I I got the the letter saying, Hey, this is where we'd like you And I'm like, Where's Korea?
But I uh loved my time there.
It was really formative for me in multiple ways.
Uh one of which
is kind of um
more amusing. I was at the time a chemistry major in college.
And I was so happy to be on another continent from chemistry. I had those two years away to really kind of reassess my life.
And kinda grow up.
And most people when they
Grow up.
They go away from the artistic pursuits because they don't make a lot of sense. I grew up and came back and said
I'm gonna do this, right? I'm gonna I'm gonna be a writer.
Uh but
Living.
in another culture, living where you are a minority.
Um, granted a privileged minority still, but a a minority living and saying that
The way that people's language influences the way they think about the world.
The way that their social mores
impact their relationships with one another and all these things was extremely formative for me in understanding how to approach writing a fantastical culture.
just on a fundamental basis getting rid of some of these ideas.
That
The way that I do things is the only way to do things.
the Korean language for people who haven't been exposed.
Particularly the writing system. Yes. So hunger if people want to learn to read Korean, you won't be able to understand what you're reading, but if you want to sound it out, you can learn it in a few hours. Yeah. We learned it in a few hours. It's
Th do you know the story?
Tell the story. I do, but I think people will appreciate it. This is
Obviously mythologized, right?
But King Seejong.
So King Say Joan, he's the guy on the essentially the ten dollar bill in Korea. He is their George Washington.
And Seejong the Great.
And
What happens, uh Chinese is a really fascinating writing system, right? Because it's logographic.
Which means that
Anyone can read a Chinese character. It's more of a hieroglyph.
than it is you can't sound it out, right?
Because anyone can read it, it transcends
Language.
In a lot of ways. You can see the symbol for person and know it means person, whether you speak
Mongolian, or whether you speak Thai, or whether you speak Japanese or Korean or Chinese. So it makes it a great
kind of language for trade.
But it also is extremely hard to learn because every concept must have essentially its own letter.
And so
To be fluent in reading it, you need to learn.
Two thousand to three thousand letters.
And so it was a really bad system.
For
A common people to learn
How to read.
And King Seejong was like, My people are illiterate.
Um
It they can't learn Chinese. We must have our own writing system that you can sound out, you sound out uh Korean.
And he gathered his scholars, and the story is they together created the system that would be have no um deviations. You could it read like it sounded.
And they designed it based on the movements of the mouth you make.
And then King Say Jone loved it so much, he wrote it on little leaves.
And then
Spread it out.
Because the upper class did not want people to learn how to read, and they were very against it. They're like, Oh, we don't want the commoners to read. That's for us.
They you know, passing the tests in Chinese was a big
It's like Latin for the high priesthood.
And so Seijong wrote it on the letters and it blew through Korea, and the people picked it up, and it was so divinely inspired that they intrinsically knew.
How to read Korean and did he
frustrated the attempts of the nobles from keeping people to read by by giving it to people written on leaves. It it's so delightful. It is an amazing, amazing mythologized story. And the Korean people are very proud of this writing system for good reason. I encourage everybody to to just take
A few hours, I think there's even a comic book called How to Learn to Read Korean in Fifteen Minutes or something like that. Slight exaggeration. It's gonna take you more than fifteen minutes. Yeah. But in sixty minutes, you could definitely
Get the basics and figure it out. Definitely gives you a false sense.
of your own um skill when you learn it, you're like, wow, I'm reading. And they're like, all right, now the actual language, what these things mean. And if you good news, if you do learn some Korean
You can hop.
reasonably easily to Japanese and in some cases to
to Chinese as well. So you might have Zhang Hwang for telephone, then Chinese Mandarin and then Dehuang in Japanese, right? So there's a lot of of overlap or
Like uh if you want to say.
Tan San Tsu could I like please give me sparkling water in Japanese Tan San Tsu J Seo.
In Korean. So anyway, if you get one, then it's a good branch off to other things. All right. I'm going to cut my linguistics
Uh nerding short.
You need to create a Conling. Have you ever done it? Oh, I have actually. So you should explain what that means, but I have actually
Spend some time on it, and I owe you a huge debt of gratitude because I listened to probably 40 episodes of Writing Excuses. Oh, did you? When I was working on my first real attempt at fantasy world building a few years ago.
And I wanted to incorporate
language is a core piece of it. And I've spent a lot of time also
looking at Tolkien's work with languages. He's the master. Yeah. Unbelievably complex. And I also at one point, this is actually from my third book.
reached out to the gentleman who designed the Navi language in Avatar, which in very
partial measure stemmed from some of his exposure to
Some of these East Asian languages as well.
How would you approach it?
And how do you think about language construction?
Are you sure we're not getting too nerdy for your audience? You know what super nerdy folks look we're about to go really deep in the nerd pool. So if you want to skip ahead five minutes, that's fine, but I'd encourage you to stick around for it. So a cotton leg is a constructed language.
most people know of Klingon and Elvish and George Martin has one and the Navi you mentioned. These are just
Invented languages.
Uh there's only one that's in wide use or wide quote unquote Esperanto.
Um you could
Almost say that Korean is a bit one because it was
actively designed.
Rather than growing organically, but I think it's
hovering in this in between space. So how do I approach it?
I
Look at what Tolkien did.
And I say, Wow.
He
Basically wrote Lord of the Rings.
Because he had these cool languages he was designing and he wanted a place to use them.
Right. Including crazy scripts. Yeah.
Uh and I said I don't have
twenty years to do that, like Grandpa Tolkien. I'm I'm really a narrative guy. I really focus on what makes a narrative work. I'm gonna break it down. People think of me of the world as the world building guy.
But I'm not.
That's certainly the thing I've used as my branding and marketing.
It's the way that I've used to make myself easily recommendable and distinctive.
But what I spend most of my time on is narrative.
And so when I look at the language, I'm like
I want to have something.
That is
Relevant that works.
But I don't want to spend twenty years. And so I usually come up with a few interesting rules that I've come up
with through my knowledge of linguistics and I say
Follow these rules. Whenever you need a word, go back to these rules and build it.
Don't write out the whole language. Don't come out with how you would say every sentence.
Each time you need something, go to the rules, build it up from the fundamentals, and it will all eventually then work.
But it means I end a book with fifty words and maybe a little bit of grammatical structure, not with an entire language that you could speak.
This I ran into, which is part of the reason why I was revisiting my email exchanges with the person who created Navi, because I had something like eight greater houses in this fantasy world that I was creating for my own entertainment more than anything else. It's just a itch I really want to scratch. Yeah.
And
The extent to which I developed languages was really just for a few exclamations, a few songs, very short, not Tolkien, like twenty minutes on audiobook. And I loved it, but I recognized how you could really trap yourself in quicksand.
If you tried to get too ambitious. We call it world builder's disease. Which sometimes you want to give yourself. It's fun.
But if you spend
twenty years world building every book.
In today's market.
You're probably not gonna have a career as a
professional writer. You might you might get lucky and write that one book that'll
sell millions of copies and make it so you can live off of j just that income. Most of us it takes a lot more effort and
We learn to world build in service of story rather than write stories in service of world building.
But everybody gets to do what they want. You you scratch your itch how you want to scratch it.
We're gonna talk about putting in the effort.
And no man's land, perhaps, is one way that we could put it, but I want to ask first
About David Farland, if I'm pronouncing the name correctly.
So as an undergrad, at least based on
research I did. You took a creative writing class with
David Farlett or a writing class. Yeah.
How did that
affect you and what lessons
Might you have
grabbed onto that have stuck with you in any way.
Yeah, so I came back
From Korea.
sophomore year of college. And I'm like
I'm young, I'm stupid.
Now's the time to try to be a writer.
Right.
This is what I really want to do.
And I suspect we'll get into later why I really wanted to do that and things like that. But I changed my major to English because I thought that's what she had to do.
Later found out Stephen King and others recommend you major in anything but English.
The reasoning being that
You should study something that you're fascinated by.
And then use that to inform your writing, which is generally pretty good advice.
I do recommend that.
the cheat code is if you major in English.
You can use your writing as your homework.
The assignments you can, you know.
You can double use your time a lot of times. You can be practicing your writing, but also turn it in. And so it it's a little easier.
In some ways.
Changed my major to English and I took a whole bunch of classes from a whole bunch of professors whom
I they're dear to me.
I love them.
Uh most of them have retired by now or passed on, but
They knew nothing about publishing.
This is just very common in the arts, right?
Uh they'll talk about how
to express yourself as a writer.
But they won't talk about how do you construct
A sympathetic character.
Never heard those
Terms.
They'll tell you about, you know, how to get into a MFA program.
But they won't tell you how to get a publishing deal'cause none of them have done it.
And so again
They did teach me some
Valuable things.
But my senior year.
After going through a bunch of these workshops is what we call it, writing workshops.
I heard that there was a writer coming in who actually had published something.
And he was teaching the low level, two hundred level class. By then I was in taking the graduate courses, uh, even though I wasn't a graduate yet. And I'm like
I should probably take this class, even though it's kind of a step backward. It won't fulfill any of my credit requirements, but
I'm at college to learn, not to
check some boxes off of a list. And so I took his class and it was
Revolutionary to me. He sat down
Like
the first few days he's like, All right, here's how you actually construct
A narrative. Here's what works.
Here's what doesn't work here are tools.
You really focused and it became my focus in teaching.
On here's a toolbox, because not every tool works for every writer.
In fact, you're generally gonna gravitate toward one or two and the rest you'll find useless.
And he took that toolbox approach and he said some writers do it this way, some writers do it that way. Try this. Here's something to do.
And then he talked about publishing in this way.
that was mind blowing because that was the
big thing for me was hearing someone say the black box. Yeah.
Here's uh here's my publishing contract, he said. He passed it around. Here's my latest contract. Have a look at it, ask questions.
And
Here's how you go about getting one of these.
And I took his advice.
Back in the early two thousands.
Publishing in sci fi fantasy was still very networking focused.
It's actually moved away from that.
For various reasons.
But back then.
The best way to break in
was to go to the conventions
Get into the parties,
Meet the editors.
and start chatting with them and start
listening to what they were actually interested in.
Yeah, the magic question was, what are you working on right now?
That you're really excited by because this lets you learn the personalities.

It's not networking in that none of them knew who I was.
But it's networking and then hearing from them directly what they were buying.
And why?
Then you could go to these, you know, fifty editors and say, All right, these five
Really seem like they would like my work.
Instead of sending
To all fifty. I target those five. I met them at a party. I say, Hey
I met you. Sound like
You know, we hit it off. You mentioned that I could send you my work. Here it is.
And that's what got me an agent and an editor.
uh was doing that. Just kind of the Dave Farlin method of breaking in. Uh I was the last generation that worked for.
really doesn't work anymore.
Uh everyone jokes that in publishing
No one actually wants to publish any authors. No one wants to actually do any work.
So any time someone sneaks in
They're like, Oh, how did you get into publishing? Oh, really? And then they close that door. So that no one else can get in. Um that we all joke about things like that. It's not actually true. Everyone actually wants to find great authors and great work, but the industry changes.
quickly enough that what works for one generation, by the time they've broken in, the industry has changed. It just doesn't work. So I'm going to come back to
the agent and I'll I'll just plant the seed. I'm gonna ask how much writing you did before that happened. Okay. Yeah. But before we get to that, I wanna ask, are you still
Teaching the creative writing class. Yeah. BYU. Bring them on university.
What is the first class?
First class.
So
First class is
Some things I just told you. I get up and I say to them
So the very first thing.
As I say to them.
During this class, we're gonna pretend you want to be a professional writing.
Right.
Earning a full time living from your writing.
In the next ten years.
That we're gonna pretend because
Most of you
That's probably not why they're there.
Right.
Um most of them they they're just curious. They may have a book in them.
And we have this
Curious.
relationship with art.
In our society.
It is
As soon as you say I'm going to write something.
People like, oh, when will you monetize it? When will you earn money from it?
And
That can be kind of destructive.
Right. Like you mentioned you're writing a book just or you wrote one just because
It was an itch. You you enjoyed it.
I think writing is legitimately just good for people, in the same way that working out is good for people.
learning to write a narrative and get those thoughts out of your head page.
Just
Innately good.
Most people when they go play basketball
For you if they look like me.
People aren't gonna be like
So when you're going into the NBA. Right. But if you write a book, people will say, So when are you going to publish it?
And I say to the students, it's okay if that's not your goal.
If you want to write just for you, if you want to be on the I spend twenty years and then produce one book.
Route.
Totally fine.
However
I want you to know everything you would need.
To shoot for the highest level, which is earning a full time living as a writer.
And everything else falls underneath that.
So during the class.
We pretend
That that's your goal.
Once you walk out of it, you can make your own goals, whatever they are. But while we're there
We pretend that.
And then the second thing I say is, you're gonna have to learn when to ignore me.
And that is really hard to do because I'm an authority. I'm up there.
Uh survivorship bias.
Says
Who knows what I actually say is going to be relevant. Some of it, hopefully, but I can't really determine.
What
really played a part in me being successful in what shit, of course. And
I want to approach it as a toolbox.
giving people all of these various tools, some of which are contradictory.
Right? Self contradiction. I can give you examples of that if you want, but
You can't use them all.
So
You're gonna have to ignore some of the advice of major authors.
Some of the things that Stephen King tells you will be wrong. Some of the things
For you.
Саме врон фі.
You have to
Find your own way. And so I kind of start off with
I'm gonna pretend you wanna be a professional writer and then follow it up with
But learn when to ignore me.
What are some of the contradictory
tools or approaches in the toolkit.
The one I generally use.
As my prime example is when I was studying this before I broke in.
Two authors that I admired. I read their books.
Uh I read uh Odd Writing by Stephen King and How to Write Sci Fi and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card.
And I read these books.
And uh I honestly can't tell you one hundred percent if it was in those exact books or other writings of theirs on their websites and things, but Stephen King at one point said
Do not
Make an outline.
Do not use a writing group.
These will destroy your writing.
And
Scott Card is like
I need an outline.
It is fundamentally
Vital for me.
In order to build my book.
Now Stephen King is what we generally call
Uh these are George R. Martin's terms. He's uh he's wonderful the way he speaks about uh fiction, if you're really interested.
Anything George says is golden.
He calls them gardeners. Stephen King is a gardener.
For Stephen King
Exploring and discovering his story is the thing that makes him excited.
He wants to take a seed, he'll often say I take two really interesting characters.
And I put them
In conflict.
And have something go wrong and I see where the story goes and I just write.
And he says that if he has an outline, he feels like he's already done that process.
In the outline. So when he sits down to write the book.
He has no motivation.
He's not exploring discovering anymore.
The other group we call architects.
Architects
Like to build a structure.
And then
Kind of
go and take this little piece and then polish that little piece and see where it goes, and then take the next piece that they've already built as part of their structure and build a story around that.
And
Most people are somewhere in between these two extremes, but those were two extremes where I realized
I can't do both of these. I can't both not have an outline and have an outline. I can have a hybrid approach.
But
If you
Try to take both of their advice.
Equally weighted.
then you're gonna get nowhere.
You can try both methods.
In different ways. You can try some hybrids.
But a lot of things you'll learn in writing, you kind of have to choose one or the other and try it out and see how it works for you.
What are some of the assignments that have most resonated with students or
You think best served them even though they might not recognize it.
What I generally do is I
Follow a
A focus on habits approach.
Instead of giving them specific writing exercises, I can give them if that someone comes up to me and says, I'm having trouble with X.
I'll give them a writing exercise.
If someone comes up to me and says
I am having
A lot of trouble.
Going back and revising my chapter over and over again instead of writing the next one.
I'll say, Okay.
Try writing longhand.
Uh, this works for some people.
Um you go, you take a page of paper, you write it longhand, and you tell yourself
It doesn't have to be perfect until I put it into the computer.
And you start each day.
r taking what you wrote before and putting it to the computer.
And then leave it alone and write your next chapter longhand. And then use that process to kind of
Get yourself back into the writing, but then forcing yourself to do something new.
That works for some people.
If people are having trouble with dialogue, I say, All right, go do the exercise where you sit.
and listen to people on campus.
And you just write down exactly what they say.
Exactly as it said.
And then
Take it and try to write it under different styles of dialogue. If you're writing
Like Soderbergh how would you do it? Pick some of your favorite people, go watch their
Movies.
write down the dialogue and compare that to the real life and just kind of like
Figure out what kind of dialogue you like to do. Those are exercises.
But in general, I'm only doing that when I'm diagnosing a problem.
For the class, I'm saying.
Your job if you want to.
Try to be a professional writer.
You're gonna have to write.
Consistently.
Nine out of ten writers that I've found are that do better with consistency.
One out of ten is a binge rider.
I don't understand binge riders as well, but I can talk about that.
Those are the people who go.
Rent a cabin.
Take two months.
Walk in without a book, come out with a book.
And then they don't write for ten months. Um right.
Most people are better served.
By writing a certain amount every day.
really consistently or at least two or three times a week.
And building a novel.
out of good habits. And I focus on that. I'm like, break it down.
Set a goal.
Have a spread sheet.
And try to hit your word counts.
Or at least your hour counts.
If you're having trouble doing this, go to a specific place every day that you do this, that you don't do a lot of other things. Go to the coffee shop, go to a certain room in the house, turn on certain music that you only turn on when you're writing.
Build that habit.
So that you are very consistent.
Thatch.
your writing time, if you there's something you already do every day. If you go you already have build a habit to go to the gym.
then try to align your life so that you go to the gym and then have
an hour to write.
Think about where you're gonna write at the gym, sit and write for an hour so that you are adding onto a habit that you've already built.
And that's my focus in the class is really
Be consistent. See if you can write. The goal is in the class to write thirty five thousand words.
classes around a third of the year. If you do that
All year.
You will end up with a hundred thousand words, which is your average novel.
How many just for people listening who aren't in the the writing?
Biz or the writing habit. Hundred thousand words.
In a typical trade paperback or it could be a hardcover. How many pages is that? Three hundred.
Yeah, three fifty.
Um, like the way of kings is four hundred thousand words.
And we kind of cram stuff in there and we get to a thousand pages on that.
Uh so you can kind of run that. It's a fourth of a thousand pages. So it'll be two fifty, but
Here's the thing. We use dirty tricks in publishing.
If you're reading a thriller or a young adult book
What they'll do is they'll put a lot fewer words on a page.
Because they wanna increase the pacing.
They wanna make it feel like you're just zipping through. It's a page turner, right?
So they're gonna want
You know, fifty percent fewer words.
On every page.
So that kid picking up that book that's a reluctant reader's like wow, this one's really fast.
I don't have space for that in my epic fantasies. I I I push the limits of what can be bound.
And beyond that, we're not expecting you to read this book in one sitting.
So we can put more on a page that makes it feel dense and thick and meaty.
Which can be really enjoyable if you want to dig into a new world and things like that.
Yeah.
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Let's hit some top line.
Habits.
Okay. From Brandon. How many words
Per year on average, would you say?
So put down. My goal is two thousand to twenty five hundred words a day.
So
Yeah now.
Whatever ten pages to twenty pages.
Um, is what I'm looking at. Depends. I mean, I write in the old school manuscript format.
Where everything's twelve point and courier and
It's a a holdover from the days when
certain type setting things are done that are too nerdy perhaps to talk about here.
But
I think in words. So I do two thousand twenty hundred five hundred. Those are new words. Those are new words. Now when I'm doing revisions.
I'm not writing new words.
And I would say around a third of my time.
is spent on revisions depending on the year.
And this is the thing.
Some years I'll do a lot of words, some years I do a lot more revisions.
It really depends. But if we're looking at two thousand words uh a week
Times fifty weeks.
Like that can produce quite a lot of words. Um, right. Twenty so ten thousand words a week is what that would turn into.
That's five hundred thousand words a year.
Right, um is what I could theoretically produce.
Now
Third of my time's done.
So
Really
I'm looking at around three hundred thousand words.
A stormlight archive book is eighteen months.
Of work.
Um, for that reason and things like that.
Alright, we might come back.
to that and the revision process. But just as promised to hop back and forth between past and present tense.
Why did you want to become a writer?
So this is a fun story.
I was not a writer.
Were a reader when I was young.
Which is
I found pretty odd.
For people who are published novelists. A lot of my friends, I'll talk to them. They'd be like, Yeah, I published my first thing when I was two.
Right. I came out of the womb with a poem.
Uh ready to go in my student newspaper.
And things like that. Me, I
I did read when I was very young.
And about
Fourth or fifth grade, I fell out of it.
And
This is the era where I lived in Nebraska.
And
There are certain books that people just really like to read in Nebraska.
And they usually involved
Young people on farms.
Sometiming in the wilderness on their own, sometimes on a ranch. They had pet dogs.
And the pet dogs died.
And I got like three of those in a row where I'm like, I don't even have a dog.
But I'm tired of the dog dying.
I know what it's like to be a kid.
Like I don't live on a farm, but my grandparents were all farmers, right?
And
I live behind a farm.
Uh, I was in Lincoln. It's mostly urban, but
Mostly urban in that Midwest way where you're in the capital city in a brand new kind of
high cost development, but there's a cornfield in your backyard. That's just Nebraska.
Right.
It's just
How we roll.
And so I knew all that. I was not interested in it.
And so I fell out of reading.
Eighth grade rolls around.
I have a teacher, Ms. Reader. She doesn't remember me. I Ms. Reader. Ms. Reader. How appropriate. Yep. Yeah, Ms. Reader.
Uh, she wanted to be a professor at UC Irvine. So if anyone had an a professor reader at UC Irvine, this was this was the same person.
But uh Ms. Reader, she was my eighth grade English teacher.
And I
Probably shouldn't admit this, but I cheated on a book report.
With her.
If you're a smart kid you realize that the back of the book
even before the internet basically tells you the entire plot and then you can read the last chapter and you'll know
the whole plot of the book. So it's like book report, write a summary and why you liked it.
And I read the back of the book, the last chapter, and turned it in.
And I made some mistakes, and she picked me out.
She sat me down and she was actually very good. She's like
Something's not clicking with you with books. And I'm like, No, they really aren't. She's like
So
For your next book report, I just want you to read one of these books.
on my rack here. These are my favorite books.
that I have for kids to read. I just want you to actually read it.
And you can talk to me about it. And I'm like, I just I don't like books. I don't she's like, Well just
Try something different.
Uh so I went to the rack and
I always joke it's like you can tell the paperbacks have been read.
By a hundred students, right? They got
Spaghetti stains on them and things like that. It's just
And I looked leaf through and I arrived on this book called Dragon Spain.
Barbara Hamley.
And it really was the cover.
Uh the cover illustrator's Michael Whalen.
I would eventually he's the illustrator who did the Way of Kings uh in the Stromlight Archive for me. I eventually got him. Uh he just retired. He did
The last cover was the the fifth book of the Storm Lad Archive and he's retired. But he's done that before, so he might be back.
He pulls a Miyazaki uh sometimes and pops in and out uh or a Michael Jordan, depending on your uh the field you're talking about. But
Regardless.
I picked up this book and
You know, it had
Cool Dragon on the cover.
It was all misty and kind of awesome looking. It had a cute girl.
On the cover, it's like
Hey, I'm fourteen. This maybe this will work.
Uh and I take this book now.
This book should not have worked.
This book absolutely should not have. Like, what do you want to give a reluctant reader? You usually want to give them a book about someone their age.
usually s very similar to them.
A rocked reader, you if it's a young man, you hand him Harry Potter.
Right.
This is a book about a middle aged woman going through a midlife crisis.
The story is that there's a dragon who's come to
You know, destroy the kingdom.
The last living person who's killed a dragon is this guy and they go hunting him. And he lives.
Up in the north'cause he's now middle aged with a family and he's like
I killed a dragon when I was in my twenties.
I don't do that anymore.
I'm an old dude now and they're like, You're the only one who's ever done it.
And so he goes to uh his wife and he's like
I guess I gotta go kill this dragon. We gotta figure out how to do this. And it's told from her perspective as they go down and try to figure out how to kill a dragon.
As middle aged people and be smart about it rather than charging you with a sword.
And her story is
She has um been told by her teacher she could be the greatest
wizard ever she's got um raw natural talent
But she has divided her time.
between studying and having a family.
And it her her teacher's like, You really should
Give up that family stuff. Just really focus.
On your m your magic.
But you know, it this is her crisis. This is what and through going down she kind of
learns about the dragon magic and she starts to get really into that. And not to give spoilers, but there's an opportunity for her to just go and become what she'd always dreamed.
And her crisis is do I go do this right now, or do I not?
And I'm reading this book, and it's really cool, it's inventive.
And I realize at some point
My mother
She
graduated first in her class in accounting.
In a year where she was the only woman in most of her accounting classes.
Right.
She had been offered a really prestigious scholarship to go get um her CPA.
And she had decided not to. Uh she decided that
She wanted to be home with young kids when she had young kids.
Which I do not think is an
A decision anyone should make for you, but decision she made for herself.

after having kids went on and had a really great career as an accountant, but she gave up.
Some really important things.
That uh as I'm reading this book, I had always heard these stories.
You know, she would tell them. She wants us to know that she uh and I always thought, Of course you did, Mom. Look at me.
I'm great.
This is what you you should have done.
I'm reading this book and I'm like
Ditch the kids. Go be a wizard. Wizarding is awesome.
The kids'll get along, they'll figure it out. And I get done with this book. And on one hand, it's kind of a silly book about wizards.
And dragons.
Right.
And I get down to this book and I understand my mom better.
And this
What
Build empathy in me for someone that
You know.
I'm a fourteen year old boy.
I'm understanding a middle aged woman in ways I'd never been able to before, and I'd had fun while doing it. And there was a magic.
And I don't use that.
Yeah, word lightly as as a as a storyteller, as a writer of fantasy. There was a magic
To that author.
Being able to convey a life experience of someone.
That just entered my brain and has never left.
And I said
Just like if you went and saw a magic trick.
You're an analytical type person. You probably want to say, How did they do it?
How did how did they vanish that thing? What type of mirrors did they use?
I saw read this and said, I need to know how this is done.
I have to know.
And I just started reading voraciously.
I went to the card catalog'cause I'm old.
I'm even older than you. Oh, I remember those car caps.
And I went and got the next book in line, just alphabetical, because it started with dragon. And I read everything that had dragons in it in the school library.
Just to figure it out.
And
You know, something changed in me that day.
I went from a C student to an A student.
Over summer. C's in eighth grade.
A's in ninth grade.
Why that changed because I discovered
Stories about wizards?
I discovered there was something I wanted to do.
Right. There was now a reason to get good grades.
I was in Nebraska.
And
U and L
Is good for some things.
I later fur learned that it actually has a decent writing program.
But
I wanted a good education and
I wanted to go
To BYU where my parents had gone, and I realized I probably wouldn't get into BYU.
is a private school. Uh you do have to have
You know, better grades.
than Cs generally to make it into some of these schools. And so suddenly it had a reason.
Like well, I want to go to a better school.
Again, I was dumb. U and L's actually a really good school.
Um, but as a kid, I'm like I need to get into this school, and so
My grades went up.
Like I need to be a writer, I need to degree, I need to learn about this.
Therefore, I'm gonna have to go to college. Therefore I'm gonna have to learn to learn because otherwise I won't figure out how to do this. And
Having a purpose, having a reason.
To do well.
changed my entire outlook. And I
I was not Val Victorian.
I was one grade off of it because I took a semester and moved to France.
That tanked my grades.
Um, it wasn't a full semester, about half a semester, but I never caught up on all the stuff that I needed to do. So I got a B plus in one class.
But it was totally worth it.
Go live in France. I was gonna How did you decide to go to France? I took four years of French
And
My teacher in French.
was the best teacher I had.
Miz dress.
And
When you have good teachers
It changes your passion for a class.
Right. Completely.
You know, I wouldn't have picked French as my favorite subject, but it was my favorite class.
And so I had
Three years of that, and she said, Hey, I'm taking a study abroad.
To Paris.
You're gonna have to miss half a semester.
Um, you'll have to do makeup work, but we'll live in Paris and go visit all the sites and go to all the museums. And I'm like, I am in
You're so passionate about your trips to Paris, and it was so wonderful. Like
Stayed with a f host family.
And then did
Day trips to just places around Paris went to
you know, Givarney and Versailles and
saw everything and museums every day and bad grades in that.
Yeah.
Sounds like a good trade. Yeah. And it's so parallel to what happened to me with Mr. Shimano in high school.
When I transferred schools.
Ended up taking Japanese, had no plans to go to Japan, and then six months in, he didn't go with me, but that's how the study abroad came about. And completely
Changed everything. But I spent the next
few summers catching up with summer school because none of the grades transferred.
I love Japan.
I've only been once, but it was just delightful.
Just
Walking around Tokyo is such a surreal and interesting experience.
Yeah, I tell people it's like thirty percent blade runner and seventy percent DMV. Like if you if you live in Japan, it's just like I have to do another carbon copy that when then we have to fax what is this? Why my few of my friends have moved and have kind of since confirmed that that is their experience. So
I'm focusing on
Headbusing and come back to it. The class because
You've thought about writing very deeply.
And
It's basically a filtering function for
ferreting out some of the key ingredients as you see them in your writing process. You mentioned narrative.
And how
From a positioning perspective, people think of you and it's very helpful. It's also valid in some ways as a world builder.
But that first and foremost it's like it's world building in service of a narrative, not the other way around. Yep.
How would you teach narrative? Are there particular books? Is it like a three act play? Is it the hero's journey? What are we what are we talking about?
So
I do two lectures on narrative.
And generally the first day I do not talk about Hero's Journey or three act structure or any of these things. That's for the second week.
'Cause I I do my classes one
Giant lecture each week.
Are these available anywhere? Yeah, they're on YouTube. Amazing. Yeah, you can watch the we're doing new ones this year.
Um, so you can go watch these two lectures that I'm talking about.
The first one
I just talk on about the theory.
Of
Plot. What makes someone turn a page?
Why does someone start at page one?
And then and what
What is a page turner?
And my theory on this is
А із асен в прогрес.
We like to see things count.
As human beings.
And the great plots are doing this.
beneath the hood.
They are showing incremental slow progress forwards, sometimes backwards.
Sometimes a little of each.
Toward a goal.
And the idea for plot is to identify
what type of plot it is. If you're doing a mystery.
Then that progress is going to be in the form of information.
Story starts without it.
The characters without the information, the reader without the information, generally.
and ends with them gaining the information.
And so the story
The progress.
is all about these little bits of information that you get through the story.
And
At its fundamental, this does some fun things. For instance, buddy cop movies and romances have the same sort of fundamental structure.
Which is it's about a relationship between two people where slowly you're finding out that they work better together than apart.
And so your progress is seeing
How they rub each other wrong.
But then how
Dave, my own teacher, talked about braiding roses.
How if the thored outward.
For these characters rather than point it inward, they become a defensive bulwark for one another. What does that mean? Braided roses. Yeah, oh yeah, I see. So they're it's sort of us against the world. Us against the world. If you take two roses and you don't braid them, you stick them together, they poke each other.
But if you braid them really well.
then the all the thorns point outward.
And these two roses suddenly become stronger together.
Than they were apart. Yeah. Uh again, stole that one from Dave.
And so the idea for a character plot is you are braiding the roses and s over time you're seeing
That those points.
Number one, you see how dangerous they are poking into each other.
But then you see how
Point it outward.
These
People actually work better and the kind of the holes, the places where one doesn't have a thorn.
And can get hit, another one's thorn protects.
And things like that, and over the course of the story.
You see that rose get braided to the point that
You are saying you guys are so much better together than apart. You need to be together. And then when they
Either hook up or become partners.
Again, same s story structure, then you stand up and you cheer.
Um so the idea is
It is
Promise.
You promise at the start.
In a romance novel, you show two people apart.
You show what their thorns are.
You promise just by featuring them that they're gonna get together.
Buddy Cop movie. Here's this cop. He's a loner. He works alone. But he has, you know
Держі проблем.
There's something that's hurting.
Uh and here's this other cop. He's gonna retire soon, but you know, he he's missing something in his life.
And then you slowly that's your promise.
Y progres.
is showing them work well together and then your payoff
is the moment at the end where all that work you've put into it

As
They hook up or in certain stories they don't. It can be either way, but
Promise.
Progress payoff.
That is what makes people
Love stories.
And read through.
On a kind of
Macro skill.
Bre getting through an individual chapter is something different.
Um, but on a macro scale that is plot and that is
You know, I talk about on the first day this idea of how to do that, how to have twists.
that are actually fulfilling promises.
And that one's fun.
The best twists.
Don't just surprise the reader.
A complication should surprise the reader, but a twist
should be surprising yet inevitable.
And if you do it right, people are wanting that twist before they realize it happens and then it does.
And that is day one. Then day two is I'm I'm like, all right, here are some structures that people have used. Here's your your toolbox.
Some people use the hero's journey.
Here's what the hero's journey is in brief. Here is what it's good for. Here are some
things to watch out for because the hero's journey can scare you wrong sometimes.
Here's three act format. Here's what it's good at.
Here's some maybe some foibles of three act format.
Here's um Robert Jordan's method, which he called Points on the Map.
Here's um how a lot of uh screwball comedy is written. It's called Yes, but no and.
All of these different tools I try to talk about.
And say and there's a ton more.
There's nine point story structure, there's seven point story structure, whatever.
But the idea is here's some things to try.
But keep in mind
Promise.
progress payoff. And I feel like that gives sort of an overview of how to build narrative.
Are there any in addition to your classes, of course, and we'll link to those in the show notes.
Are there any books or resources that you encourage people
to read to get a better understanding of narrative or these different forms of narrative. And what came to my mind, even though it's not
Directed at
Potential novelists is a book called Save the Cat goes to the movies.
Yeah. That examines different genres within screenwriting. Okay. That's not the original Save the Cat. No. That's the new one. So I do recommend Save the Cat, but Save the Cat goes to the movies. I haven't read that. That sounds good. It's fun. Yeah. The the first one's also excellent. I mean I enjoyed it. Yeah. So Save the Cat is kind of
It it's it's a really good leaping off point. And if you want the opposite of Save the Cat, on writing by Stephen King.
Is a leaping off point in Save the Cats about structure.
And on writings about the life of a writer and not structure.
And those will give you kind of two of the the kind of
Yeah, different.
viewpoints on storytelling and they're both very good.
My agent always recommends Writing to Sell by Scott Meredith.
I find it a little
too structure focused.
Uh there is art to writing.
And
The dirty secret of outlining is you're still gonna have to learn to to garden.
Because yeah, you'll have these points in the outline, but then when you sit down to write them, you're a gardener.
getting between these two points in the outline.
And so both skills are really important, but Scott Meredith, I did read that and like it uh quite a bit. So where do you fall?
In general or now.
Between
The gardening or gardener and architect.
Yeah, so I've tried all the tools. I have a middle grade series uh called Alcatraz versus the librarians, which are Pure Garden.
I actually use a method
A little like do you know the old show Whose Line Is It Anyway? Sure.
I pull a bunch of ideas, I brainstorm a bunch of random ideas, and then I say, I've got to use all of these. Go.
Uh and I write a story without an outline.
That's to practice the tool.
And I generally fall these days.
on a seventy five percent outline.
sort of thing. I do a lot of war building on my plot and I do a lot of building.
on my setting.
And then I write my way into characters.
One of the big dangers of outlining too much is
characters that feel wooden or cardboard because they're there merely to get you between point A and point B.
And then you know, from point B to point C on your outline.
And if you have characters that your early readers are like, these feel a little wooden, it might be because instead of going according to the character's motivations.
You're just going according to the outline.
And I find that if I
Let myself write my way into character and then rebuild my outline. Now writing your way into character, by that you mean you're creating the setting, the environment.
And the the plot. And the plot. But then I rewrite the plot once I know the character.
Here's my process.
So
I start.
Usually with a couple of really good ideas.
Right. I usually want to have multiple interesting ideas.
For my setting.
At least one hook for each character.
Yeah. Could you give a an example of this starting?
Yeah, so um let's uh build it from one of my books, Ms. Born, right?
So Mistborn had a series of ideas. The first idea came.
I was reading um Harry Potter back in the Harry Potter boom.
And I thought, man, these dark lords never get a break. Right. Um Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, um, Wheel of Time.
There's this dark lord.
And what happens is like some furry footed British kid throws their ring in a hole.
And their entire empire collapses. Or, you know, there's a kid you're gonna kill and the power of a mother's love protects him. How can you plan for the power of a mother's love when you're a dark lord? That's just a complete oddball.
Um, and I think they never get a break. What if the Dark Lord won?
What if uh Frodo got to the end of Lord of the Rings with the Ring?
And Saron was there, he's like
My ring!
You know how long I've been looking for that?
Thank you so much for that. Must have been a hard journey bringing that all the way here. Thank you. And then killed him and took over the world, right?
Um, that's like
What if
And I thought, that's a downer of a book.
I don't know that I want to write a book about the
traditional hero's journey that ends with the Dark Lord winning. But it went in the back of the head, right?
And then
I have a deep and abiding love of the heist genre.
Yeah, Sneakers is one of my favorite films of all time.
Oldy but goodie, uh the sting, all the way up to kind of, you know, the the Oceans 11s and the Italian job, both the old one and the new one, just the inception.
You you can you do a good heist you can get me.
And as a writer
Some of your light bulb moments are when you're like, Hey
I love this thing.
And I've never written about it.
And that's gold.
When you you know, you feel like you've
You've covered everything and then you realize there's some
area of passion and love that you haven't tapped at all. I'm like
I need to do a fantasy heist.
What if I did a heist where every member of this heist crew had a magical talent?
And they all combined together. I'm like, nobody's done this.
It was really kind of a big deal to me when I realized no one had done this because as a writer.
You're always looking for the things that no one has done it.
The truth is everyone's done everything.
But when you find something you're like
I can't think of a major story.
that has done a full on heist.
In fantasy.
I was super excited. Then I realized
Fantasy heist.
Dark Lord One.
Team of thieves?
Rob the Dark Lord.
I have a plot.
That's like that's my inception.
Um meanwhile I want to
Good.
idea for each character.
And so Mistborn's about two characters.
Uh one is about Celsier.
It was my my
Concept for him for myself was the gentleman thief.
Who'd lived his life?
You know, conning people, kind of small time cons, but living among upper society where he liked to do.
that something went horribly wrong and he found out
He's like
I haven't been making the world a better place. I haven't been helping anyone.
I've just been coasting on my charm.
And has a crisis of conscience on
Should I be
Actually using this to do something.
And you know, what happens is his wife is killed.
His heist goes wrong.
And he decides he wants revenge and he's gonna do it by robbing the Dark Lord, right? That's my concept for him.
My concept for Vin, who's um
The other main character is this idea of a young woman who lives in this world.
Who has the magical talent and doesn't know it.
I'm looking for a conflict, right?
For her conflict is
She's managed to remain a good person.
But she's lost her belief that anyone else is is good.
She gets betrayed in some ways that just makes her give up.
On
Kind of humanity in general.
And the idea is putting them two together. Kelsier who still kinda has this
Deep and abiding optimism.
There's like, I'm gonna do something good. He's learned optimism, right? He's learned I need to do something good with my life. And he's like by force. And her, who's lost it.
And she becomes the apprentice.
To him as he recruits her into the team.
And this idea of a heist
Where these two people are growing. Can I ask a question, not to interrupt, but
Did you have all of this before you
Put pen to paper, metaphorically speaking, to write. This much I had.
And in w in what form does that exist? So it exists for me generally in um I do a new document that says
It does setting the top.
Then character, then plot.
And the setting will have an all you know some of the Dark Lord one, that's setting stuff, right?
What does a world look like where the dark lord is one and ruled for a thousand years?
In my books, I like to have an interesting use of magic. We can talk about that at some point. We will. Um, and but what is the interesting use of magic? That's how I got into writing excuses. Yeah, is it? How do I walk the line between nerding out and making it feel like approachable?
Because I don't want my books to read like an encyclopedia entry or a video game, right? I want it to read like
A new branch of science that's really fun.
Um
And then character I'll have these things. And so
With the character you notice these are seeds.
Vin is like this, Celsier is like this.
I don't know yet how their interaction is gonna go and how they're gonna be. In fact, I wrote three chapters.
Within
First.
Three different first chapters.
Trying different personalities. I started her with an artful dodger type.
really confident moving in the underworld, ripping people off, and it just did not work.
And then I tried another one, I can't even remember what that one was, but then I tried a third one, which is the personality she ended up with.
Kelskar I can have right from the get go.
All right. It's my job to a job, so I'll do it again. How did you know those first two didn't work?
This is where it's just like a water feel kind of thing that you've acquired over time. This is art and not science. It just
And sometimes it doesn't work and you don't figure it out till late, like
My most
Famous series. They're probably
Mistborn and the Stormland Archive are about tied for most famous.
Stormlight, I wrote an entire novel.
Like three hundred thousand words long.
With the character having the wrong personality the entire time.
And it was only at the end that I'm like, This is just wrong. And I
Threw the book away.
Wrote it again eight years later with a different personality and it worked.
But in order to have
The characters live and breathe.
And
feel like real people, I feel like I need to give them that volition, which is
Kind of.
destructive for
that all that narrative structure I've come up with.
But
That's good because having that structure
And then saying, All right, now that I know what this person would do, how does that influence
how they would actually approach.
this structure and I'll go and I'll change that.
And knowing about, you know, promise progress payoff, which I couldn't have named.
For you back in two thousand and four.
When I was writing this born, but
I I kind of understood intrinsically. I could tweak
to the character personalities as I went.
So that I was making sure that these things were
threading the needle, so to speak, where you've got this character. You need them to go through this plot.
But you need to make sure they feel like they're a real person, so you can't
Hold them to any one point, but
Uh you can make it come together, hopefully. So I wanna come back to Stormlight for a second because this it struck me that
You have the ability
to put things on the back burner or
scrap and effectively start from scratch, restart something.
Yeah.
that you've put a lot of some cost into. Mm-hmm.
And that is hard for most people. So I'm wondering, say, in the case of

That you
really conclude at three hundred thousand words or so it's not working the way I want it to work. What is the
Inner monologue.
that you have to get to the point where you're like
Park it.
Particularly, uh I mean, we don't need to get maybe into this aspect of it. When you have external pressures, maybe you've applied pressure to yourself, you maybe have deadlines in mind.
How do you get to
that point. Like what is your internal process for that?
You know, it's happened to me three major times.
Where I've done it. And
Um of those only one did I ever come back to.
Two of them I parked and have laid fallow.
One important mindset is kind of a ground rule is
Remembering
As a writer.
That
The
Piece of art is not necessarily just the story you're creating.
That you are the piece of art.
The time you spend writing is
is improving you as a writer.
And that is the most important thing.
The book is
Almost a side product.
Not really.
But it almost is to the fact that you are becoming you are the art.
And if you know that
It helps a lot. One of the things that pros do.
That
Amateurs have trouble with in writing.
Is prose throw away chapters a lot.
In my experience, you write it.
And
You get done with the chapter and you're like
That just did not work.
I'm gonna toss that and start over the next day.
Amateurs have a lot of trouble with this, in my experience.
There's a lot of causes of writers' block, but one of the main ones
I'm convinced is that
You're writing the chapter wrong.
You have enough instincts as a writer because you've practiced long enough to know you should throw it away.
But you don't want to because you did the work.
But your instincts won't let you continue doing it wrong.
And you're not willing to to toss it and try over.
Um
And
So there is that.
What happens with a whole book?
Yeah, done with the whole book and a one of a couple of things happened.
With all with two of the three of these books, I get done and I'm like
That
Just
Doesn't
Give me the shine, the feel, the feel of excitement that I want this book to have.
There's something fundamentally wrong with it.
And I am sometimes not even sure what it is.
For a while.
When I put aside the Way of Kings, uh the two thousand two version, we call it Way of Kings Prime.
I put it aside and said I don't know why this went wrong.
It was actually two things. It wasn't just having Caladin have the wrong personality.
Uh it was that I
I went into this book wanting to write a giant epic.
While reading um
The wheel of time.
which was uh one of my favorite book series at the time is before I had uh taken it over.
Ah, this was five years before I would get that call.
Which is a wild story. Yeah, it is a wild story.
Game of Thrones was huge.
uh at the time and I've been studying Game of Thrones and I'm like, I wanna write something
Like this. And so I started
With a huge cast.
Up front.
not recognizing the both of those examples I gave started with
A cast who is relatively small.
That over the course of several books grew into this complex.
Web of
different characters having different relationships. And it had this nice onboarding. And so what I did is I wrote a book that was the beginnings of like ten characters stories and didn't get through any of them.
It was too all over the place. And the other was I have the wrong personality.
Something feels wrong and as an artist.
I just say I don't know what this is yet. I put it aside.
Once in a while happens during uh alpha and beta reads, I'm getting the wrong response.
People are reading this book.
And they're
They're thinking something completely opposite.
From what I wanted them to. The parts that I wanted them to enjoy they're bored by.
Or the character I wanted them to click with.
they're just annoyed by and aren't interested in.
Uh and you realize something is just wrong. Something is fundamentally wrong with this story.
And
I don't want to release it till I know what that is.
Sometimes you might figure that out.
And be able to fix it.
Sometimes you might look at that and be like
You know what, I don't mind if people have this response. This is the piece of art, and this piece of art is going to have this response from some percentage of the audience.
That's
Maybe not a selling point, but it is
Part of the art.
But with those three books
I put them aside. And with Way of Kings I eventually figured out what it was.
And I tried it again.
The other two I haven't gotten there yet.

So let's
Let's come back to habits.
And your schedule for writing.
Do you still have two primary blocks of writing?
And
Could you explain what your
Your current
Schedule tends to look like.
So I find that for what I do.
And where my personal psychology is.
An eight hour block.
is not sustainable.
For writing.
This means I can do it for a week or two.
at eight hours, but it's gonna brain drain me. It's gonna exhaust me. I get done with eight hours.
And I am
Mentally worn out.
I find that if I do two four hour blocks instead.
I never quite get there, and it's more sustainable.
And so what I do is I will
Get up.
I get up late.
I get up at around noon or one.
And
I will go to the gym.
Which is
You know, different from me than other people, the gym is writing time for me.
Um, I'm not hitting it super hard.
I am there to think through what I'm doing. Some motion moving your body. Number one, it's good for you, but that's a side effect for me too.
I can put on music and I can move and I can think about what I'm gonna write.
Then I go and I work from two until six these days is usually what I do.
One until five.
Something like that.
And then I'm done.
Um, I go, I shower, six thirty, I'm ready to hang with my family.
And I'll be with family from six until six thirty to ten thirty.
Um
Go out with my wife.
Hang with my kids.
Build some Legos, play some video games, whatever it is.
I learned early in my career.
One of the most important things I ever did.
was take that time and
Demarcated is non writing.
I found early in my marriage.
That
Writing it will consume every moment.
Possible.
And I was always anxious.
To get back to the story.
And as soon as I
changed my brain and said, No, no, no, no.
Even if your wife is away.
Six thirty to ten thirty can't be writing time.
It is off limits.
You have to do something else.
Suddenly
it was a lot easier for me to be there for my family. And I think
I mean y you you've interviewed a lot of highly productive
Highly successful people.
I think
A lot of them are gonna talk about the same thing that it's very hard to be there with people when you're there with people.
Mm-hmm.
Sure.
Your brain is always working on the next big thing. Yeah. This is particularly true with people who work on big creative projects. Yeah.
And that gave me this permission. It actually came
a moment my wife, um I went out to dinner with some writer friends.
And afterward I'm like, That was such a great dinner and she's like
Yeah, but you didn't look at me once.
And I realized she had become invisible to me because the writing was consuming.
All so made that change.
Ten thirty.
Kids are supposed to go to bed. They're older now. They just don't. But sometime around there they
They drift off.
Uh, my wife goes to bed. Uh, she was a school teacher for many years, still kind of keeps school teachers
hours and she is wonderful for getting up with the kids.
I don't have to do that and never have.
Um, and I go back to work at about eleven. I write from eleven to three.
Uh and then
three to four or five is just
Whatever I want to do.
That's the real goof off time.
That's to go play with my magic cards time.
That's the
Play a video game, pop out the Steam Deck time.
And this
Schedule. You'll notice I don't have
To worry about
Demuting?
Which gives me an advantage here.
Uh has been really sustainable for me. So that's a home office predominantly where you're writing. I write for my home office. I I do like to move around.
I go in the gazebo. Lately I've gone in the gazebo when it's really cold and
I hire one of my kids to come
Put logs on a fire for me.
And I sit by the fireplace.
Sometimes I like to be on the beach, sometimes I like when I'm around here, I like to be in different places.
I can set up a hammock here or there. Um, sit with my laptop. I do not work at a desk.
That's really sustainable.
It's worked for me for the last twenty years.
It's incredible. I got all my best writing done really late at night.
When I was
Uh I mean still am writing and working on a new book, but uh when I was working on my first few books especially, it was always when everyone else is asleep.
Let's talk about
The non home environment.
We're sitting in a in a
Quite a large building, or at least a building with a lot of large rooms. Yes.
Why
Do you have
This company.
You why have why have you and your wife built this company?
All right because there are a lot of writers out there.
We just want to focus on writing.
They go the traditional publishing route, which I'm not saying it's
uh mutually exclusive choice.
But why do you have all this?
How long? How long do you want to go? Yeah, this is the big one. This is a long form
Podcast we have all the time we want.
All right.
So you're right.
Most writers
want to sell a book and live that kind of dream you see presented
In film and television.
Which is accurate.
to the top percentage of writers.
Most writers you f read about or see in film are the big ones. They're doing really well.
Uh, and so they're off in a cabin.
Telling their story or their the ones that have to be pried away.
From their easy chair to get them to even do any publicity whatsoever, right? They want to live that life.
Um, that is the classic life of a writer. And there's some of me.
That wants that.
But the secret is I was raised by an accountant and a businessman.
And
Particularly my mother, that accountant.
She instilled into me.
Some aspirations.
And I I I call this my superpower. My superpowers to be an artist raised by an accountant, right?
Uh and
I've always had a bit of that entrepreneurial sense. What were the aspirations?
The aspirations well they started s small
They started with
You know what? I want to be able to make a living from writing.
Got back from Korea.
And said, All right.
I am NOT
very good at this writing thing, but I really, really love it.
I could tell
Because when I spent time doing the writing
Time.
didn't matter anymore, right?
I could spend hours doing this. And it's the first thing I found other than reading.
or video games that I could spend hours doing and just come out of it feeling
Tired.
But fulfilled.
But I'm like, I want to do this.
So I sat down and I took what I'd learned.
both kind of from my mother and kind of
Uh missions have kind of a regimented structure.
And I said, I'm gonna apply this all to writing.
And I'm gonna I'm just gonna start writing books.
And I heard your first five books are generally terrible.
I said, Well I that's good. I don't have to be good yet.
Uh, it took a lot of pressure off me. I'm gonna I said I'm gonna write six.
And the first five I'm not gonna send out to any publishers.
Right.
Um right.
And that's bad advice for doing that, right? Yeah. Wow. You didn't even send them out. I didn't send them out.
It was just it was just weight training in the gym for your mind for the number six. Yep.
Um I didn't send them out. I did eventually I shared number five with some
Some people.
I got involved with the local
Science fiction magazine.
as an editor, I eventually took it over because that's what I do and I was head editor.
And I eventually said, Well, I do have a book and I started sharing book five with people.
Um right around.
Test readers.
I just wrote the books.
Um and again.
This is why the advice can be bad. There's some people out there that would be bad advice for.
Uh Pat Rawfus published his first book and it's brilliant. Um the wind. Yeah. Spectacular book. First novel. Now he did a ton of revisions on that. He spent as much time.
Revising that book as I spent writing mine, but
Formi the good advice was
Your first five books are terrible.
Don't stress.
And so weight training for my mind. I wrote five books.
Uh, and then I said just before you had an agent.
For I had an agent.
Before I had anything, before I even knew what an agent was. Before I'd taken Dave's class.
I took Dave's class.
The year that I finished launch, which is book number six.
I had just finished that one.
And so I said
All right.
Book six, that's the launcher. So that's the one I eventually ended up selling. Those five I'd written in different subgenres. I knew I'd like sci fi fantasy.
But uh the risk of being too nerdy, my sub genres, I did an epic fantasy.
I did a comedic
fantasy, a Terry Pratchett style
uh sort of thing. I did a cyberpunk.
I did a space opera and then I wrote a sequel to my epic fantasy to kind of j be like
Is this what I want to do?
What
characterizes an epic fantasy. So epic fantasy fantasy in short
Follows three main lines of descent.
One line
comes from what we call portal fantasies.
And your kind of line of descent of that.
starts in the modern era with Alice in Wonderland.
goes to Narnia and Harry Potter's one of the more example. This is kids from our world get sucked into a fantasy world.
and experiences usually uh young adult focused.
Uh, you can trace that all the way back to the old stories of the fairy tales people going to the woods.
And then come out of the woods. They go into the fantasy world, come out.
Right.
Uh the second line is what we call heroic fantasy.
Heroic fantasy's lines kind of really starts with the Greek epics and Beowulf, but in modern terms, you would recognize Conan.
Аз за проgenitor із хронік мен файти агін.
The monsters of the world
And taming them.
And you know, just kinda destroying them.
It's heroic man versus evil wizard.
A lot of the old serials for that.
And in modern terms are Grimdark uh kind of line, you you kind of look at Joe Abercrombie.
is kind of the modern version of that. So the blade itself would be the blade itself. Uh fantastic. Oh so fun. Also one of the
Best
voice actors I've ever heard of it. Joe is amazing. Um he's he's delightful.
Tangent, you want my Joe Admercarme story? Yes, please. Okay, tangent.
I am flying to Spain.
Right. And Joe is gonna meet me there'cause we're born con together.
It's called Celsius. I'm actually going back this year.
So I'm passing through Amsterdam.
And I did a thing back then, maybe we'll talk about I don't know. I signed my books in airports.
I would see a book of mine in an airport bookstore, I would sign it and I would post on Twitter.
And I'd say, I signed my book.
First one gets there, gets to get the book.
Right. This was a thing of mine. My fans loved it.
Uh, I don't travel that way as much anymore, and there's fewer airport bookstores. They've all died off. So I don't really do it anymore, but for a while
I did that.
They named it brandalizing. Um yeah. And I did this thing in the airport.
I left my book, I took a picture of it in the spot.
And I'm getting in the line to get on the plane, right?
And I get it.
Tweet.
And it's from Joe and he says, Sanderson
My book's next year's and you didn't sign it?
And I I should
I can't.
Well it's not my book. He's like
Sign my book, Sanderson
And all caps, exclamation exclamation and point. And so I have to leave the line. They're calling the line.
Run to the bookstore, sign Joe Abercrami's book, take a picture of it.
Post it and say, Your book is signed by me. And then I did make my flight, but I almost missed my flight signing Joe's book.
So someone out there went and bought Joe's book signed by me. How long uh had you known each other at that point? Uh we had met at conventions.
and been on panels together and Joe is a riot.
Like if you get a chance
If he's anywhere
You can go see him.
Joe has this magic to turn any panel into a a joyable panel.
No matter who's on it with him.
And so
Like I won't say that I'm best buds with Joe. I don't know Joe really well, but professional colleagues
And I love being on a panel with him. He makes me look
intelligent and and funny, uh, which I love.
So we've got
Coral fantasy, we've got heroic fantasy, right?
Michael Moorcock, all of that stuff.
Then we have epic fantasy.
An epic fantasy is termed by completely different fantasy world.
The other two are generally have roots in our world. Portal, you start in our world, and heroic tends to be
Kind of our world.
The modern ones aren't, but you know, Conan takes place in the prehistory of our world and things like that.
Epic fantasy
really starts with Tolkien.
You can say that some of the heroic epics had a big part in this too, right? Gilgamesh even and stuff like that. But this idea of
Epic fantasy is the movement of worlds. The world is at stake. Secondary world is what we call it. It's it's very removed from our planet. All new rules, all new world, all new magic.
And it's this idea they're they're the big thick ones.
They're kind of like historical epics.
But in a different
In a different world.
Um so that's the their similarity and
You know, Game of Thrones is this.
Though Game of Thrones borrows a little from heroic. That's kind of his secret sauce is he's
He takes heroic
characters and sticks them in epic fantasy plot. And then they just start getting killed off because they they're living in a much more brutal version of an epic fantasy world than most of them.
Epic is me and Robert Jordan and things like that. That's epic fantasy.
Um, it's just stakes of the world. Got it. And I took us off track a little bit because the question was, why are we sitting in this huge yeah office? Yeah. And then you're like, Well, it's backtrack. Yeah. Right. Artist raised by an accountant.
And then
We came through and you're like number six. Number six. That was go time.
That was go time. Right, uh right a launchers.
And
At that point
My goal was only
I'm gonna try to conquer this and become a professional writer. If I can earn a living
Doing this.
I will have been successful.
But then I did. I s actually it took me a few more years.
I wrote thirteen novels before I sold one.
Uh I sold number six.
after I'd finis number thirteen, which was Way of King's Prime.
We can talk about there's kind of a
Dark Moment of the Soul happens before that, where I'm at book number twelve and I'm like
What am I doing? Twelve bucks and no one's buying'em? Maybe I'm maybe I'm really bad at this, but anyway.
When did you start you started trying to sell them at which book? About book six.
Right around and I hit perfectly at Dave's class.
About when I was working on book sex, I started sending out query letters and things like that on some of the earlier ones.
and started collecting my rejection letters and things like that.
And then I m took Dave's class and I started flying out to these conventions.
And trying to meet editors in person.
And just kinda hearing from their mouths what they want.
what they're buying, what they're interested in.
And trying to target my books at them.
By that point
That I was doing that I had eight or nine.
And six, seven, and eight were pretty good books.
Any one of those three probably could have broken me out. I didn't ever publish seven or eight.
Uh I just published six.
Then I sell a book.
And
I realized well now the job is to make this a career because I sold my book.
For a grand total of ten thousand dollars.
That was broken across
Three years. So I made five thousand dollars and then
Twenty five hundred and then twenty five hundred.
So you can imagine that's a
It's not not meager some. Meager sum. I fortunately was uh married to someone who was making very sweet
great income as a public school teacher.
She was the sugar mama. We were living on her twenty two thousand a year as a public school teacher.
But um she supported me.
While I was doing that and uh breaking in with those books. We did meet after I'd at least sold one, so I was
I at least had something to say, look, it's real. Uh it made us five thousand dollars this year, but or made me. We weren't married then, but you know what I mean.
And so yeah, first year of marriage I made twenty five hundred dollars. That was what I grand total I contributed.
But
At that point, your job is to get stable.
And the danger point after you like there's two danger points. One is never selling a book, but the number two danger point is your second book.
We talked a little bit about this second book.
is like do or die time.
And uh I can talk all about like I it was pretty big do or die for me.
Uh but then
It stabilized.
Then things started to work. I hit the bestseller list and then Wheel of Time. That was with the first or the second book. Oh, it was my fourth that hit or yeah, my fourth that hit the best seller. Yeah, it was uh Mistborn Three was my first one. Very low on. It was either Mistborn Three, it might have been been Warbreaker, but it's four or five hit like
The times list went to thirty five then and I hit like number thirty five.
Right. Still counts. Still counts. Still counts. It was for two thousand copies in a week.
Doesn't sound like very much to be a bestseller, but
I hit that best sell list, then the wheel of time happened.
And my entire life changed. And I'm sure we'll get to that.
But
About twenty four.
twelve tw through twenty fourteen.
I started to realize some things.
Somewhere in there, I can't remember the exact date, you can look it up.
Amazon turned off the ability to buy all McMillan books.
For my publishers to subsidiary of Make Million.
Uh this is because of their contract disputes.
Amazon wanted to pricey books cheaper to sell Kindles. They wanted the li lost lead
In order to to control the market.
Which was very smart on their end, but the publishers were panicking about driving uh book prices to the basement because
You know, if Amazon sells them for a dollar.
You know, and the point
Amazon is selling for a dollar and paying us on those books like eight dollars.
And they're like, What's the problem? We sell'em for a dollar, you g you still make your eight dollars and
The publisher's like, Yeah, but people are gonna expect books to be a dollar and when you control the market
You're gonna say, Well
We're not paying you eight dollars on these books anymore. We're gonna pay you the seventy cents that you would get off of a one dollar book. And so whole panic.
Big contract disputes.
Amazon is working very hard to become
you know, dominant in this market and the publishers are fighting them and Amazon turns off the ability to buy my books.
And this was a wake up call to me.
Because
Yeah
Told me that
The system was no longer what it had been.
All the way through the course of publishing history. All the way through publishing history, your audience, your buyers were the bookstores.
Really.
core were the bookstores. If you convince the bookstores to shelve your books
Then people went to the book stores.
And the more books you had on the shelf, the more you sold.
Old publishing adage that Tom Dougherty, founder of Tor, very smart man would say is like
I want to have ten books on the shelf, even if only one of them sells.
Because eventually
Nine of them are gonna sell.
ten of a copy because everyone will go in and say, This must be an important book.
They have ten copies of it here.
The best advertisement for a book is having the as many on the shelf. And so your fight was to get the bookstores to carry your book. It was real estate.
Yep.
That was no longer the case.
Your audience, your market was not the bookstores, it was only Amazon.
Amazon controlled everything.
By then they had Audible.
Uh, and Audible has become the growth segment of the the market.
They controlled ebooks and they were coming to control print books.
And
Having one person be able to turn off my books was a big deal to me.
I it happened previously with the Alcatraz books where borders decided not to carry one of them.
But Barnes Noble did. And so it was still the book succeeded and eventually Borders came around and decided to carry it.
There's only one person.
They control your entire career. And I said, I
Cannot be subject.
And that's when the big entrepreneurial part of my brain said, All right.
Let's change. I went to the publishers.
I said
There are certain things I think we should be doing.
And publishing blessed their hearts.
They're still trapped in a lot of ways in the nineteen hundreds.
Um, maybe the eighteen hundreds.
They do not change very quickly.
And
I looked at other markets.
And I said, What uh what is music doing? What is movies doing?
Ah, what were music and movies? What were my friends who were independent comic publishers?
doing. You know Howard Taylor, who is on Right Excuses with me. I'm like
What's he doing? He gives it away for free. If Amazon decides that my books are essentially free.
How do I make a living?
How's he making a living? He gives it away for free and he
Still makes a living.
And I started to see some trends.
And they involved
having a variety of product prices.
One was having something really high end.
that the super fans could buy to display to show off, whether that be the vinyl
What that be the equivalent of going to a concert?
And buying merch there.
Whether it be, you know, buying the the book online that is free, but you want to have a copy.
To show off.
All the way down.
the really cheap product and in a lot of ways if you have the really expensive thing
That subsidizes.
the really cheap product so that everybody can get the books.
Everyone served better.
By a variety of offerings. Different pricing tiers. Different pricing tiers, letting people buy in.
And I realized that's the same.
If you if you people are buying into the expensive one, you can go lower on the cheap one.
And the people who can't afford this or don't want it are happy. The people who want this are happy. Everyone is more happy.
And I went to the publisher, I'm like we should be
Upselling to merchandise.
Lord of the Rings released these cool
uh DVDs that came with bookends, Dolum bookends.
Right. Said we should be doing things like that for big books.
We should be bundling ebook and audio book.
With a hard cover.
We should be selling
Leather bounce.
uh really high end nice ones, but we shouldn't be charging what you're charging. They were charging two fifty for the lever bounds. I'm like
That's a too high a price point. We should be doing a hundred dollar
Price point.
And the publisher said to me
We can't do this.
And they had some good reasons.
I I think they're not insurmountable, but they're reasons where look, the bookstores can't
carry the special editions.
We just can't
figure out how to make them work. The bookstores can't sell merch.
We the bookstores can't sell the leather bounce.
Because
We can't you know, we printed two hundred and fifty copies of the wheel of time leather bounds.
And
We had so much trouble selling them because fans didn't know where to get them.
Uh the bookstores didn't want to carry something that expensive.
That they weren't sure if they were gonna sell. It was just all a big mess.
And after a few years of this I had
numerous phone call with um the CEO of McMillan.
Above
Even Tom Daugherty, like the head dude.
And I could not make any inroads, and that's when
Yeah, the voice of my mother whispered.
Well, Brandon.
I trained you better than that. Do it yourself.
And I said, Um, I just have to.
And so I got my team together.
They said
We are going to try to Amazon proof ourselves.
Uh, that means we are going to direct sale.
We are going to start building our own direct
to our consumer. And I started with the leather bounce.
My decision was this was something the market wanted. I kept hearing from fans they wanted them. I heard from the publisher they can't sell them.
So I went to the publisher and said
Can you give me a
those rights back. And he's like, Sure.
They're just free. We can't do anything with them. Maybe you can.
And that's again to their credit, right?
The the publishers are
Guessing in retrospect. In retrospect, um they they may but they couldn't have done it. They couldn't have done it because it had to be direct to consumer.
Part of the reason.
Is like the
The fans running out.
to buy the special edition of the bookstore is just that it's a bad methodology.
So I said to my team, we're gonna build these, we're gonna do leather bounds.
They sold two hundred and fifty copies.
I wanna sell ten thousand.
Right. Well, we started five. I wanna sell five thousand. We ended up selling fifty thousand.
Right. Now is that of multiple books or
Wow. Right. Fifty hard bound. Yeah. Okay. Uh leatherbound. Leatherbound. Leatherbound's at a hundred to two hundred and fifty.
Nowadays our initial print runs are fifty thousand.
Back then it was ten thousand and then five thousand more and then five thousand more and then things like that, right?
Uh they will everyone we get in stock will sell.
Um everyone's signed.
that is in stock will just instantly sell.
And so
There's obviously a very big market. In fact, such a big market.
I cannot physically
produce enough of them to sell.
the signed ones. We have the unsigned ones that people still buy.
But the sign ones go instantly.
Quality problem to have.
Yeah, it is a it's a quality problem to have.
Uh it means that my my time suddenly got
А верий стрін
monetary constraint on it.
uh which is
Something that
I try to pay attention to, but not too much. I don't know if you've had this, but do you ever try to put a dollar amount on your time? And is that just madness for you?
It is madness. I did that for a very long time. I think it is helpful in
some of the maybe earlier intermediate entrepreneurial stages so that you don't find yourself if you are like me a perfectionist.
micromanaging or doing too much yourself. Yeah.
However, there is a point where I think it just makes you miserable because you end up placing so high a per hour value on your time.
that every squandered minute is like having a pound of flesh taken.
And you can drive yourself insane.
Yeah, I I wind in that
Because
If I sign my name.
That's two hundred and fifty dollars.
'Cause a'cause a leather mount. But I don't want to spend my life signing my name. I wanna write the books. And
But the most money I can earn per hour.
I can sign a thousand of those in an hour and that's two hundred and fifty each. Which is just an unreal if you think about that, that's like
Yeah.
That's bananas. That that is bananas. Uh my normal writing time I can put a different dollar amount. Depends on what I'm writing. It's Did you ever get holding?
Because it happen it's it happened to me with with speaking engagements, different things. Yeah. But
Did you get pulled away from the creative work or the actual wordsmithing at any point? Or were you able to hold the line? So I was able to hold the line, but barely.
At one point I started to get popular enough that people wanted me in on the speaking.

And so we put a dollar amount on it. I'm like, Well
At that point a day of writing and it take me two days, a day of writing's twenty five grand.
Uh, so two days.
fifty grand. And we put it up there instantly.
Like
Ten inquiries.
And I'm like
I don't wanna do that. Now what. Now what? I just said you know what? No, we were wrong.
Uh and part of that is because I don't f feel like I'm fifty thousand dollars worth of speaking.
Right.
They're a really good
motivational speakers that are maybe worth that.
I don't think I am.
My time is worth that.
They would probably disagree. They're like
Whatever this we have this money set aside for speakers, what speakers cost. But
The other thing is
That's what my writing time was and I love writing.
And if I'm gonna spend two days writing, I wanna spend it writing.
And nowadays
Like it would be ridiculous for me to go do one of these things.
It would cost like
Four hundred grand?
It'd be even worse.
And so I did have to stop thinking about the hour.
Whatever but it is a helpful metric.
For where you spend your time.
Put your time where your
happy and excited, but also if you can choose among different things you're having side.
You can you can do that. So anyway.
That's n beside the point. I gave this challenge to my team.
And
It worked.
Right.
We started to do all the things that the publishers weren't doing.
And then that's when I said, All right, now we're going to actually
Build a team and grow.
Uh, and we moved to doing crowdfunding.
It's really a lot better. We did pre orders on the initial ones, we moved to crowdfunding.
And that's when we went
My team all through the teens was maybe ten people. Probably didn't even quite get there.
And who who were those people? What was the kind of org chart at the time?
So me and Emily
So Emily runs the business and I run the creative.
Right.
So she does HR, she does accounting.
Um, she does
Operations is what we call it, and all of that stuff.
And it's operations, sort of the logistics of manufacturing and shipping. Yes. Everything? It's manufacturing shipping. It's H R, it's
Facilities.
Basically
She's over that. So if if you look at my org chart.
Emily and I are at the top and I am over what we call creative development.
Which
Early on was one person. All these were one p person.
Creative development and publicity.
are kind of under me. And what did creative development do at that time? That's our art team. Okay, got it. So that was that was art
Art. So art and then editorial and publicity were me.
And then merchandising events and facilities were her.
And so we started.
Two thousand seven I hired my first employee.
I broke out in two thousand five.
Two thousand seven I hire
An assistant editor whose job is to do
Executive assistant and editorial work for me.
Well very soon. Oh wait, you're actually our first. Becky's like you w that wasn't he was our first like
Full time in play. Our first one, we hire Becky.
To do shipping.
So actually our first employee is shipping.
You're gonna love this.
My second book, we had they have remainders.
You know what remainders are. You should explain for the people listening, though.
Boy, we're on a tangent to a tangent. I love this. Um You're pretty good I'm impressed with your ability to reel it in though.
What you haven't done, which happens to me all the time, is someone will say, What were we talking about? What was your question again? You're very good at the case.
Publishing, like Tom Doherty said, he wants ten books on the shelf, and you really want to sell seven of those.
Seven to eight.
If you sell everyone
That means you didn't put enough on the shelf. Someone walked into that store and couldn't buy a book.
If you sell
Two.
You actually printed way too many. Tom would still want them for publicity reasons, but
industry kind of
Common sense says.
You wanna have remainders somewhere around. Remainders are
left over at the end of a print run. You want to have around twenty percent.
Anything between thirty
Ta ten percent is fine. Forty percent starts to look sketchy.
And less than ten percent is bad also. So
You end up getting
Thousands of books shipped back.
Right.
Alantris, they printed ten thousand and they had remainders on Elantris.
Or not launchers, misborn. Launchers they didn't have remainers. They didn't print enough of them.
Mistborn they did.
They actually overprint a little bit. So they had
Too many remainders. They said, Brandon, you can have these.
It's a dollar apiece. I'm like
Entrepreneur, what does my mom say? You buy those books at a dollar and you sign them and you sell them at cover price.
And you use that to supplement your income, right? You're making two thousand
Five hundred dollars a year. You need to supplement that somehow. So I bought them all.
Okay, so this was yeah, this is going back early.
Bottom all
Put them in our garage, couldn't park our car anymore. Yeah.
Then we hired Becky.
Uh, who's my sister in law.

Take the orders, we'll put'em up on my website sign.
And you know, it's a trickle, ten a week, or even
even that many. But she was shipping that. So first person is shipping. Second person is editorial.
Executive system editorial.
Soon there's enough editorial work for him that I need another assistant.
So then we hire merchandising.
personal.
What is the merch?
So the merch at that point was uh was looking at doing t shirts and um stickers.
And take over the shipping from Becky.
To have like a full in house thing. So that's when
We let Becky go, so she was our first employee. I'm nodding, she's over here in the corner. She eventually uh got hired again. She'll she'll come back into the story.
Um, but then we have like a full time person who is shipping and to come up with merchandising. And then I hire
Her husband, we hired them as team.
Um for twenty hours each a week.
as one forty hour employee. He was an artist. He'd done all my art for Eltras or
Miss Corner seek saying the letters.
for Missborn and she was
Uh, she is the person we had been offloading our merchandise to so far.
that it started doing it. We're like, we're bringing this in house.
So posters.
Art prints, all that stuff.
Then our next employee is uh right around the same time is publicity and marketing all together.
That's uh Adam whom you've met.
So then we have our our our structure all set, right?
We have
For me, I have an editorial.
Person.
I have a creative element, which
Art person.
And I have a publicity person.
And then Emily has
A person for shipping and for merchandise together.
And then she hired a facilities person to kind of
our little office at the time to clean it up.
to make sure people need to change light bulbs and things like that.
And then she handled herself.
All of the HR and things like that.
And that's where we began, and that's what we were.
For like
Ten years.
Until the first kick starter.
Where things exploded.
And slowly we've been adding people.
To shipping.
And we've been shipping out of the house next door that we bought.
Um
And that's when we said, All right, it's time to level up. And I said, Everyone's gonna build a department and I want a full team.
For each one because we're
We're gonna go somewhere.
with this now that I have this team. Yeah, just to give people a visual so when uh
And I got my amazing tour earlier.
I remember walking into the warehouse and I was like, I feel like I'm at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. This is a gigantic space.
Levels upon levels upon levels and
Pallets upon pallets upon pallets.
It it is it is really
uh jaw dropping to walk into that space. Now you mentioned you mentioned Kickstarter. I know we're gonna be jumping ahead a little bit.
And I'm gonna wanna come back to Warbreaker and all sorts of other things. But since you already mentioned
Kickstarter. I recall very distinctly when your launch video was sent to me.
Did you ever heard you could listen to Race users, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I got this video and I was like, Oh, this should be fun to watch. So for people who don't have any context, uh
This is the big one.
Yes. The the big one.
Yeah, how do you want to set that up? Because it's just it's it's so mind boggling. I don't even know which angle to take on it.
I have a couple of big level up moments in my life.
Yeah.
Uh the first one is when I pitched Mistborn.
Going from a launtress to Mistborn, where I say I'm not doing sequel to launch, I'm doing this whole new thing.
And I've got big aspirations.
The next one's in the wheel of time hit me.
The next one's when we started doing our Love the Bounds and the most recent one is our Kickstarter.
Now I say our Kickstarter'cause it's the famous one. We'd actually done one before.
That hit seven million. That was for the Way of Kings leatherbound.
We moved our leather bounds from
So we did Elantris and and the Mistborn books and Warbreaker just as pre orders.
During the twenty teens.
And then
Uh coming to the twenty twenties,
We said all right, we're moving to Kickstarter. This happened actually because of my friend Howard Taylor.
It was uh
He was one of my models where he's the guy who did a webcomic.
Comic book that he sold the print editions.
In order to subsidize the free thing online.
And he came to me, he said, Brandon
You should be doing
Crowdfunding.
I'm like, we have a nice pre order system. He's like, no, crowdfunding hits
Publicity in a different way, and I realized he's right.
I should have been doing these. One of the problems with the pre orders is we never knew how many to order.
Right.
And with a Kickstarter, you get all those orders come in and you have to pay a chunk to Kickstarter.
But they have a nice backend structure.
Uh, we investigated that and uh Kara, my person who's in charge of fulfillment, is like this would be so much easier.
than what we're doing because you can mail merge all these things and they keep all of this track of all of the stuff with the shipping and the prices and it's just
makes it so much easier.
Then there's the publicity side where
It's
You can start adding all of these add ons and things and so
We tried one out.
With the Way of King's Lather Man, it was successful, seven million dollars, which is pretty good.
And then COVID hit.
Okay. So before we get to COVID hits. Now before we get to that.
What did you guys learn? What were the key lessons learned with that first
Prototype run. Let's just say first prototype run.
So there's a couple of things. Number one, um, there's a whole lot of organization that goes into
shipping out fifty thousand books at once instead of fifty thousand books across 10 years. Yeah. Right. Because a lot of folks who do Kickstarter
Yeah. If they're successful, get the hug of death.
Exactly. And they implode.
Yep, they implode because managing and shipping
And keeping everyone happy. When you do a
What we were doing, where we're sending out a few thousand
you know, every every month or things like that.
People are get their books in a timely way, and a kick starter.
Suddenly you have figure out how to send 50,000 books and keep everyone updated on it, right? And you have to figure out how to get merchandise.
And books ship together.
Or in separate packages. That's a really big one because
What we found with our books is
We could
Drop ship the books st direct from the printer.
But
Not
The merchandise which comes in on different
Boats from around the world.
'Cause you're printing them all in different places.
And so we had to figure out how are we doing all the shipping, the logistics.
do kill a lot of people.
And we were able to build that. So that's all behind the scenes stuff. That's a lesson.
Having your logistics in place, knowing how you're gonna fit fill
If you are successful.
Is a very big deal. Knowing that you can already produce these things.
At scale.
Have them arrive.
Like
lot of people who do Kickstarters don't understand.
Like
The the sheer fact of these big trucks coming in.

Go to certain places.
And
They can only offload in certain ways. And some of them have need a high dock, and some of them will have a ramp.
And you have to find out like where can they deposit these things. If you don't have a warehouse with a high dock, you better then know that the trucks are coming in with a ramp.
And you know, a palate jack. Otherwise they're gonna arrive and be like all right.
Move these and you're like
What do we do?
Uh, we actually had one of those where they'd all had ramps before and then run r arrived without and they're like
All right, how you getting this?
Out.
Uh, and we had to have like a bunch of people go
into the back of the book and move them off of the pallets by box.
So this is these are all lessons learned. So there's all these logistical things. Uh the second thing we learned.
was that
It was true. A crowdfunding campaign where you bring
All of the mightier fan base together for one event.
Cuts through the noise.
There's a certain
principle I've started calling like
Escape velocity of attention.
Escape velocity of attention is
In today's media environment.
It's like people's attention.
Or
have a gravitational pull to what they've already been paying attention to.
And
They love the things that they love and getting
Anything else?
to achieve that escape velocity, to to go off and to to make a to make a splash, to in any idea to not just cut c crash and burn to get out into the universe and draw the attention of other people is just super difficult.
And most things.
Like sit on the planet and never get up into the universe where everyone can see it. They crash and burn. And it's like there's this layer.
keeping people's attention away from paying attention to this thing over here.
And in order to make any sort of noise, get any sort of attention outside of a very small group, you need a certain amount of attention being paid to it. So that you achieve this escape loss and you blast out and then
the rest of the planets pay attention to it, not just the one that is your little little planet of attention.
And
It's really hard.
Like launching new books for new authors today is much harder.
Uh, you might notice uh I've noticed there are fewer b people who break out now than used to.
More authors are earning a living now than used to.
But they're mi earning less.
Because there are fewer breakouts.
There are fewer movie stars.
Than there used to be.
There are fewer giant bands than there used to be. And this is all because
Our attention is there's so many things vying for it that we'd like put up this barrier and we don't wanna we don't wanna look up.
Um, and it's very natural.
And so
Having a Kickstarter.
It's that.
that momentum behind you starts to make noise. Executed properly. Executed properly.
And a lot of them flop, but actually you probably bringing all of your fan base together and making a lot of noise.
Suddenly more people pay attention to you.
And with our way of King's Kickstarter, it still only reached
Our audience.
Right.
Uh but
Even reaching your audience is really hard today.
Uh all of this.
Social media.
platforms that we have.
Learn to rely upon and use it found out.
That
People can't pay attention to everything. They will click too many names.
They will f wanna follow these names, but then
There'll be too much spam of all these names on their feeds.
And all of them use algorithms because number one, they need to monetize somehow.
And number two, people follow too many things and it overwhelms most people. So they come
And they bounce off of even their social media platforms. And so
And the
Early days of social media.
If someone followed you on Facebook and you did a post, it showed up on their feed automatically. No longer the case.
And that stopped in the twenty teens.
And so it depended on how many people like the thing.
So if you even want to reach your own audience, you have to
Have to have an escape velocity of attention, you have to break through these barriers.
Preventing even your fan base.
from seeing what's happening. I still get people
Who come to me like
Well, you did this big Kickstarter. I didn't even hear about this. We sold to only 10% of our audience with the big one that we're getting to, right?
Um That's insane. That's only ten percent. And that's
All that effort to get to ten percent.
And I would say the big kickstarter was
thirty to forty percent new people. So we really only reach five percent of my audience.
But regardless.
That it taught us that. Taught me about
skate velocity of attention, how to break through, get into the sky.
And start getting everyone's attention.
Maybe a little bit. Or at least get high enough that e your whole planet
that follows you more of them can see it. So I wanna give I wanna give people just a a bit of a
A carrot dangling on the end of a stick here. Yeah.
And then we're gonna go back to
Yeah.
Uh with the big campaign.
That we keep referring to.
What did that end up totaling?
So it was forty one point something million.
Official.
Forty five when you would do all the people like you have people that can add on extra stuff.
The behind the scenes was another four and a half or so. We ended right at 45 million. So if you go look at it right now, it's 41 point something.
Uh do you have it there? What is it? Forty one point. Uh I don't have actually the points. I just have roughly forty one. Roughly forty one million.
Um, and the previous highest kickstarter had been twenty one.
That's
Uh, and we still have the record. Oh wild.
Here's what's wild it's for books.
Right?
Every if you go look at that top ten, everything else is some cool tech innovation. Yeah.
And we have it for novels.
So
Covid hits.
Right?
Covid hits.
I have gone through cycles in my life multiple times where I say yes to too many things.
And then I'm traveling too much.
And twenty nineteen was one of those years.
As an author, you know this. People want you in person.
And
Traveling is fun. I enjoy seeing the world.
So you say yes to a bunch of things and then you end up as I did in twenty nineteen
With three different trips to Europe.
Europe can be kind of exhausting. Three tours in Europe, multiple tours around here, and I calculated I've been on the road
One third of my days.
Covid hits.
And I had twenty twenty was set for the same thing.
And all that gets cancelled.
No one can travel.
And suddenly I have
One third of my time back.
In the meantime.
I'd started to feel dissatisfied with something in my life.
When I was early in my career.
I could just have a random idea.
And I would shelve it until I was done with my current book. But I could have something that was really exciting to me and when I finished my current book.
I could go in and I could write that.
Cool idea.
War breaker that you mentioned was one of these, just a standalone book.
That I wrote, you know, Mistborn trilogy between the Mistborn trilogy
The wheel of time.
And Stormlight on either side. I have this just little standalone book that was a cool idea I had.
And I love that about fantasy. Some of my favorite fantasy novels.
Are standalone books.
Guy Gabriel K is very good at them.
Um
Uh, Lions of Al-Rasan or Taigana are too highly recommended. They're 90s fantasy, they're a little slower than modern fantasy. Uh really just single volume.
Really digging into one world but
Doesn't overstay its welcome.
And I
Hadn't been able to do that.
In a while I was I was writing series, all these series. Everything I wrote turned into a big series and I
I didn't have a place for these.
Wacky ideas.
And I started to hit my mid forties.
And I started to realize
I'm only really gonna be able to do this probably till my seventies.
If I'm lucky.
Right.
Most authors really slow down when they hit their seven.

Uh this is what
People who are fans of um of Game of Thrones have found.
Yeah, George was always a little on the slower side and then he hit
You know, retirement age.
And he slowed down, and a lot of authors that happen too.
And I started to calculate out and I'm like, I don't have room for any of these cool ideas.
That makes me sad.
But then suddenly I had a third of my time back.
And
I
Started watching movies with my kids. They were old enough that we could show them some of our favorite movies, and we showed them The Princess Bride.
Uh, one of my favorite movies and favorite books. Amazing. Yeah.
Amazing everything. It's wonderful, wonderful book, wonderful. Written by um by William Goldman, who's a great screenwriter.
He's written a lot of classics. Butchcasting a Sundance Kid was one of his and just
brilliant screenwriter who strip doctored a ton of your favorite movies as well as wrote s multiple on his own of your favorite movies.
Um and so
I was watching this movie and I love just the feel of it.
This sort of fantasy
Yeah.
Is fun, but doesn't quite take itself too seriously.
Uh and I we got done with that and my wife's like, I love that.
Uh moving.
She said.
Isn't it funny that the princess doesn't do anything?

In the movie The Princess Bright. She even she tries to hit a rat once and she misses. Right? Like that's the most she accomplishes.
That and marrying the bad guy.
Almost. Yeah. And she's like, wouldn't it be nice if she did something? Yes.
So
That's stuck in my brain. I'm like what if
The princess bride.
You know, Princess Bride starts with guy goes off to seek his fortune, says, Wait for me, I'm gonna go find my fortune and come back, and then we can get married and I'll have money. What if he went off and he got captured by pirates?
Mm-hmm.
What if
That story happened, but the princess said
Well
I guess I have to go find him now.
And went to find him, right?
No one's gonna go find him, well it's down to me. She has no experience with this, but she's like
I'm the only one. So she goes off. And that
I wrote a story.
that was more fairy talish. It's still in my cosmic universe, all my connected things. So it's told by
My story telling character.
Uh based a little bit off of some Shakespearean fool.
Vibes from like twelfth night and stuff like that.
Let me I'm just gonna sidebar because we might not get to it. Yeah. You have someone
Among e
within this company whose whose job
Sole job as I understand it is continuity. Yes. Right. And you have an internal wiki to keep track of
everything in this universe so that it interconnects and coheres
As good as I am with narrative.
I need all of this stuff still. So we have someone.
So
From his voice. This is the first time I'd done this, right? All my other books are in my voice. I said, What if a character told a story to someone else about this?
This young woman.
And it became the story Tress of the Emerald Sea.
That I wrote without
Any plans to publish it?
Without any contracts, without any expectations. I didn't tell the fans it was coming. I wrote it.
Just gave the chapters to my wife to read.
as I was writing it and it was liberating.
With no deadlines, no contract.
It just I wrote it because I had a little extra time.
And I thought that was amazing.
that's something I've been missing and covet give gave me this chance across those like

We cancel everything.
That I
Use that extra time.
I've fulfilled all of my contractual obligations writing books, but I also
Ended up writing four novels.
Mm-hmm.
that were just squeezed between and
I say, you know, these are each a hundred thousand words.
Right. So they're one Stormlight Archive book.
So it's about eighteen months of writing.
Time that I squeezed in there.
uh between different things.
And I
wrote these four books and I realized
Well
At about book three, I realized I had something.
Something.
That I could spring on people.
And Covid had been so miserable for so many people.
Uh it was delightful for me. I'm writing books, I'm watching movies with my kids, no one's asking me to go on tour anymore.
And so
In the midst of all this, I started to have a plan.
And I started to have an idea.
And I got that fourth one written and I wrote the fourth one deliberately for the Kickstarter. I've realized I wanted one that felt more like my classic novels.
So that fans who like Mist Warren
And Stormlight we get something.
Because one and number one and number three of that were told from my storyteller voice.
And then number two was something completely different. It's a science fiction novel unrelated to every
My other stuff. And so I wrote one kind of for the fans.
And then I sprung them on my
Company.
Said.
There's four books.
Out of nowhere.
Tell me what you think.
And I watched their reaction to finding four.
unexpected books in the excitement
They just move through the company.
And I said, All right.
I've got something.
I did it again with test audience.
Some of my s sworn to secrecy.
Uh early readers.
Do you use the same early readers typically? Um I have a pool of about a hundred of them.
And we
Don't use them all for every book. We just kinda
Kind of randomly decide.
And I said
Where I have Brandon has an extra book and we actually split like the hundred into drips of twenty five and sent them all four different books.
And they all talk.
Do you just say two groups of forty five? No, it did sorry, four groups of twenty five. Four groups of twenty five. Sorry. Yeah, yeah. I probably misspoke on that. No, no, no. I think I think I misheard it. Okay, four groups of twenty five. And they'll
talk on like discords and things and we sent them each a different book.
And then I watched the Discord as they all realized I had written four books in secret.
And
I
spun this into the video that you watched. I went to my team and I said, I want to do something.
And they were a little resistant because sometimes some of these big ideas that I have
I'm the big idea person and they
They can be really daunting.
Such as the we're gonna we're gonna
Do our own leather bounce. We're gonna
Yeah, start doing Kickstarters. I kinda
Have to my job is to we always talk, Emily and I, my job is to look
And pull people toward that star future. And her job is to say
Remember to be practical.
Remember to be practical. Can we actually accomplish this? What will it take to actually accomplish this?
And I went to them and I said, I want to do a video.
Where I pretend
that I'm coming out with some big scandal and I'm retiring from writing because I've secretly
You know, done something just horrible.
That happens periodically.
And it's probably
it maybe not be something really fun to make fun of, but you know, you have a lot of writers like
You know, I have to admit that I plagiarized or I have to admit that anyway, all those apology videos.
that people and I said, I'm gonna make a fake apology video.
And the reason being is everyone's gonna get gotten by it and they're gonna share it with their friends who'll get gotten by it. They'll just say, Hey, watch this. And then you'll be, Oh no, Sanderson, what's up with him? And we'll tap into that sort of horror mentality that watch a train wreck.
car wrecked people, you know, want to slow down. If they think something Brandon's gonna announce something terrible, and then I hit them
Instead
Of it being another terrible COVID thing, it was there's four surprise books. You get this delightful thing.
In your life instead.
And I knew this would go viral.
I just knew it would. They were scared of it.
Uh,'cause they're like this.
You know, sounds like you have like cancer or something, and that's not something to make fun of. And I I'm like, Yes, it is not. I agree.
But at the same time I knew it would work.
I
I'm a storyteller.
And that's a s video with a story. Sure. Right? Like I live for the reveal.
If people read my books, you will tell.
I live for that ending.
Where I've been distracting with something and then I pull out
That surprise. I love the the great twist. I love the really good complication that you're not expecting. I love when a story comes together right at the end.
And that video did it.
And it announced a Kickstarter for four secret books.
We did not expect.
To go to forty
One million dollars.
We were hoping to get to around seven to ten, like we'd done before.
But that escape velocity of attention, right?
I suddenly it's the first time in my life
Where suddenly
People are paying attention who are not
in my circle of influence, who don't read epic fantasy suddenly
New stories are everywhere.
Everyone's talking about it.
Um, I get interview by like, you know, legit news media.
And the closest I had ever gotten to that was the wheel of time way back when. And even then, no one really interviewed me. Yeah, which we'll come back to. I did appear on Colbert report.
That's a big one.
Well
My face appeared.
Does that count? I think that counts. So Steven Colbert
had a piece on Zeppelins.
'Cause he was in character, this is Colbert report about how much he hates zeppelins or whatever.
And he holds up because USA Today had done a thing.
On Zeppelins?
And he holds up a USA Today page.
And there's my little picture. Doofus takes over wheel of time is like the bottom story on the page below the fold. And there's this giant Zeppelin storm. And he holds it up and he points at Zeppelins and then there's me. I my face was on the Colbert report. It's pixelated. You can barely tell.
But you appeared. But I appeared. Yeah. As seen on. As seen on Steven Colbert. Brandon Sanderson. Uh my claim to thing. My fan fans all tweeted me. This is way back in like 2009. I was like two thousand seven. It was right when the wheel of time happened. So when you look at this record breaking
Success. This Kickstarter.
Were there aspects of it or packages?
That
just outperformed all expectations. Yeah, it was the the main tier.
The buy everything tier.
So we did it. Again, I like to have people be able to self select it.
And so there was a
Relatively inexpensive.
e book and audiobook bundle that you got together.
And
Yeah, I think it was fifteen dollars.
H.
For those. And so each book in the the audio
Ebook.
But combo is fifteen dollars. Yep.
Uh which
is about the price of an Audible credit.
Plus you get the ebook. We thought that was a the so for sixty bucks you got all four books.
on that and then the high end
We did
You get all four books in our nice editions. They're not leather bound, but they're like a
fifty five dollar price point. We sold them at forty on this.
Plus
A box every month.
of Brandon Sanderson swag.
I've just
Magical swag.
For how long? For a year. For a year. Yeah, I like the idea of subscription boxes.
But
I have a problem with them in that they
There was the big subscription box craze of the late teens.
Um and I feel like their incentive was misplaced. They wanted to keep you going as long as they could.
Because of that, they will stretch out the cool objects. They'll run out of steam.
And uh Adam actually in our company had pitched why don't we do a subscription box?
And I've always been hesitant because I feel like
you eventually end up with too much crap you don't want.
But I went to the team and I said, What if we did eight boxes?
Four books in eight boxes. So across a year you get a book every quarter.
And then you get
Two boxes of swag. And we just make that swag awesome. We put all of our best ideas into it. We make
Eight.
Really killer boxes and then we're done.
We don't
Ask people to subscribe for longer.
We just
You got your cool boxes of interesting stuff.
Ah, and that just went great.
Uh everything. So those were forty bucks each, I think, also. So it's the idea is that it's forty dollars a month.
For those months you get a book.
And then eight of those months you get a forty dollars uh box.
Um that has other cool stuff in it.
Uh and forty dollars was a high enough price point we could make some really quality, cool things.
Just under five hundred bucks. Yeah for that.
Yep, and that one, that tier.
was I believe our biggest tier. If it wasn't that one, it was the tier of just all the books in their high those those editions, those two.
were the ones that just went gangbusters.
Almost nobody bought.
The lower tiers.
Did that surprise you? Yeah.
That surprised me.
But again.
Everyone's happy. They all get to self select now at the way. How do you explain that?
Based on what you said earlier, which is that you only hit
five to ten percent of your audience and you had thirty to forty percent newbies.
Yeah. Going for the gold. I mean, that just strikes me as so unexpected. Yeah. Um, I think part of it is I would guess the majority of that thirty to forty percent were people who had heard of me.
And had not tried me yet.
Right. I wasn't grabbing people who'd never
You know.
That didn't
ever read. But it was people who'd friends would say, Hey, Brandon Sanderson. And these four books were all starter books.
They're all meant.
Even the fourth one, which is kind of tied into things.
b to be books you could just pick up and read without knowing any of my other
Thanks. And to this day.
Trust of the Emerald Sea.
You wanna hear
Weird stuff. Another tangent. Love weird stuff. Tress of the Emerald Sea.
You would think I have plumbed
The depths of my audience, right, doing this Kickstarter. Forty five million dollars.
Shipped out a hundred and fifty thousand copies.
of that book.
Right.
With the uh with the Kickstarter and all said and done.
That is my best selling book.
Through an edition but from the publisher.
After Mistborn and Stormlight Archive.
After the first books of those, not even the sequels, like after Mistborn One and S uh and Stormlight One.
Trust the MLC.
That book sells as much. It's really comparable. There are the weeks where it kind of beats them.
So
This book that you would think we'd sold to everybody.
The publisher releases an edition, expecting, well, there's not much, but we'll have it on the shelves, becomes their third best selling Sanderson book.
How do you how do you explain that?
It's because
It's that escape velocity of attention.
People hear about you, they want to try you out.
but they don't know where to start or there's so many things and something cuts through. People can say
Trust is a great place to start.
Uh book talk really likes stress.
It talks about and says, Great place to start on Sanderson.
A little bit more romantic, a little bit more whimsical. It fits with what a lot of people like on book talk.
So they buy it, even though
So
Um it it's really interesting. The starter books do sell the best.
Anyway, we're going back to
We release this thing and those are the ones like
People want
They've heard of me?
They say, Well, I'll try this thing and be they become part of something.
And so they all buy in, and then there's that thing we call it the Yaris Anderson, and we started shipping these boxes out. And people got their boxes and their books and
Uh it was it was wonderful. It was
The best year of my life, right? It's incredible. It's so incredible. So I have a question about the four times twenty five people, the test traders. Yeah. And this actually ties into some of the questions I want to ask about Warbreaker but
Let's focus on the test readers, the four groups twenty five.
When you have a new book. Mm-hmm.
Of any type.
Do you use
Twenty five to a hundred test readers? Yeah.
Okay.
How do you
absorb or evaluate that feedback.
Because that is
I could foresee that being a lot of feedback.
I um pay
My team.
My editorial team.
To condense it into the
most relevant information.
So this is a big difference between me and a lot of uh writers.
is I look at books a little bit like
Hollywood looks at movies with test audiences.
I want to know what my audience is gonna say about a book before I release it.
Sometimes it'll change.
What I write, often it will, sometimes it won't. I just wanna know.
I wanna understand how it's gonna perform, what people are gonna think of it.
And a lot of writers do this with a couple of early readers.
I find that doesn't give me an actual test audience. It doesn't give me the pulse.
of an audience. I need like twenty to thirty
If not.
Forty to fifty.
people reading it. Even that's just a tiny percentage of the audience. But it's been
Really key to me.
It started.
When I was in nobody before I sold, before I had an agent, before I had an editor, I actually sold to an editor before I got an agent. So I'm I'm reverse.
But back before I had any of that and I was
Uh head of that magazine.
Uh I started using those readers and passing out my books, and I would print off physical copies because it's the late nineties.
And I would
Have a pack of gel pens.
of different colors. And I'd say pick a color.
Write your name in that color so I know.
Who's writing the comment?
Read through the book and write.
Your feedback all in that color.
Go ahead and respond to what other people have written.
And they would pass around my friends
And they would all take a different color and you'd have these conversations on the margins.
About what people thought of certain scenes, and I saw that and I'm like, This is really handy.
Did you ask for particular types of feedback to focus it? So what I want is just
I don't want people to fix the book.
I want people to give their
Descriptive
responses to the book.
If you were just reading this
As a professionally published thing.
Where are the places you're bored? Where are the places you're confused?
Where are the places that you're standing up and sharing?
Where are the places?
They
Yeah.
Where are you engaged? Where are you not engaged?
Just
What are you enjoying?
Don't tell me what's wrong.
Don't tell me what to fix.
Tell me what where you're bored.
And tell me.
Where you're confused.
Tell me where you're excited.
And tell me where you're turning the pages so fast you have to come back and write your feedback because you don't want to stop to write your feedback.
Um, and that became really valuable to me.
And so when we moved beyond that and I was actually published
I started making spread sheets.
Where I'm like, you get the book.
Go on the spreadsheet.
And go to the chapters tab on the spreadsheet on like a Google sheet.
and go look and respond to what people are saying. And if you know, you just make a comment, say
I feel this about this chapter.
And then respond to what other people are saying.
And then each chapter fills up
with giant um conversations about that chapter, almost like you have a book club out there reading the book. And having people to respond to things'cause it helps you spot patterns. Someone's like, Yeah, I would start dragging here. I didn't really understand why this character did this. And then you have somebody like, Yeah, me too, me too. Yeah, exactly.
Uh or they'll say, No, no, no, it was this and the first one was like, Oh, that made sense. I went back and read it like
You'll see
Emerging
Where the problems are.
and where they aren't. And m nowadays what we let you let people do is they just add
a check mark next to it if they agree with it.
And if they disagree, have them write out. That's in a spreadsheet or you use it. Spread sheet. We use Google Sheets. And
Uh no, no, we started using an actual program.
Peter, edit who's head of editorial, was like we need an actual program that's a little
That's secure and that can track
Like people will write a line number.
where they have their comment now and stuff.
Uh so we actually use a program
But sometimes we still use Google Sheets for kind of what we call program and off the shelf program that that's one of my beta readers, uh, which is what we call these people, worked for the company.
And pitched it to us.
And the name of it's escaping me right now. I can find out what it is. We can figure it out. Yeah, we'll figure it out.
So part of the reason I'm asking is that yeah, yeah, I've been I started working on this book six, seven years ago. Is this your fantasy?
No, okay. No, this is a different book. This is an entire book on saying no.
And
Basically finding clarity in a world of noise. It's a really good book to write. And I started working on it. It's the first book I ever shelved. I was like, you know what?
I'm not quite ready to write this and I
canceled the contract, returned the biggest advance it ever received.
Now I'm working on it, but I've
Foyself just paying attention energetically to
What's energizing me or draining me.
The idea of serial release.
Yeah, very exactly big. Because I've never done it. I've never done it.
And
That raises a whole lot of questions, which is one of the reasons I want to talk about Warbreaker. Yeah. And releasing early drafts for free on the website with Creative Commons and Let's go to that and just saying, let me finish what I do with the beta reading. Yeah. Yeah.
I give all that to my team.
I go read the end of part summaries and the end of book summaries.
They take the rest.
They distill it and then they actually put it into a copy of the book, the manuscript.
Just interstitials.
They said this at this point. They said this at this point. So I never even have to go to the document.
Except to read like end of part one, what are people's general responses? And these are comments in a word doc or something like that. Comments in a word doc just uh in track changes.
Yeah.
Here's a big discussion that happened here. Here's the here's and they
They only take like ten to twenty percent of it and put it in.
Yeah.
What are the criteria?
for selection. If they're only taking ten, twenty percent.
It's Peter and Karen, and they know me really well.
Yeah. These are people that I've worked with since college. Yeah. Okay. And so it's over time and I will star and say this is a good comment. This is one that I you know, they and they
They handle editorial. They'll see what I revise.
And what I don't know.
And they'll know in the future.
Watch for this. And do remember, I'm going and looking at the end of part and reading all of people's general comments. So this is just for a given chapter, if there's a speed bump or something like that. But they they figured it out.
And then
Looking at at Warbreaker, why did you release it in the way that you released it? Maybe you just describe
how you want about it. So Warbreaker happened after I wrote the Mistborn trilogy and I was chatting with Cory Doctor.
Kind of.
Uh famous tech blogger.
and uh creative commons advocate.
Every interaction with Corey has been
Really positive.
Like super class act.
Uh I was once at the Hugo Awards and
This is you know like the Academy Awards in sci fi fantasy.
And
I was nominated and you get a little pin if you're nominated to wear around in your lapel. And I didn't know that. It was in my basket. I didn't know it was there. He saw I didn't have mine. I'm like, Oh, I don't have my pen. And he took off because he he had several. You wear any that you any nominations you've had.
During that night.
And so he took off one of his and he just pinned it on me.
Uh yeah, that's kinda class acquireous.
So I was talking to him and he
really believes
I am believed that
Attention is people's most valuable commodity.
Not their money.
their attention. If you can get their attention, you will eventually be able to
uh in some ways get money from that audience to support yourself. But he says start with the attention.
This is really smart.
Uh, he released all of his books in the creative commons and he's a big advocate for that.
I realized at the time I had Mistborn coming out and this was right when
wheel of time was being announced. It was way back when it's two thousand seven. So
Um I wrote a lot of the book, but there are parts I hadn't written. So
The idea was
I started releasing the chapters just on forums.
To let people give feedback.
to me trying an a serialized version of a book with the main goal being
See how an audience online gives feedback different from my beta readers.
But also
to have a chance to kind of bring my audience together into one place.
And then when it was done, I released the book under the creative commons.
Partially as an experiment.
How does this impact giving away the book for free? How does this impact the sales?
of the commercial edition.
I wanted data on that.
Um and the data says
doesn't really impact it.
Um, it sells just as well as the Launch does, even a little bit better, and Elontros wasn't released in the Creative Commons. So
Uh, it doesn't sell as well as
Stormlight or Misborn.
But those are my breakouts, you know, my stand up successes. And I don't think
You know.
that has anything to do with it. Have you released any books after that with Creative Commons? No. I'm planning I keep wanting to do another one.
Uh and I haven't found the right one to do.
Um, but I I am planning to do that at some point. How did you find the feedback?
online in the forums differed from beta testers. It was about the same.
It was. It really was. But remember, we've got an insular audience of super fans at that point. That's the only people paying attention to me in two thousand seven.
Um now it probably be different.
Uh, but I can get a little bit of that by watching
We do re release
one chapter a week or two chapters a week of new books.
leading up to launch to about a third of the book.
And I can go read the threads.
On
Reddit.
About that.
And they s they actually mirror the beta readers really closely. Amazing. It's really interesting. There are a few things. This newest book surprised me. Only one thing surprised me.
Um and that is in the newest book
People are responding to modernized language.
More than I expected them to.
What do you mean by that? Uh epic fantasy. You walk this line in epic fantasy.
Do you use okay?
Or do you use all right?
And I've been moving the Stormlight Archive
toward modern language across the course of the of the novels.
as we're preparing to kind of go a little bit more what we call mage punk, a little more modern.
for the next page. Yeah. Um it's not my term. It's just what people kind of call when s fantasy sci magic becomes technology.
So if you
watch any sort of uh film or thing where, you know, you have
Ships powered by a magical technology. They'll call that mage punk. Hextech and arcane. Hextech. Arcane is mage punk. That's the straight up uh subgenre of that. So I was taken by surprise on that. People are kind of responding against that.
And I think
There m this could just be like people want more sincerity.
in their media nowadays.
I think they're tired of media being cynical.
And this is a sign, maybe I I don't think it went cynical, but this is like a danger sign of that. So they're like
You know, they're like they would like me to pull back. They want me to call it courting instead of dating.
Uh right. And just kind of stay a little bit more with that fantasy feel.
That one took me by surprise. My beta readers didn't spot that.
Everything else in those threads were things my beta reader spotted.
that I either you know that I left because I felt this was
integral to the narrative I'm telling. If it's negative
It's all right for it to be negative. This is the piece of art, right?
Like
Some people don't like impressionists.
But you can't
make impressionism better by not being impressionists. Each piece of art is gonna have things like that.
Um quick question. When when you're releasing, say chapter by chapter
Yeah. Up to a third of a new book.
What is your cadence of releasing those chapters? Is it once per week? Once per week is what we've been doing.
I I could see value in twice a week.
Uh, but once a week
Everyone gets together.
The threads on Reddit are really cool. Where do you release those chapters? Uh we released them on Tor's website, Tor's publicity website. Uh right now it's called Reactor. It used to be Tor.com.
Um and
Uh, that's a good place for them.
Why not release them on your own site?
Um in some other way. So yeah, good question.
So there's arguments.
for that. The thing about it is we've found
Over time.
Personal websites are important, but they're much less important than
social media or aggregate websites in today's
Mind economy.
What do you mean by aggregate websites? So Tor's website is um a website that just has posts every day, things
Like
You know, shared blogs or
Places you go to that finding
A whole bunch of articles. Right, right, right.
Um, what we've found is like, for instance, people will come to me
to buy their print books, they will not come to me to buy their e books.
We had an ebook store. Maybe we'll put it back up.
And we might even have a few that we're selling now.
We sell in the tens of copies of my ebooks.
People like their platform. They want to have a Kindle and buy the books on their Kindle, which makes perfect sense.
They do not want to go somewhere else.
Buy an ebook and load it to the Kindle, even if it's cheaper somewhere else. Yep.
Who those who control the platform.
control the world. He who controls the spice, you know controls well here it's you control the platform. That's why Amazon did what it did. That's why Amazon worked so hard to make Kindle a thing.
even going so far as to pay out millions and millions of dollars in order to try to corner that market in
gain that mind share of going to Kindle.
Uh I don't mind tour.
trying to turn their website into that. It helps other authors.
fans get used to going there. Yeah. That's good.
Yeah. The tech world like the hacker news. Yeah. Yeah, stuff like that.
Um and we link to it on my website. It's not like it's not there.
Um, so I I don't have a big problem. We might have even double posted them on my website. Uh I can't remember, but normally we just do them on tour.
But you said something I want to ask you about. Sure.
Tell me if this is uh if this is tread a if we want to tread lightly or if this is
But you'd still take advances.
Well, so I took advances on my
Past books.
Profit share agreements. Uhhuh.
And actually when I was
Beginning to consider rebooting
you know, dusting off and rebooting that book that I'd had on the on the back shelf. I spoke with a number of larger publishers.
Who as humans I
Like a lot.
And
They on the phone were very enthusiastic about doing some type of very generous profit share agreement. And then they sent me the contracts and there was so much Hollywood accounting that I found it to be insulting. I'm like, all right, so there's this.
X percentage double digit distribution fee, and then there's a promotional fee that isn't in perpetuity, even though
they're not gonna do very much promotion and maybe that's for two to four weeks if they do any, but then they're gonna move on to their new roster.
And I just found the deal structures so generally insulting.
That if I ran the math
I realized this is not that much better.
Then
the traditional deals that I've been selling, but I'm foregoing the advance, not because I don't have confidence in the books.
But I like having
The publishers experience some sunk cost.
Uh so that they're incentivized uh with loss aversion. But there is that argument. That's the point.
with the new book, I'm not planning on doing any of that.
And
The field is wide open to the experimentation that
I could do and
I haven't figured it out. I mean, I've thought about keeping
Audio and
E book although I'll come back to that. I'd love your
perspective on this. And then then maybe doing a print only deal because I do not have as you do the sort of facilities
I'm I'm I'm almost uh perfectly happy to farm that out with
With an appropriately
Spect.
agreement. Uh the deal terms need to make sense.
But then there are even arguments for
Me to say
license with a reversion of rights. Friend of mine, Hugh Howie. Yep.
Uh I know Hugh. Yeah, is so smart with this. Mm-hmm.
And
As you noted before, like I used to have an audio book club.
with Audible. This was back in the day with ACX when you get up to like seventy five percent royalties. Before they killed that. Yeah. Which uh and I understand, like as a business, as you have more and more
It as you amass
more and more critical mass in terms of control of a market.
you can then change your
compensation scheme with
Royalties. But as soon as it got to the point where it's like, Okay, I'm gonna max out at whatever it is, twenty five, thirty five, I was like I'm I'm this is no longer
worth the time that I would put into it. So I stopped doing it.
So
I've thought about keeping audio.
And ebook. I'm still considering it.
But the fact of the matter is it seems like larger publishers have negotiated
superior deal terms.
So even no? Okay, that's the pitch that I keep getting, which is even if you get a lower percentage of the total
The
In absolute dollars you're still gonna make more because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So this is all very
current for me. But I don't care about
Advance.
At this point in my life.
So
What they're saying on audiobooks has some some truth.
Yeah.
Not true on ebooks. Yeah. So I'll just say you there, though.
There is one thing
that the New York publishers get away with any books that uh
You can't get on your own. Even I have not been able to fight them down on this. They will let the New York publishers charge more than$10. Uh yeah.
And so there is that. This is on eBooks. On eBooks. Yeah. On audio. So
This can get technical and nerdy.
Yeah, let's do it. I like technical inertia. So on eBooks
Basically the publisher is getting seventy percent.
Of price.
It's ten dollars, they're getting seven bucks sent.
As an indie author
Doing it yourself, you will get seven bucks, but they will take out a tiny distribution fee at
Amazon, which is super annoying.
If you have a lot of artwork, it can get
Higher.
Usually it's only like 10, 15 cents. But they will take that out where they don't for the New York publishers. So that's one of the big differences. The other thing is.
They'll let the New York publisher charge fourteen ninety nine for the book.
You, they will only let charge 10. If you go over 10, they'll only give you a twenty percent instead of a seventy percent royalty.
They really need to
Then they wanna they wanna keep you between what is two ninety nine and nine ninety nine. Yep.
So is if your book is priced at nine ninety nine.
As an ebook, there is almost no incentive.
To go to New York.
Audiobooks, New York has negotiated all of their payments from Audible based on cover price of the book.
So they can change the cover price.
of the book and get different things going on. But almost everything on Audible sells by credit.
And getting out of the publishers how much they get off of a credit.
is
Like pulling teeth.
Uh getting out of Audible how much you earn off of a credit.
Is like pulling teeth because in their sense, and this is the big problem with audio books.
I don't like
That you are the customer of Audible?
Not the customer of the authors.
When you sign up for Audible
Um, and Audible's a great company, don't get me wrong.
They made huge advances.
in audio book um distribution readability
Uh, they've improved that market quite a bit. They are a net positive for everyone.
But they control so much of the market.
that they are able to do some of these practices that we talked about.
But beyond that.
People sign up for a subscription fee.
This is partially Apple's fault.
Apple and Google because
If you buy an audio book
Through Audible's app.
Google and Apple want to take thirty percent of that.
And
The
Publishers and don't want to do that. Thirty percent is egregious. It's insane. It's all sorts of lawsuits going on that
You know, them taking that much.
But
Because of that
They do the subscription service. So you sign up for the subscription on their website.
Google or Apple get none.
You get a credit every month, you can spend a credit. None of that credit goes'cause it's by credit.
But then that turns all the audience into subscribers to Audible.
So if Audible stops carrying a book.
People just stop buying it.
Once again.
He who controls the spice, he who controls the platform.
controls everything, which means that
They get to say, Well, it's a credit. What is a credit? Well, a credit is divided this way. And we give out this many free books as part of the promotions with credits. And so that plays into it. And some of the credits go for books like this. And so they have this huge spreadsheet that
To their credit credit, I'm saying credit too much, to they have started being more open with how that spreadsheet works for us. And we can plug in the numbers and see. They only started doing that in the last year as we we pushed them.
But it turns out that there's all this tenanagans. They get
fifteen dollars and after all our work and things, we get on average like
Four bucks.
out of that fifteen.
The publishers
do have something where they're getting a little bit more.
But at the end of the day.
I earn more this way than I do with the publishers.
Even though the publishers can make up for it a little bit.
by having certain weird deals on what they get paid.
Uh at the end of the day I really wish
We could push audiobooks into that
Transparent.
You get seventy percent of that fifteen bucks is what should go to the author.
Or
Certain percentage of that's the author, certain percent to the reader. Narrators don't get royalties, which is kind of a thing. And I just really wish we could.
Pierce that and make it happen, but
We haven't been able to, but
So it sounds like if I'm hearing you correctly, your advice would be to hold on to it to yourself. So
It depends.
But ebook?
Yes. I have found that
My system that I have, which is a profit share.
And we took a sledgehammer.
To that contract that you got offered.
and eventually got it to a place where it was good.
Uh, it's really close to a straight up profit share.
There's a few little Hollywood accounting things they do, but they have to account them very clearly.
And we end up doing with our profit share.
Ten to twenty percent better.
Than we used to do.
as much as fifty percent better in some cases. That's not trivial. Uh it's not trivial. Uh so
I could actually get those actual numbers, I should get'em and see.
But it's significant, uh what we're making.
Um more because with the profit share.
But my best thing has been trust. They took a print only deal.
I have ebook and audiobook.
And I have a profit share on the print with them.
And then the ebook and audio book. The ebook
Straight up.
Is better. The audio book
We make more, but we would make
Almost the same with the with the publisher.
And are you just interfacing directly with Amazon platforms for the
Yeah. Amazon and everyone else.
Doing my best. Like Amazon would pay us better if we put'em only on Amazon, but I refuse.
Um, and that's one one of the reasons the publisher deal is a little better.
Amazon gives them the deal that they give
If you're exclusive to Amazon.
As in Indy, they were force you to be exclusive to get the good deal. They give that deal to the publishers, but they can be on everything.
Yeah. It's all so messy, right?
This is all in the weeds.
But
Here's the the takeaway.
Yeah.
Power is in
In two people's hands.
Right now. It's in the creators.
And the platform controllers.
Uh it's not in New York's hand anymore.
And that's
In some ways bad,'cause th those are good people.
I think most creatives in like the audio industry w hate their business. Uh uh most authors
Are pretty like
Like you said, the people are good.
The contracts sometimes you have to take a sledgehammer too.
Uh, but I generally don't mind New York.
Um they generally I think try.
To treat authors well.
But
In this new world
We control the content.
And if you can figure out how to control your platform also.
Then that's King.
But
you as a content creator, I think should be
Looking at the platforms.
and learning how to m uh manipulate all the different platforms so that you can
You can have the
The best world you can. So that that's where we live right now.
So let's go back to the list of your inflection points for a second because I've I've made promises I want to keep with my listeners. Namely
So we have we have Missborn.
Wheel of time.
Leatherbound.
And then the
Covid Kickstarter. Yes. We have not covered the wheel of time. So for people who don't even recognize the name.
What is this? And then how did you end up becoming involved?
So I talked about the three kind of genres of fantasy.
For the nineties and early two thousands, the flag bearer of the best selling.
Epic fantasy was the wheel of time.
It was eventually dethroned by Game of Thrones when the television show for Game of Thrones came out. Until the television show
Wheel of Time was the was the top.
Beyond that.
Robert Jordan.
Got sick in the early two thousands uh with a rare blood disease.
Um
And
Because of this
His book releases slowed down quite a bit.
And uh that's when Game of Thrones was taking off. But
For most of you know, for all of my childhood, Wheel of Time was the kind of flag bearer for epic fantasy.
was the heir to Tolkien, so to speak.
and selling millions of copies, uh, doing really, really well.
And
He got sick.
It was really positive.
But then in two thousand seven he passed away.
Uh having left his series unfinished.
And I was a fan of this series.
Um, I had grown up reading it. It was one of my favorites.
And
I
Did not know him or his wife.
His wife was his editor.
Uh it's actually really fun. She
Was his editor before his she was his wife, and so
I always joke that that's a good way to make sure your editorial direction gets taken. You marry your author.
But she had discovered him uh in Charleston, where she'd moved away from the big city. She was Tor's editorial director. She kind of helped Tom Doherty build tour.
She's the editor, if you guys know your sci fi fantasy, she was the editor of the The Book of Swords by Fred Saberhagen. She's the editor of the book Enders Game.
Really, really top notch editor.
Uh and then she discovered
Wheel of time.
And so
He passes away in two thousand seven.
And
Before he passes away, he asked her to find someone.
to finish the series. He decides he does want it finished.
It puts that on her.
She considered it a dying request.
So two thousand seven happens.
And one morning I get up.
And there's a voicemail on my phone.
As we've talked about, I get up late and that's even later for New York, right?
Like
The by the time I get up it's three PM in New York. So Now is there something that happened before the
Voice
So there is, but I didn't know it.
I get this voice memo from someone I'd never met.
But I knew my reputation says and I can
I know the every word in inflection is two hundred times.
Hello, Brandon Sanderson. This is Harriet McDougall Rigney.
I am Robert Jordan's widow.
And I would like you to call me back. There's something I want to talk to you about.
Just that by itself.
So I get this voicemail and I'm like
Robert Jordan's widow, Harriet McDougall, the editor?
Uh okay. So I call her back and I don't get a response.
She's out getting massage.
I later find.
So I call my agent.
Uh no, I call my editor, he doesn't respond.
He never responded.
Moshe.
He he kept hours.
even weirder than mine when he he's still around, but he was my editor. He's retired since then. But you know, Moshe
Great guy.
Um, I know this is something that you've talked about. Bipolar.
Um, so they're huge swaths of time where you just couldn't get a hold of him.
Uh so he's self medicated with the history channel. And so sometimes you'd have to find out how to get a hold of Moshe.
And so he didn't answer, not a big deal. Call my agent, he always answers.
He's very professional. Doesn't answer.
So I'm like freaking out.
And I my wife sees me and I am not a nervous person. I am not a person that emotions
Strike very powerfully.
That's just my own
Weird.
Neurodivergence. I don't
generally feel strong emotions.
But that day I'm like walking in a circle, like babbling.
And she's like, What's going on?
Like I've never seen Brandon like this, and I'm like Robert Jordan's
wife just called me.
She's like, what?
What do you want? I'm like, I don't know.
So I finally call Tor. I reach an editor at Tor, who's one of the managing editors.
And he says, Oh that.
Yeah, it's it's
What you think it is.
Get her to call you back.
What do I think it is? Well, I knew that I'd written a little thing about Robert Jordan on my website a few days earlier.
Just kind of talking about how much he'd meant to me.
It's very short, it's like three paragraphs.
So I'm like
Maybe she wants to talk about that.
You know.
Yeah. Why would the widow call you to talk about your piece?
You know, you're you're you're not wanting to assume anything. Like again, I didn't know.
Any of them.
So she calls me, she says, Well?
Um, I'm looking for someone to finish my late husband's work.
And I was wondering if you'd be interested.
And I literally responded Bah like
I I can talk.
I'm a talker.
I could not talk. Turned into a sheep. I turned into a sheep. I actually I wrote her an email that night after not sleeping all night.
That said, Dear Harry, I promise I'm not an idiot. That was the first line. Like I
I couldn't speak because this is so unexpected.
And I spent that night thinking I'm like
Man, if I say yes to this and I screw it up.
Like
We we have seen how major media properties
Have had someone take over for them.
And then maybe not do as quite as good a job as the
Fan base is wanted.
And what that has done perhaps too.
Reputations and things like that. And just so we can place this in time.
Where in your career were you? This is two thousand seven. I only have three books out.
Maybe two. I have two books.
No, three. I have three books out. I have Elantris and Mistborn and then the first of my kids series, the ones I discovery wrote.
I'm about to go on tour for my second Mistborn novel.
Um this is before I've blown up.
I blew up on Missborn too.
Uh, we can talk about that moment before. That's the first one. Mistborn two is where the publisher knew I so they didn't know yet.
They still fought
I was maybe going to be a failure as a writer.
Um we'll get to that.
So the publisher had not brought my name up to her.
Mm-hmm.
When she'd asked who who should finish it. Thanks, guys. Yep. Nobody mentioned me. Cause um Mistborn had been floundering.
Uh for reasons we'll talk about.
Um, this morning I'm in floundering.
N my name was not mentioned.
But
Somebody
That day.
Her name was Elise Matheson, and I'm very thankful to her.
was printing off things on the internet, nice things that people had said about Robert Jordan.
And she printed off my thing and she put it in the stack.
And that night, Harriet
Reddit.
With the other things.
And I mentioned that I he had influenced my writing and she's like
Well, this is really eloquent. He wrote this really well. He's a writer.
So she called Tom Dherty.
And he's used to the side.
I wrote something along the lines of You go quietly, but you leave us trembling.
Right.
Just something, you know, it was it was
Ah, and so she calls
Tom.
And says, What about this Brandon Sanderson guy? And he's like, Oh yeah, he's one of our authors. I've read one of his books. Pretty good. Let me let me send you one of his books.
'Cause he was super excited it was one of his authors she was asking about. Cause a lot of the names that came up were not his authors.
The n main one that kept coming up was George Martin, because he and Robert Jordan were friends.
Well, George was already behind.
On his books in two thousand seven.
And the publishing industry would not stand for him taking someone else's books. Going on a side quest. Side quest. So
Um, but a lot of the names that came up were not
Tom's authors. And so he's like, Oh, it's one of my authors. And so he sends her misborn.
And so
She's like, Well
Before I read this book, I should find out if the young man's interested.
Maybe he doesn't want to do this. And so that's when she called me.
Uh and asked if I was interested, and that's when I bod like a sheep.
And then I wrote her that email that night and said
You know, I've thought about it a lot. I thought
If someone's gonna do this and it can't be him, I want it to be me.
At least I know I'm a fan.
Like I always use this Venn diagram, right?
Venn diagram of
Pretty good sci fi fantasy writers and
Pretty big uh Robert Jordan fans.
There are bigger Robert Jordan fans.
out there than be.
Hardcore by far.
There are
Better writers than me.
Right.
Uh Terry Pratchett.
uh I always call the greatest writer of my generation, right?
That like
You know.
Um there are amazing writers. George is a fantastic writer.
Um
I would probably rank George as the greatest living sci fi fantasy writer.
There's Jane Yolin, who's just incredible.
But if you put that then gr diagram together
There's not a lot of people in the middle there.
That are pretty big Robert Jordan fans. And I think
pretty excellent sci fi fantasy writers, and that was me. And so I realized
I want it to be me because
If it doesn't go to me, it might go to someone who's a good writer but doesn't know
The box.
Uh, and so she said, All right.
Well I'm
Considering
Uh, there's some names I'm considering. It was me or George.
I later found out.
And she sh when she tells this story, she says, There was really only one. It was Brandon,'cause she knew by then she couldn't have George.
And so she went and she read Miss Born.
And then
She thought on it. She took a month.
She read Missborn and thought on it for a month.
I went on tour not knowing if I was gonna finish the wheel of time and not being able to tell anybody.
And that's when Missborn Two just exploded.
And then at the end of that tour, she called me and she said
I want you to do it. Actually it's in the middle of the tour,'cause I was still on tour.
When she told some of the other people
Because they came and met me. So
I didn't have to wait that long. It was pretty excruciating. It was probably only like two weeks.
And she calls me and says I would I would like you to do it.
So I call my agent and I say
They're gonna offer us a deal.
Take it.
And he says, Well, we'll negotiate. I'm like, No, no, no.
This is just a yes. Whatever they offer.
You just say yes.
And she was very generous. It was a good deal right off the bat. My agent's like wow, there's not even really that much to negotiate. He like went to bat, he forced me to let him go to bad on like some foreign
Percentage just to so
Agents have to flex their muscles, right?
But uh I just said yes and then by December
I had the manuscript and then I got the call in like September, October.
And the manuscript he'd written like
Fifty pages.
Of the final book. So

Okay. So
We could spend um I'm sure another three hours talking about how you pieced everything together and worked on that. But
I want to pick up on something you said because
I I don't know anything about it. And I'm in the process of of reading Missborn right now and I'm ripping through it. So when you said it was floundering, I was like huh.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Why was it floundering?
So
When you're a new author, you have a shiny new author glow with your first book.
And
Do you get picked up a little bit more for reviews.
You get picked up more by people who are like, Oh, I've never heard of this person.
There's a certain demographic of reader who'll just read a first book by an author to try them out.
That is why generally publishers recommend
that you take your first book and you write a sequel to it as your second book.
Because when you jump from a sequel to a different series
You lose a percentage of audience.
And so
I had the shiny new author thing.
We sold about ten thousand copies in hard cover of a launch, which is really good for a debut author.
It's even better now.
Back then it was it was good. Now it's fantastic.
Um
And Tom Doherty called me, he's like, Well
We want to see who will launch us, and I said no.
I've got this idea of misborn and I really want to do this.
One of my
Real goals.
My powerful goals early on.
was I wanted to build an audience for me.
Not for a given book series.
I wanted to write in a lot of different sub genres.
I want to do a lot of different things.
I want the flexibility.
Uh to do this thing called the Cosmere which is
probably bigger than this podcast can get into, but if you haven't read the books, it's like the MCU.
But for fantasy.
And I did this two years before the MCU's first uh movie came out.
Um it's where it's an interconnected w universe of a whole bunch of different planets with all these epic fantasy
And there's characters. M C U is all the Marvel Yes. All the Marvel movies. All the Marvel movies where you have like
And so Mistborn, Elantris, Warbreaker, all have this uh one character who's traveling between these planets with a mysterious objective behind the scenes.
His name is Hoyt.
And you'll see him in all three of them. He's a main character at Stormlight, then.
And I wanted to do this big thing.
And I was really ambitious about it and I wanted to build something bigger than
A launch us in a sequel.
And the publisher is like it's a bad idea.
I'm like
It's a bad idea.
Except it's investing in my future. If I do it right.
Then when I

and go to something else, they will follow me to the something else.
Because so many authors get trapped.
In one series.
Uh we were talking about this before we started recording that that was also sort of after the four hour work week. Yeah. It was like, Well then I can do the three hour work week and the two hour work week or the four hour work week for, you know, single mothers and so on. And I was like, No, no.
This is a window where I can potentially
Buy my freedom.
To work in a lot of different things.
And that was we we have the exact same wavelength on that.
But
Tom Dougherty, he's a publisher.
Not an editor. Like his job is to look at the business. And he was right.
So launchers came out, sold ten thousand.
Mistborn one comes out on hardcover.
And it sells fewer.
The audience that liked Miss Vid Launtress like Launtress.
Certain percentage of them did just didn't move to Missborn'cause it wasn't a sequel.
I no longer have the new author shiny glow.
So that people who are looking for a book are like, Oh, I I saw that before. Let's pick up this other book by a new author.
So
I
Well, Mistborn's a stronger book than a Launch by many fold. Launch is my sixth book, Mistborn's my fourteenth.
I learned a lot.
It's still one of the best starting points.
And so
It's a much stronger book, but
I get
Fewer sales.
They released the paperback and the paperback has a dreadful cover.
I love the illustrator. He did the hard covers of all of them.
But once in a while the cover just doesn't click.
And this cover was
One of the worst covers that I've had.
It didn't click with my audience.
And that paperback came out and just
Yeah.
Crashed.
Just completely tanked.
And that's the most dangerous point my career has had.
I was right then thinking I'm gonna be a middle grade author writing these kids books because that's the only thing
That's the new thing.
Um but I went to my agent and we went to the publisher and said, We need a new cover.
This cover is not clicking and we fought and we fought and we fought and I said
Remember way back when you released the wheel of time, you released the like a five ninety or a four ninety nine version. I think it was three ninety nine then.
Do a four ninety nine version of this one. Let's jump start my career up to a new cover.
And Tom Dharty, again to his credit, I had to fight him, but he said yes.
We released a new paperback a few months before Mistborn Two.
With a new cover.
That one.
Boom.
It's sold now.
There's this thing in publishing call the death spiral.
Much bigger back in the bookstore days.
If you sell ten thousand of your first book
And then eight thousand or seven thousand like misborn sold.
What do they order for your third book?
Five thousand five thousand. It's called the death spiral. So they ordered like five thousand copies and then it becomes it can become a self fulfilling prophecy, right?
Because you don't have the exposure. Yep.
In the re in the retail price. Then you don't have the space on the shelf. People can go to bookstores and not find the book if you're down to like that many copies.
Uh and things like that. And so death spiral.
That's what they call it.
And we'd already gotten the we got the orders for Mistborn Two and they were bad.
Right.
They were
You know, on the death spiral, but then the paperback.
Paperback.
We got selling and so what happened is Missborn Two came out.
Instantly sold out.
Alright, so hold on. I gotta pause this for a second. So yeah.
What else contributed

the relaunch of that lower price paperback of Missborn.
One.
Mm-hmm.
Besides the cover. Was there anything else?
It was the lower price point.
And it was the cover. Those are the only things we changed. Now
You'll love this publishing.
It's weird.
They were not willing to release a new version of the book with a new cover.
Until we said it's a new addition. It's the cheaper until when they had in their head it was a new
Addition. It's got a different ISBN, guys. It's a whole new game. Whole new game.
They were willing to put a new cover on it.
So actually it was the four ninety nine thing that worked. We were at our wits end until I thought of that.
and pitched it and they're like, Oh yeah, a four ninety nine edition.
We do those and then suddenly they're willing to repackage it and put a new new cover on it. As a big red banner, four ninety nine.
It has
The nice cover blurb from Robin Hobb.
But the hardcover had that too.
The the cover was a little more targeted at what was popular then.
Photorealism was starting to be a thing for fantasy, partially because of Jim Butcher's books. We use the same illustrator cover artist as Jim Butcher's books, and it has that sort of urban fantasy feel.
Um, Missborn was really well primed to take off.
Partially because of Hunger Games.
Teenage prot uh girl protagonist in a kind of dark
uh future world in fact.
In Taiwan.
It released before Hunger Games.
And it became the Hunger Games, meaning
The market wanted a dark dystopian teen YAS fast. And we outsold Hunger Games there. Hunger Games became the Mistborn.
And Mistborn became the Hunger Games in Taiwan, because we beat it to market.
We didn't
Here and we didn't market it as YA.
It was, you know, it's an adult's got two viewpoints, one a teenager, one adult.
But it was really good for the market.
Right.
And so the fact that it was really good for the market.
Yeah.
felt dystopian, but it wasn't using all the dystopian tropes that eventually killed the dystopian.
Sort of thing. It was
No one had read of Fantasy Heist.
Since uh about the same time, Lies of Luck More came out. Yeah, which is another one Scott Lynch. Yeah, Scott Lynch. Fantastic series. That is a really fun really fun series. Uh fantastic book. And he and I had this on separate continents, the same idea and got him out around the same time. And I highly recommend that one too.
And his is more heisty even than mine.
Mine takes more of the epic fantasy direction, like Kelsier's trying to overthrow
The Empire by Robbing.
Um and so
All those things meant that when Miss Born actually got covered, right?
It really started selling.
It would have been better if there would have been books for people to buy, but instantly selling out week one.
May the publisher go, Oh
Wait a minute. And then they went to reprint and then there was this clamor online, people m emailing bookstores, emailing the uh the publisher, Where is our Mistborn Two? We have to have Mistborn Two.
And that field Mestporn to eventually
with all the reprints going to like twelve to fifteen thousand in hardcover.
And that primed Mistpoint three to hit the bestseller list. Wow.
Yeah. So I wanna t I wanna touch on something because you mentioned Lies of Laclamora and
Maybe that's heistier per se, but one thing we haven't talked about.
Is
Magic systems. Mm-hmm.
And so I I feel like that is something that really
shines and it's part of the reason why I wanted to dig into Mistborn also. Yeah. With the Alamancey and
Magic systems. How do you think about magic systems? I mean I I have the three laws. Yes.
of magic here in front of me. But I could I could read them. How how do you want to lead into magic systems? Because people are going to think to themselves if they haven't heard this term.
Yeah.
What the hell is a magic system? Let me talk about it in a way that uh for the audience, I'm gonna avoid getting to the weeds too much. This can I don't wanna give you encyclopedia entries and things like this.
Um but
I
Founding.
Something that I really love in world building, and that is
I love
In history.

Of the scientific revolution.
Time period between Newton.
And about the early nineteen hundreds.
Where
People were learning to apply science.
To everything they did.
Where they
For saying hey, wait.
All these things we assume
What if we use the scientific method on them?
And then they start discovering.
Newton believed in alchemy.
And he tried to apply the scientific method and couldn't get it to work.
Which is one of the reasons they s people start saying, Well maybe
Alchemy isn't actually scientific. Yeah, and spending time I was like
third of his time. I mean it was a lot. Yeah, yeah. He tried so hard.
To be able to transmute lead into gold or whatever. And turns out we can do it. We just need
You know, an Adam Smasher.
But
Regardless, like this idea of you know spontaneous generation. People used to think that if you left meat out
And it rotted. It spawned flies.
And that's where flies came from.
Scientific method says well let's
try some tests and see, and lo and behold, it's not that it's the eggs are being laid, right? All this stuff. Up until like I said, the nineteen hundreds, where I read an article once
From the time period about someone who'd gone and studied the science of digging ditches.
And the whole theme of it was
If we can help
The ditch diggers, we help everyone, right? Here's how they can labor more effectively so it isn't as hard on their joints.
So that they
are more efficient, but also so that they're happier and they get tired less.
Here's a whole article of science.
Helping.
Everyone.
And that period of superstition becoming science.
I love it
It's so interesting.
And that's why Miss Born's actually set
A lot of epic fantasy set.
Around in an analogous of like the twelve to fourteen hundreds.
Mistborn set in about eighteen twenties to eighteen forties, if it were on Earth.
They don't have gunpowder for various reasons, but the right
Pre
Uh industrial revolution.
Where сайн
And mat and and fantasy and you know superstition are colliding.
And what I found I really like reading.
Is
Fantasy worlds.
That take a little bit of science fiction world building.
A little bit of science fiction aesthetic.
And say what if you apply the scientific
Two
Something that in our world doesn't exist, but in their world is a new branch of physics.
And that lets my characters explore.
Science?
And magic together. What is real, what isn't real, what works, what doesn't work.
Mistborn has kind of a periodic table of the elements where they're discovering that
they can use certain metals to do certain things that are magical.
Doesn't exist in our world.
The difference between fantasy and science fiction to me is science fiction
Says this thing could happen.
Лец
Town.
You know, like what are they the possibilities that would lead to it?
Arthur C Clark says I think we can do
satellites with geosynchronous orbits.
Here's all the science. I'm gonna write a book where they can do that, and then later on we'll figure it out.
Fantasy for me starts with a cool idea and justifies it.
through the text without real science, right?
I want to have
You know, people who use these metals.
Y you to to bounce around like ninjas, right?
Um
You can uh you can drop a uh a coin.
And you can push off of it and through Newton's laws.
You know, if it's pushed against the ground, you're launched upward.
If you're pushing on it and it
You know, you throw your weight against it, it shoots across the room.
And how much can I do with that just by playing with vector science? Again.
I don't want to get in the weeds, but the idea is
People applying
Their intellect.
to magic, and that's a magic system.
What is the magic system? What
Is
that people have access to. Lord of the Rings has several magic systems. One is the one ring.
It's what we call a hard magic system.
Uh Lord of the Rings, if you put on the ring
You turn invisible.
But Saron can see.
Very simple. It corrupts people along the way. There are like three rules for the ring and you can understand them.
Making a hard magic doesn't mean that it's like it makes sense.
Right.
Superheroes are generally hard magics, even though it's like bonkers.
Superman gets powers from sunlight.
Makes no sense.
We have external logic, but internally it's consistent.
He gets his powers from the sun and he can do X, Y, and Z.
That's what we call a hard magic system.
Gandalf. So rules that are internally consistent. Yeah. Rules that are internally consistent that the characters can figure out and use.
That's a hard magic system.
Uh Roto can put the ring on.
And vanish from Saron's eyes.
But will pay the cost.
Or he'll vanish from everyone else's eyes, but he'll be seen by Sarah. So he can pay the cost.
Let's get some short term gain.
For some long term detriment by using the ring.
Perfectly within the realm of his he can he can access it and use it.
Candolf is what we call soft magic system.
You never really know what Gandalf can do.
In the movies they do this brilliantly by being like he holds up his staff
And like
The sun rises.
And like
Did he shoot sunlight at the orcs, or is it just like
What's going on?
Like Gandalf shows up and magical things happen.
The other characters can't control this. You don't see it being controlled by the narrative.
He just does things, and those are cool magic systems. You can do all kinds of stuff with that.
I found a niche in hard magic systems.
That intersection where people are
applying their logic. It's so much fun. I
Talked about Mistborn, like, you know, you can drop a coin and launch in the air. You can throw it and push it at someone.
You throw it, you push it, someone it hits them, then you get launched backward.
Suddenly I can have characters have to figure out puzzles.
In combat.
We're having a fight scene, but the fight scene is how can I get in position?
T
Us
This medal against him is
So engaging to write. It's so much fun. It makes every every fight scene just a fun little um puzzle box to try to figure out.
Um and so
Because I like that.
I decided to use it as part of my branding.
Like so hard to stand out.
I know I like these things. I know I'm gonna be doing it in my books. So I became the magic system guy. I've thought about it a lot. So I released my three laws. It's just kind of their rules that I follow.
Mostly in
Um because I did something wrong at some point and I'm like, that broke my magic system.
How can I fix that?
And I came up with a rule thumb for myself.
That I could follow.
And I use those to kind of build the magic the way I do them.
It's not the only way to do it. It's not the only good way to do it.
But
It was really helpful to have a thing that was mine.
What are you gonna get when you come to one of my books? You're gonna get
At the core, I want
An interesting story about interesting characters.
But I can't brand that way because that's what everyone does.
So what's the branding? You're gonna get science fiction world building.
In a fantasy story.
You're gonna get
People discovering how magic works.
uh that's repeatable and they're going to be able to use it.
In order to solve problems.
N
Make
their lives better or, you know, at least manipulate them in certain ways. All of my books are gonna have that sort of feel.
And that's w what became kind of my thing.
So let me if you don't mind, I'll just I'll read these three. Yes and have some some some follow ups. Okay. All right.
Sanderson's three laws of magic.
Yeah.
So number one.
Is
An author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.
Number two, weaknesses, limits, and costs are more interesting than powers.
That's one that I kinda latched on to.
Three, the author should expand on what is already a part of the magic system before something entirely new is added, as this may otherwise entirely change how the magic system fits into the fictional world. So the second one is the most self explanatory to me.
Right. The power of constraints. Yep.
And it can be applied to a million things, but
I I I find that to be
Very
Accessible to me.
Could you expand on the on number one, number three?
Sure can.
So number one.
If you and I've actually added a word to this, uh in a little phrase to this.
Um uh author's ability to solve problems in a satisfying way.
With magic.
And a story is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic. So
Let's pause it.
Two sort of storylines.
In one.
Your character
Um is going to use
Well, in both of them your character's gonna use the magic to save the day at the end.
In the first one.
The character spends
The majority of the book.
Off and on.
Figure out how this magic works.
To the point that they realize by the ending.
Wait.
Everyone's been doing this wrong.
Here's the rules.
Here's how they got misled.
If I make this one little tweak.
Suddenly
I'll be able to fix the problem that no one else is being able to fix.
And at the ending they realize that.
They solve that problem and boom.
They have taken their wits and
Their intelligence, their
Their progress, right? We say promise.
Um progress payoff.
The payoff is to the actual progress of the story.
This person has been studying their entire time.
They've learned how the magic works. So at the end
They're able to pull off something that no one else could, and you believe it.
Because
Of all that work.
In the other one.
They get to the end.
They are
Unable to solve the problem.
But then through the power
Of just caring really a lot.
They figure it out and save the day. A mother's love.
A mother's love.
Um and see
This is why I use the satisfying way.
The mother's love protecting Harry is not actually a bad thing because
That wasn't supposed to be a plot.
Element I'm poking fun a little bit. But it is poking fun. Joe deserves it. We can poke fun at her.
Um
Um because she
J.K. Rowling was really good at internal logic in a given book, and then she'd throw it out the window for the next one, right? Time turners.
actually in the Time Turner book makes sense how they're used. She sets up the rules, she uses them.
Book four, they forget they can try time travel.
And don't ever use them. But
Regardless, you can see what's going on here.
The idea of Sanderson's first law is
Any plot element, but magic and fantasy. A lot of people who don't read fantasy, they point it and be like
Can't believe any of the stakes.
Because anything can happen.
Yeah, it's like the uh Deus Ex Machina. Deus Ex Machina.
Playwright can't figure out the ending, so the God descends from the rafters and voila.

But the thing is any book is that way.
If you
want to write a book.
Where at the end the the romance novel in a perfectly realistic setting that they just get together because you decide.
You can just
DSX marking to that.
You can Deus X mocking to the thriller.
You any book, the reader c uh the author can do that.
With a goal we haven't
Extra tendency toward that with magic.
So the
charge that we do that is not unsubstantiated, right?
Occasionally authors like
Magic so I'll snap my fingers and save the day.
But
As a reader with a magic system.
If you make it so that we understand.
So that
Like
Star Wars. Star Wars is such a perfect example.
We believe that Luke can shoot.
The missiles down the tube.
When he's using the force.
Why?
Well, through the course of the story, we've seen
Obi-Wan Kenobi use this magic. We've seen L Luke struggle to use this magic. We see targeting computers, they fire and they miss.
The target two computers are are are fallible.
We're at the big moment and then
Use the force loop.
Obi Wan is there. We've seen the whole time Obi Wan preparing him.
And he takes off the thing.
Ені шутс, ви болів.
That he can do that.
Because
Yeah.
Set up and pay off.
Promise, progress, payoff.
And that's what Sanderson's first law is. If you're gonna use magic at the end of your story.
To solve the problem.
Promise progress payoff.
Do you want a soft magic?
Use it to cause problems.
Or you can use it to solve problems in an unsatisfying way, and sometimes you want that.
When Gandalf saves the fellowship from the Balrog.
It's actually kind of unsatisfying because Gandalf is dead.
And you watch the movie Peter Jackson again.
Brilliant movies.
The after Gandalf dies.
Everyone is down.
And like flop down and crying.
And broken.
Because
The magic use isn't satisfying. Ganov didn't get up there and save the day.
He sacrificed himself.
And
It actually hits with a very different emotion. It's instead
An escalation. So that's that's an example of soft magic causing a problem. Exactly.
And so yes, Gandalf did save them from the Balrog, but the cost is bigger.
Then the the whole point of that is not yay Gandalf, it is
Huge complication.
Gandalf kept the the fellowship together.
What's gonna happen when Gandalf isn't there to prevent Boromir from taking the ring? And then he pays that off.
It the fellowship shatters brilliant use of both a soft magic and a hard magic.
for what they're really good at.
George is good at this too. He uses a lot of soft magics.
Whenever someone uses magic in Game of Thrones, you get scared.
Because people are gonna die.
And things are gonna go wrong.
And everything's gonna suck even worse.
Because of using the magic and that
Soft magic is brilliant for that.
Uh, it creates a sense of wim of mystery and danger and sorrow. Sort of an unpredictability that's exciting, whereas solving problems, the audience is just like oh come on. Yeah, exactly. And they both do different kinds of things.
And so if you understand this, you can have the emotions you want.
In the stories.
Right. And Tolkien very wisely. He uses the ring.
to solve problems and escalate in certain ways.
Like Sam being able to put on the ring to go save Frodo after Frodo is taken by the Orcs.
You are totally by that Sam can do that because you know what the ring can do. It solves a problem. It's actually you're like, Yay, Sam.
Good job, and that's a heroic moment.
It gets fro to back.
Right.
You know, Frodo's alive.
Everything's happy because Sam
Manipulated the magic that he's learned.
And then he gives up the ring.
And you're like, Good job, Sam.
You have done it.
Lord of the Rings is just a a great
Manual for how to do both of these things.
We're gonna come to
number three. Yes. The third law in the second, but I just want to recommend to folks I had a opportunity to spend some time in Oxford for the first time. And it is just from a literary perspective, so fun.
To walk around Oxford to s and to see all of the influences and the pubs and so on where Tolkien and C. S. Lewis used to grab drinks and I always blank on the third. Yep, everybody does. Or like, yeah, sorry, pal. Or Phil uh or his dark materials, right? And Philip Pullman. And that entire world.
Which
Which I have to just I'll air a grievance, which is
When
Things get slotted. This is me being.
Naive, I guess, but
into young adult. My assumption always was as a so called adult, like young adult is easier to read. But it seems to be when the protagonist is a young adult,'cause I remember reading
The golden compass and I was like, I do not understand these three hundred nautical terms. It was very, very
Intricate book. I'll tell you this, no one knows what to do with uh the Golden Compass because Lara's actually like eight.
And so it's not young adult it's what
the age group that that would be would be middle grade or chapter books.
It was shelved in both sections. No one knows what to do with that. And that's an example of breaking the rules.
Fantastically, and it working out really well.
I don't remember how old she is, but she's not young adult age. She might be ten, but
Uh, young adult can be
just as complicated as adult. Uh and it's mostly a marketing thing, like Mistborn.
Uh, all my books Missborn shelved as adult everywhere, but eventually towards like
Let's release a young adult version. Put it in the young adult section. Why not? Maybe new people will find it.
Skyward.
Which is my actual young adult series, is shelved as adult.
In the UK.
Because they're like, Well, we just wanna package it the same as yours and sell it to your audience and I'm like, Okay. So they packaged it and put it in the adult section. So
All marketing. Tomato, tomato. Yeah. The third law. Third law. All right. I third law, let me tell you the story of where what went wrong.
In Mistborn.
It's actually a great first line for your next book. Yeah. Let me let me tell you when we're wrong.
In Mistborn I came up with three separate magic systems for three books.
They're all there in the first one.
There's you know elements you're there's a thing that says it does which is mysterious. It's kind of
In the first book, Say Ziv's magic is a soft magic. Even though I know all the rules, you don't know
What he can do.
And when he solves problems with it, it's like
used to create mystery.
And questions
And even some danger.
Right.
Um book two.
I start f showing you how it works.
So that it becomes now understandable.
And things like that. And then there's uh hemolurgy.
Um so
Each book I wanted to explore a different aspect.
Of the magic.
When it came to the Stormlight Archive
I had
started to fall into a trap.
And the trap is bigger is better.
And this is what killed the original Stormlight Archive. So you would think I'd learned this lesson. But people started to say, You had three magic systems in Mistborn. How many will you have in the Stormlight Archive? And I'm like,
There's gonna be thirty magic systems. It's gonna be so epic.
All right.
Um, and then I sat down and I was building all this and I'm like
This is the wrong way to approach the book.
Thirty magic isn't our better than three.
Three well done magic systems are way better than thirty.
non well done magic systems.
I need to sit down and say what is my book actually about?
What is the world building that's really gonna enhance the story?
Let's talk about that and do a really good job of it.
This is in video games.
There's this great series called The Elder Scrolls.
And um one of the first games to ever procedurally generate.
Dungeons.
And they they pitched
One of their one of their games is like there's a thousand dungeons you can explore.
But the truth is
All those thousand dungeons are built out of thirty different elements recombined in different ways. And so you were bored after the second one. Later on. Oops.
They realized if they just take hand care and
They build
A well crafted dungeon they put fewer of them in.
Everyone's happier.
It works way better.
And so but
People
would talk about those early Elder Scrolls games and be like
It's it's an ocean an inch deep.
You want to avoid that in your storytelling.
So the idea is that with the third law
It challenges me to re examine what I have.
And to go deeper.
Instead of just expanding.
To say, look, you've got something interesting. And it's not just magic. Like
This character.
Can you dig a little deeper into who this character is instead of adding a new one?
To make you know your your story
Wider but more shallow.
And it's just a challenge to me.
To do a
Good.
thoughtful job of my world building instead of always pretending bigger is better.
Got it. So the third law is to
Protect yourself, remind yourself.
Yeah. All of them are. The first one happened because
I
Added something, you'll get there.
I hadn't
Editor
And my editor said.
The ending of Missborn One isn't quite as spectacular as we want.
Can you
You know, do something spice it up. And I said, Cool, yeah, I've got this thing I'm gonna do in the second book.
I'll just let
It happened in the first book.
But I hadn't set it up.
And then the first book came out and people still really liked it. But a lot of them are pointing at that and being like, That felt like a little like a DSX mocking. And I'm like
It is.
I didn't set this up at all.
It just is out of nowhere right at the end. I'm like why
Does it work sometimes and not others? And that's where this law came from.
uh and flaws
are more interesting is the same directions. Like
You know?
looking at all the the powers that I'm adding and trying to play with them and things and realizing that
Yeah, Superman is interesting.
Because of what he can't do.
Superman as a character is interesting because he has a moral code.
Which is, you know, limitation he puts on himself. And the best stories happen either.
Because of his moral code.
Will he break or not?
Because
Uh
The people that he loves.
Which are also kind of a limitation. Or
Because he encounters someone who has kryptonite and his powers are taken away.
Those are the great three Superman stories.
All of them don't center on
H what his powers are.
Centers on.
What he can't do. He can't get Lois to fall in love with him.
He can't
Always protect everybody.
He can't violate his code and he can't do anything when Kryptonite's around.
Then you've suddenly you've got conflict and story.
Brannett, sir, we've covered a lot of ground. I could keep going for a very, very long time, but you're doing the majority of the talking, so you're doing all the heavy lifting here.
Is there anything we have not covered?
That you would like to cover or anything that you would like to say to my audience, request of my audience.
Point my audience too.
I never know how to do anything. I that you'd like to wrap things up with. On the plane with a little dance. I don't know. There is a zero flaw.
Oh let's okay. Zero thaw. So Adam Asimov added added a zero thlaw.
I added one cheekly.
Right.
And I guess what I'd say to your honest is uh thank you for putting up with me nerding out for three hours. If they want to try something, I would recommend Mistborn or Trusted the Emerald Sea, depending if they want something more heisty and actiony or something more whimsical.
But Sanderson's zero flaw.
Is
Always err on the side of what's awesome.
And this came about because
А реаліз сам тайм.
I don't follow the rules.
Sometimes I come up with something that's just too cool.
To not put in the story.
And at the end of the day, I'm writing stories because I want to do interesting things with character, with plot, with I just want things to be cool.
And so I came up with this little rule to myself, which is
All of this is good. All this is important.
But when you're writing
You come up with something really cool.
Try it out. Even if it breaks the outline, if it breaks the magic system.
Try it out.
And see if it makes the story better.
Because if it does
You'll figure out a way to make it work. You can revise so that it's foreshadowed. You can you can fix that.
Er on the side of what is awesome.
Try it.
Give yourself permission.
Yeah.
Well, I for one I'm glad you didn't end up uh being a chemist.
So I very much appreciate the time. This is an incredible
Life and world and collection of worlds that you guys have
Um
Help build with the team behind you.
And putting out the
Ungodly numbers of
Words per year. It's just it's just phenomenal. And where can people find you? Where's the best place to find all things?
Brandon Sanderson.com.
Yeah.
Easy to find. Everything's on there. Sample chapters. War breaker, the free book.
It's on there. So now, like I said, I need to get a new one. It was written in two thousand six, so
It's it's been a while, but it's on there for free. Um
You can read a bunch of everything. You can, you know, we got socials. YouTube's a pretty good place for me, too. My writing lectures are there.
I do a weekly update every week on YouTube where I come on and say where I am in my writing process for the current book. So
I like to do lots of outreach.
Yeah, amazing. Well, I can't wait to see what you do next. And
uh I'll be w certainly watching and for people who
Are interested in anything we talked about, I will link to everything in the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast.

Thank you, Brandon.
For all the time. And for hosting me.
Mm-hmm. What a what a fun trip. And uh to everybody out there
Until next time, just be a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself, and thanks for tuning in.
Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?
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