Brandon Sanderson's Blog, page 4
August 16, 2023
Sel Box for Sale! + Weekly Update
Hey! Brandon here with your Weekly Update. Sorry for not being here last week. I actually was at a writing retreat, so got some good work done. In fact, let’s talk about Stormlight 5. We are at, Bing!, 66%. This puts us at two-thirds. I am feeling really good about it. I am technically 317 words behind for finishing at my target, but that’s a very manageable amount behind. I will have to stop and do revisions in about a week because I need to get more material for the beta readers that’s revised. So, that’ll put me behind another, you know, 7,000-8,000 words. But, you know, I caught up from last time, so we’ll theoretically be able to catch up again. So, anyway, expect in a couple weeks we’ll have another week with no progress.
Skyward Legacy continues to be at, Bing! 34%, the book that Janci is working on.
So, let’s talk about some things with the Kickstarter. The Cosmere box is finished. We have sent it all out. The team did that in 10 days. Really impressed with that. They sent word that they are beginning work on packaging the Warbreaker box. They still have one item that needs to arrive. And so, we still have a little—it’s been shipped, just not sure—it hasn’t arrived yet, as of my recording this. Hopefully it’ll be here by the time that you all see this, and then that one will get packed. That’ll start going out in September, theoretically.
Really good news for those who are wondering about the secret projects books. Secret Project 4, while we were in Tampa we got the first truckload. So, like Secret Project 3, it looks like the distribution channels have finally cleared up a little bit, and we are starting to actually get the books on time, when we were told we would get them. In fact, another truck is on the way. So, everything’s looking good for that one going out on time, like what happened with Secret Project 3. So, very excited about that.
We do have the Sel box up for sale now. These are the extras. We order extras in case we need to send replacements to people or things like that. Now that we have gone long enough that we know about how many replacements we had to send, we have our overage, so we are selling that right now. Get yours before they are gone.
Let’s talk about our convention, Dragonsteel 2023. There are tickets remaining, though we are getting close to our limit. In fact, the hotels are almost sold out. One of them is sold out. They added more rooms though, right? So, they did add some more rooms. But we are getting really close to where we were last year when we had to stop selling tickets. We’ll probably still have tickets up until the day of, but who knows?
So, anyway, we wanted to give a shoutout to those who have won the Legally Distinct Metallic Tickets. If you’ve been following along with this, these are people who get to go to the front of the signing line and get a personalized book from me. They should all have already gotten a little video from me congratulating them and welcoming them. So, I’m going to announce them for you here, but I’m going to leave off the last names for privacy reasons. If you hear your name and your state, but you didn’t get a video, it means that, unfortunately, there was a different person with your name from the same state. But these went to Elijah from California, Leah from Virginia, Leo from Utah, Samantha from Utah, and Richard from Oregon. So, we will look forward to seeing you at the front of the line come Dragonsteel. They said that if we waited to record this they could find me a prop Legally Distinct Metallic Ticket, but I told them you can all imagine them. You are readers after all. So, imagining things is something you’re quite good at.
If you’re wondering why I’m recording in the Lair, we’ve actually been working on the Book Club for Yumi and the Nightmare Painter. This one, very special, is hosted by my wife Emily. And that’ll be coming up, what do you think? In a couple weeks?
ADAM: Couple weeks.
In a couple of weeks, you’ll be able to watch the Book Club, like we’ve been doing for all of these. Like I said, a little extra special. We even have a visitor from another country who is here to participate in this one. So, hmm. Be looking forward to that.
We also wanted to give a shoutout to the charity drive we did with the numbered copies of Secret Projects 2 and 3. Thank you all for your generosity. I don’t actually know the final numbers because it’s still going as I’m recording this, but they’re already very high. And so, thank you. Again, we will use this for charity. Probably going to go to a children’s hospital, but there are other charity work we’ll do. I will come back to you when I know exactly what we’re going to be spending this money on, and we’ll do it as part of an update or a separate video, just so you can, you know, so that we’re accountable to you for the money that you’re giving us.
And thank you for all who signed up for the mailing list as part of this. The mailing list is the best way that we’re able to kind of keep track of people and let them know about things. So, we really appreciate that. We promise not to spam you.
Last off here, I believe that our last thing is our final round of the first, you know, tier. What do you call these things?
ADAM: Bracket.
Bracket, yeah. The first bracket, the first-round brackets, the last one from our podcast. So, in the food heist, with 71%, is the Snackaderms, one of my favorites. This food heist has indeed defeated How is This Not a Movie Yet Coffee Heist, at 29%. With the bad story ideas, we have an upset. So Planetary Shenanigans or Sisyphus Plays Katamari Damacy, this is the weird planet I came up with where people lived on a planet that was being rolled along by a giant, has defeated Abraham Lincoln Writes Epic Fantasy Fan Fic of Moby Dick, which 52% to 48%, pretty close there. So, we have an upset. Will it go all the way? We will start—we’ve actually started voting. We’re a little bit behind order, because I think last week’s podcast started people voting on the second round of brackets, even though this one hadn’t been quite announced yet. So, if you want to participate in this, you can listen to Intentionally Blank. We actually have time stamps for each of these discussions of food heists and bad story ideas.
Otherwise, hey, I’ll be back next week with another update for you. Thank you, as always.
August 3, 2023
Live From Tampa! + Weekly Update
Hey! Brandon here with your Weekly Update. I know I said I wouldn’t have one this week, but they decided we could do one at my booth at Tampa Comics Convention. Woo!
AUDIENCE: (cheering)
BRANDON: You might be able to see there’s a Rock and a Mistborn in the background. So, thumbs up there.
So, first things first, updates on the books. We are at, Bing! 62% on Stormlight 5. Had a nice writing session on the flight here. Kind of kept us going right at our about 8,000 words a week. So, it is moving along. Skyward Legacy is at, Bing! 34%.
A few quick things for you. We have our own convention, Dragonsteel 2023, November 20 and 21 in Salt Lake City. Our hotels are selling out. So, if you want one of the cheap, discounted hotels, now would be the time to maybe consider booking your ticket.
Updates on the Kickstarter and things. We have finished shipping completely Secret Project 3. So, you should have gotten your email about Secret Project 3. Yes, thank you to this team over here.
So, if you haven’t, for some reason, received your email saying yours is coming, well, check in your spam folders and then email these people, and they will figure out what’s going on.
And so that means that we have moved on to the Cosmere box, an item from which I am using at this convention right now. So, I’ll not tell you, but I am enjoying the item from the Cosmere box that is very fancy and nice. So that is going out right now.
We have a bunch of weekly deals on our books. For instance, Sunreach in the UK is a Kindle Monthly Deal for August. There’s more. Those are linked down below. So, if you want to get one of my books cheap, you can go see which ones.
Final thing we have is our podcast winners. The winners of the dumb thing we’re doing, not the actual winners of any books or anything that is more exciting. Unsurprisingly, The Gnocchi Brothers Gnocchi Gnocchi Brothers Gnocchi Restaurant has defeated Tailgating Something Nefarious, 86% to 14%. If you have no idea what this is, you’re just like, “What?” These are Dan’s food heists. We’re having a bracket. It’s a thing. So bad story ideas, Weekend at Vader’s with an Actual Zombie beat Jungle Book but with Dragons in Middle School, 83% to 17%. So, the people have spoken. Our seeds were correct on those ones. Join us on the podcast. If you have no idea what I’m talking about here, I’m very sorry. It’s very silly and kind of ridiculous.
So anyway, thank you all, and I will be back next week in the normal place with a Weekly Update.
July 5, 2023
Legally Distinct Metallic Tickets + Weekly Update
Hello! Brandon here with your Weekly Update. So, this is a longer one, all right? So settle in. I’ve got a lot of things to cover but we will do the book updates first.
We are going, Stormlight 5, Bing! 55%. Only 1% this week. Just kind of getting back into the groove of things following my writing retreat where I did a big revision of the book. But I anticipate that I should be back up to about 2% a week starting next week. We’ll see.
Skyward Legacy is at, Bing! 28%. So Janci’s moving along on that as well.
Now, the elephant in the room. Why am I dressed this way? And why do I have a legally distinct metallic ticket in my hat? Well, anyone who’s purchased a badge to Dragonsteel 2023 before July 31st will be entered into a random drawing to win the first five spots in the signing line with a plus one. We’ll announce the winners in August. So you will get these legally distinct metallic tickets as a chance to meet me.
So if you aren’t familiar with how this works, I can no longer sign everyone’s books. I move at about 100 people an hour when I’m going fast. Sometimes it’s as slow as 75 or 80. And there are often 5,000 of you at these conventions, and maybe more, which means 50 hours of signing, which is just physically impossible. And so we have changed it around. Everyone who buys the book bundle will get a signed copy. I will sign those all ahead of time in the warehouse. It’s this big thing. You can sometimes watch the time lapses on this channel, where I sign. So you will get a signed copy but it won’t be personalized.
However, if you win one of the legally distinct metallic tickets, certainly not related to any other famous IP, then you will be able to go in the signing line and be able to meet me afterward and get it personalized. It’s you plus one. Plus the front of the line. So how do you get the rest of the slots? Well, those will be assigned randomly closer to Dragonsteel. But we’re giving out the first five spots. So sign up by July 31st, and maybe you will get one of these. We will actually give you these things. Right? You will actually have the legally distinct metallic ticket in your hand that maybe you will want me to sign when you go into the line. So there we go.
Let’s talk about the goofy bracket we’re doing with my podcast. Who are the winners this week? If you don’t watch the podcast, well, you’re missing out. It is very silly. But we had, with no context, voting between the Great Maple Syrup Heist versus Asparagus. And the Great Maple Syrup Heist won overwhelmingly with 74%. So no surprises there. But on the bad story ideas, you continue to be trolls. And the Aliens Use the Legal Code to Quietly Conquer the US almost beat Vikings versus Cthulhu, which is quite shocking to me because I have a feeling Vikings versus Cthulhu will make a better shirt than a legal drama involving aliens. But it was 42%/58%. So you are a little bit more split. So Vikings versus Cthulhu may not win in the next bracket. We’ll have to see. And all of you trolls are banding together. You may have to, you know, maybe you’ll push through one of these very, very terrible ideas to get to the higher brackets.
Brandon’s Book Club, all three Frugal Wizard episodes are out. So you can go watch those, read your book, and indeed we are very close on getting all of the copies of Secret Project 2 out to you. So we have 10,000 of them we needed, so about half a truck’s worth, that did not arrive in time. But those should go out this week, very soon, theoretically, if the truck arrives. But we are very, very close. You guys did a Herculean effort. Well done. And indeed, as I understand, you are already shipping out Secret Project 3 as of this release. In fact, they started shipping them out on Friday of last week. We have all of those in stock, and they are going out. You should have gotten your digital files in the late evening on Friday,. Depending on where you live it might have been a different time for you. But those are already out. That means the audiobook and the eBook should be there and ready for you to read. You should be enjoying that book right now, unless you’re waiting for the print edition. Though, as a warning, as is our custom with these, we will start talking about it by its actual title on the day that it launches in eBook for everyone else, which means, what is it, the 11th of the month? So on the 11th of the month, our moratorium on saying the title of Secret Project 3 will go away. Just a forewarning for you as we’ve done on all of the other ones.
And if you didn’t participate in the Kickstarter, and you want to get Secret Project 2, The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England, which is kind of a—hmm, how shall I explain it? It is an alternate dimension time travel comedy action story. If you want to get that, TOR’s edition just came out with a very nice cover, that I like a lot, and you can go pick that up. It’s in bookstores everywhere.
All right. So, Tampa Bay ComiCon, July 28-29. We will—how do you get something for me? How do you get me to sign something for you at that? We will have at our booth tickets. They aren’t gorgeous, legally distinct metallic tickets like this. But we do have little tickets and they will give you a time. That way you don’t have to wait in a terribly long line. They go very quickly though. I will show up and I will sign, and you need to have a ticket to get into that line. They are free. So stop by the Dragonsteel booth. We have a very large booth that covers four numbers. But 1531, write that down. Show up there. That should be one of our corners of our booth. You should therefore be able to get those tickets. Again, get those early in the morning. I will be doing a signing on two days, Friday and Saturday. So get those early. We are trying to set up a Magic draft. We’re not sure if that will work yet. So I’ll keep you up to date on that.
The Alloy of Law with the new cover treatment, the gorgeous new trade paperbacks, they are out and you can get them. Response to these covers has been quite good. People are liking them. We would like to eventually repackage the entire—all of Mistborn with these covers. So you should be able to get all of your Mistborn books with this style of cover eventually in trade paperback. So if this is the cover style that you like, you can go on and get the Alloy of Law right now.
Books 3, 4, and 5 of the Alcatraz book series will be part of the Books-A-Million buy two get one free promotion through July 31st. So I guess go ahead and go pick those up if you haven’t read them yet, if you want to get them cheaper.
And last but not least, we have the special Baldy Brando video, the one that I was bald for several hours in order to film, if you remember that. That comes out July 11th. So be waiting for that. That one is very fun. So July 11th kind of as the wide launch of Secret Project 3, we will be releasing that video.
Anyway, thank you all very much. Sorry again this was kind of a long one. Lots of stuff to go over today. I will be back next week, probably not wearing a hat, and will have another Weekly Update for you then.
June 28, 2023
Secret Project 3 Out This Week! + Weekly Update
Hello! Brandon here with your Weekly Update. Sorry I wasn’t here last week. I did a writing retreat. It was very nice. I was able to get a bunch of Stormlight revised, which means I’ve sent the first quarter of Stormlight 5 to my editors and to my agent, and we are very excited to have at least part of it out. That means that, Bing! I’m still at 52%. That’s because I took a week and focused only on revisions, which puts me just a little bit behind where I want to be. But we were cruising before. I have been cruising pretty well this week. So I think that next week we’ll be back up to speed. And revisions do need to happen. This is an important part of the process.
Janci has also been working and Skyward Legacy is, Bing! At 26%. So she’s moving along on that. Skyward Legacy is planned—we’re not sure when we’re going to release that, but we’re thinking the year after Stormlight 5, maybe in the Spring, maybe in the Fall. So that’s the first book of the Skyward follow up series.
We have a really awesome video about where the worldbuilding of Mistborn came from on our YouTube channel. If you haven’t watched it, I recommend you go give that a look. We would like to do more of these. So if you guys like it, let us know, and we’ll look at doing this for some of the other books in the Cosmere.
I also have an exciting update for you. All right, it is time to learn which of our projects have won from the Intentionally Blank podcast’s smackdown that is going on. If you aren’t aware, if you don’t watch Intentionally Blank, Dan loves food heists for some reason. Now I do too because of him, but also food heists—it’s a thing. And I sometimes postulate very bad story ideas. And we’re seeing which of our food heists and our bad story ideas are the best. And I get to announce the first two weeks’ brackets.
So Week 1 winners. You were voting on Jack the Carjacking Car versus world where no one can read or write, which I thought was a terrible idea. You are all trolls. It didn’t win, fortunately. We don’t have to make a t-shirt potentially based on that. Jack the Carjacking Car was 51%, and the other one was 49%. It was very close. So maybe you all are just trying to make us make a t-shirt that would be very difficult to make. I can appreciate that. But Jack the Carjacking Car, which was my number one seed, it looks like is on shaky ground. It may not survive Round 2. We’ll have to see who it’s up against.
But as for food heists, in this case, the Gator Gourmands, they won by 89%. It was not very much of a surprise there. You all have your favorites in the world of the food heists.
So for Week 2, we’re also announcing that, and then we’ll go back to announcing one per week. The Great British Fake-Off did win by 83%. So that’s not a surprise. It is probably our best of our bad story ideas. I’m not surprised at all by that. And then, of course, the Edelstadtkugel, the thing I cannot pronounce, won by 93% with the food heists for Week 2. Dan’s not here to cringe at my German pronunciation there.
So we will have another vote for you coming up this Wednesday, with another—we’ll have a fun episode of Intentionally Blank, and more of the brackets. So thank you everyone who voted.
So Brandon’s Book Club. We have the episodes going live this week for your read-along for The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook to Surviving Medieval England. If you’ve been waiting on that, or if you want to do a re-read, or whatnot, we have a book club coming up, three episodes, some really fun people. I’m really excited we were able to get Wren Weichman from Corridor Digital, who is a fan of my works and also makes really cool, awesome stuff on YouTube. He’s there. And so go watch that. There’s all sorts of fun things going on in The Frugal Wizard Book Club.
Speaking of the Kickstarters, Secret Project 3, the digital files will go out to backers this week. All right? So check your BackerKit accounts Friday night at midnight. Premium hardcovers we’re going to start shipping the first week in July. I’m very excited for this one. Let’s just say this one’s pretty special to me. They’re all special to me, but this one in particular. So I’m looking forward to hearing what you all think of this book coming out on Friday. We are basically done. Not quite done but very close to done shipping out Secret Project 2. And so you should have either gotten yours or very soon will be getting yours on that. Which means that, since we have all of Secret Project 3 in, we’ll be shipping those on time all through July. Goal is to get them all out before I head to Tampa Bay ComiCon, which is the 28th and 29th.
Do be aware, if you’re going to see us, we’ll be around, but we’re not going to be doing sales on Sunday. This is just a personal thing. We’ll be doing sales Friday and Saturday. The booth will be around on Sunday, but we won’t be doing any sales. So if you want to pick up your Brandon Sanderson merch, make sure you get that on Friday or Saturday.
And last point—this was a long update. Sorry, this is what happens when I leave for a week. Your last chance to buy the Mistborn eBook as an on-sale edition for $2.99 is coming up. It was one of the Kindle monthly deals throughout the month of June. And so if you haven’t read Mistborn, or if you have a friend that you want to nudge to read Mistborn, it’s only three bucks on Kindle right now.
I’ll be back next week with another Weekly Update.
June 21, 2023
From Imagination to Reality: Mistborn Origins
June 13, 2023
Tampa Bay Comic Convention + Weekly Update
Hey! Brandon here with your Weekly Update. As you can see, my hair has grown back quite quickly. It was rather magical. But this has stayed. I did grow this out for a certain video that will be coming up. A lot of people are guessing that it’s for a cameo in one of my movies. I wish. This is for our channel. Don’t get your hopes up. But I have asked my wife, and she would like me to continue with this for a little longer, just so we can get a snapshot of what beardy Brando looks like. At this time, it’s been about 10 years since I had one, and she has a picture of me then. And so we’re going to grow this out for a little while. We’ll see how long it goes. Probably won’t last past January, would be my guess.
But let’s do our updates. So Stormlight 5 is at, Bing! 54%. I am very consistently doing 8,000 words a week, which is where I need to be in order to be doing it about 2%. That said, I do have this percentage marker at 450,000, not 400,000, for the final book. That’s number of words. So at some point, we’ll probably, if I’m doing 8,000 a week, at some point we’re going to have to move to 1.5%. So we’ll see. Right now I’m feeling good. We’re at 54%. And I am almost, in real terms, almost to 250,000 words. So again, that percentage is kind of a rough estimate, but you can see where the book is.
Skyward Legacy is at, Bing! 25% still. So that’s where Janci is on that. We’ve been shuffling our deadlines around on that. So we’ll keep you up to date on how those things are going.
Couple of cool and interesting things for you. Number one, our Mistborn box from the Year of Sanderson, these are now available. They are going to go fast. This has been our most popular box. This has the very nice bookends in it. So grab yours before they sell out. They probably won’t last very long.
In conjunction with that, we have a very cool video releasing here later this week that my team has been putting a lot of work into. This is not the baldy, beardy Brando video. That’s coming in July. But we have a very, very awesome video for you. We’ve been working on a little video series about kind of the origins of various books in the Cosmere, and the first of those is coming out. So be watching for that, that I’ve seen a rough draft off. Looks really nice. Taylor’s been working very, very hard on that. He’s smiling because it’s probably a lot of work to get that ready.
Little things. For those of you who follow Intentionally Blank, our podcast, we’re doing a little bracket on some of our favorite dumb things we’ve talked about on the podcast. For those interested, we’ve actually moved this to a Google form. We used to have it as a Reddit poll, but I pointed out you need a Reddit account to vote on those. We though we’d do it in a way that would be a little easier for people. So we’re going to extend the voting deadline for this first one until through this week. And I’ll be announcing what the brackets, the results are every week on our Weekly Update. So the first bracket result will be next week. I will announce the winners of that. Well, I guess I won’t announce it next week. I’ll get to that in a minute. But very soon we’ll be announcing that.
In fact, let me mention that. I am going to go on a writing retreat next week because I need to get parts-big early chunk of Stormlight 5 ready to go to editorial, to be read by my agent and my editor, and for Peter and his team to work on. Just so we can start doing this in shifts. That means I’m going to be taking the first 120,000 words or so and doing a deep dive on a revision of those. Which means we shouldn’t expect any percentage update for next week. I will not be writing new material. I’ll fall just a little bit behind, but I’ll catch up on that, as I do revisions instead. It also means there’ll be no Weekly Update next week. So I will be back in two weeks to tell you how that writing retreat went, to see if I managed to get through all 120,000 words. Peter’s very much hoping that I will. And I will let you know the results of our first bracket in the podcast, and I will update you on other things.
Hey, Brandon from about five minutes in the future, jumping back. We forgot something. We moved the camera, but we figure it’ll be value add. I am actually going to a Comic Convention this year, one I’ve never been to before. I like to go to different places. We were at New York Comic Con last year. This year we’ve decided to go to Tampa Bay Comics Convention. I generally, these days, am picking one convention other than Dragonsteel to go to. And this year we decided on this one for a variety of reasons. And so this is in late July. My signing and paneling info is to come. But I am very excited to be going down. I think this is my first time signing in Tampa. So I will see, hopefully, many of you at Tampa Bay Comic Convention. July 28-29th.
Thank you for hanging out with me for this little bit longer than normal Weekly Update. I will see you in two weeks.
June 7, 2023
Convention Registration is Live! + Weekly Update
Hey! Welcome to the Weekly Update. If you are curious what happened to my hair, well, we might have a video coming up for you in about a month. So watch for that. It’s quite fun.
Otherwise, time for some updates. Stormlight 5 is, Bing! 52% Moving just along at the speed I want to be moving at. Everything is going very well. Skyward Legacy is, Bing! Still at 25%.
So some really exciting news for you. Item number one of really exciting news. The convention registration is open, and the merch is live. So go get your badge. Go register for the convention. Pick up your merch for the convention. It is all ready to go and you can go register.
Now, Kickstarter update. We have everything ready for Secret Project 3. In fact, it’s right here. We have been shipped all 150,000 copies. We have them in the warehouse. This means, for the first time, Secret Project 3 will have no delays. We are very excited to tell you this. Now, we can’t ship it out quite yet even though we have it because we are constantly getting shipments of Secret Project 2 and we are shipping those out. If those shipments remain steady, we will have them all out by the end of June. We can’t promise that, obviously, because it’s outside of our control whether they come in. But we have been getting steady shipments. We’re at almost a third of those shipped out. And we are working very hard on the Sel box, which is our June box. So theoretically, the team is going to be packing all three of these together in the next month and shipping them all out. So yes, Kellyn is grinning back there in kind of a wide-eyed grin. We have asked for a little bit of extra help, so we should have enough people, theoretically, to get this done. And so you can expect a lot of boxes to be going out in the next few weeks.
And, like I said, if you want to know what’s going on here, in July, we’ll have a video ready for you. Until then, well, until next week. I’ll be back with another Weekly Update.
May 30, 2023
Big Stormlight Milestone! + Weekly Update
Hey, Weekly Update time! So, starting off, Stormlight 5 is at, Bing! 50%. That’s right. I hit 225,000 words, which I’m calling 50% on this. Hoping for a final book at around 450,000 words. We will see. But I feel very good at 50%. I warned you last week I thought I would make it, and we did. Skyward Legacy is at, Bing! 25%. So Janci has also hit a milestone there. Both books are going along and moving along, and so hopefully we will have them for you before too much longer.
My deadline right now for this, Peter has asked that I turn in the first draft of the book December 15. So I have built my outline shooting for that. Now, I do have to warn you. There’s a chance I will finish the book, and it won’t be good enough. I never anticipate that. It happens rarely. Usually there are revisions I have to do and I can fix it. But if I don’t hit that deadline, we may have to push the book back. Or if I do hit the deadline and the beta reader feedback makes me think that we’ll need more time, we’ll do that. I don’t anticipate that. I feel very confident in the book right now. It’s going really well. So I’m hopeful that we will be able to hit all of our deadlines, which would be having the book come out for Dragonsteel in the Fall of 2024.
Speaking of Dragonsteel, our convention, Dragonsteel 2023, we have registration opening one week from today at 10:00 AM Mountain Daylight Time. So we just released our badge types and pricing. Check them out at Dragonsteel.com. Maybe set a reminder on your phones. This convention’s a lot of fun. If you haven’t been to it before, it’s quite the blast. We are preparing some really fun things. So that is one week from today at 10:00 AM, registration will open.
Dragonsteel bookstore wants me to mention that it’s your last chance to use the discount code MistbornMay. So we have a discount code going. It expires this month. It does not include leatherbounds. So unfortunately, leatherbounds, we just don’t have very many of them so those aren’t on sale. But you can use the discount code for everything else.
Finally, the Frugal Wizard Book Club. This is on this channel where we have a nice panel of experts talking about the book. We just recorded those. We are now going through and doing editing and things like that. We’re going to publish them at the end of June. So we’re hoping to get most everyone their books by then. We will see. We did get another truck last week. It was a half-sized truck, but we shipped it out. And we are getting another truck tomorrow. So they are regularly coming. The worry that we would get one truck and then no more did not occur, thankfully. The books are going out very regularly. We will expect that they will continue to do so. We can’t, obviously, promise because we don’t have control over that. But we are more and more confident that these are all going to go out before the end of June, which we’re going to try to do. If we miss that, then there might be a few that go out in July. But hopefully everything’s going to go well and you will all have your books before too much longer. So you can prepare for that book club, which will be coming around the end of June.
I will be back next week with another update, so I will see you then.
May 23, 2023
The Work Continues! + Weekly Update
Brandon here with your Weekly Update. Stormlight 5 is, Bing! 48%. So we are moving right along. Next week we will probably cross that 50% mark. What this means is right now I’m at about 220,000 words. I’m going to hit us at 50% when we hit 225,000. Now, the book might be longer than 450,000, but I’m kind of hoping it will be 450,000. So we’ll see. But that’s what I’m going to call 50%, so hopefully we will hit that next week.
Skyward Legacy is at, Bing! 25%. So both Janci and I are hitting milestones within these weeks. So tune in next week and we’ll see.
TOR’s new repackage of Alloy of Law is up for preorder. This is with the new style covers. We will have all of the Mistborn books, including The Lost Metal, in this cover edition eventually, before too much longer. These are all trade paperbacks. They look really slick. So we have some links where you can get those, and the release is on July 4th. So that’s when the book will be in bookstores.
Kickstarter update. So some good news for you. We have another truck that has arrived. It wasn’t a full truck. But last week you heard me really worried that we would get one truck and then they would dry up, like happened on Secret Project 1. That is not so far happening. Another truck has come and we have actually scheduled for the other ones. And so we’re hoping that that schedule is going to work and keep. I saw people mention in the last weekly update that they had gotten their shipping notification. We’re going to be shipping out this truck very quickly, and hopefully, the next ones will just keep rolling in so that we can keep sending out Secret Project 2 to you all.
Final thing: we are going to be doing a book club for Book 2, The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England. Like we did with Book 1, we’re going to have a book club on this channel just for the read-along. So if you want to join, it’s going to be published at the end of June. Theoretically by then most people will have gotten their physical editions and you’ll all have had your audiobook and your ebook. So you can come along and participate in that, read the comments, watch the thing. We’re going to have Joshua, my agent, as part of this one, and he is a character and a delightful human being. And so that will be a lot of fun. So come be prepared to go to the Frugal Wizard book club, which we’ll do across a couple of weeks like we did the last one here on the channel on YouTube.
I’ll be back next week with more updates for you.
May 16, 2023
Frugal Wizard Update + Weekly Update
Hello! Weekly Update time. So, “Stormlight 5,” Bing! 46%. Moving it up 2% again this week. Writing has been going really well. I am moving through this thing. I’m over 200,000 words. So I feel good. I need to turn it in. TOR has been pretty explicit with us. I need to turn it in on June 1st of next year, which means that’s the final draft of it. So I just need to keep on going. The goal is, if I can possibly finish this thing by January 1st that still makes it pretty tight but that’s what we’re going to try to do. So follow along.
“Skyward Legacy” is at, Bing! 22%. So that is moving along very well also. I’ll probably be stopping to do my pass on that early fall, which would be my guess. That’s when Janci thinks that she’s going to be finished.
A couple of other fun things for you. TOR’s repackage of “Alloy of Law” is available for preorder right now. So new covers on all of the Wax and Wayne books coming up that are matching the new covers for the original trilogy, all of these in these nice trade paperback, kind of a more modern-looking cover for these. So if you’ve been looking to pick up copies and you want some nice trade paperbacks, those are coming out, and we will have all of the rest of them coming shortly.
I encourage you to join me Thursday of this week and watch a livestream with me and my friend Wes Chu. Wes is a fantastic author. I would recommend that you pick up his books and read them. They are fast-paced kind of sci-fi/fantasy thriller sort of things. They’re great books, and Wes is a great guy. And so please, you know, have some questions ready. We have a thread on Reddit where you can post your questions for me and Wes. This is not a spoiler stream. This is a chat about anything with Wes. He’s a delightful human being, and we went to high school together. We didn’t know that until we met again many years later because he only went one year to my high school. But two high school students from Lincoln, Nebraska, became professional sci-fi/fantasy authors. Who knew? So anyway, come see Wes.
Now, the exciting thing, which some of you already know because I believe an update went live on Kickstarter yesterday. We have gotten our first truck of Secret Project 2. Now, last time we got one truck of secret project for Secret Project 1, we got really excited and assumed we were getting all the other trucks very soon thereafter because that’s what we had been told would happen. And then we got one truck and a lot of time passed. We are trying to see if that’s going to happen this time, and we do not have straight answers yet. We do know we have one truck. And so we are shipping that truck of them out. And as soon as we get others we will ship them. We can’t promise when we’ll get those. But we will be updating you as we do.
So Secret Project 2, “The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England,” will start shipping in print this week, and may have already started happening. We have 17,000 of these. And so what we decided for this one is that we would ship to the first 17,000 backers who backed to receive a physical copy of the book. We figured that’s the fairest way to do this. That doesn’t mean number one will get theirs first. We’re just going to ship to those 17,000 because the system doesn’t let us necessarily figure that out. But we can get those books to the first 17,000. So if you backed the Kickstarter early, you should get a notification here soon.
Last item of business. Because we are having difficulties getting these all fulfilled, we’re going to go ahead and push the Words of Radiance crowdfunding campaign back again. We were kind of looking and eyeing this September/October, or this August/September. We just don’t feel comfortable doing that. We’ve just had enough delays on this Kickstarter. We feel a lot more comfortable asking you for backing again once you know that our Year of Sanderson has worked out. And we’re still very confident. I mean, we have some little delays, but we feel very good about how quickly we are getting these out considering when we’re receiving them. But we don’t feel comfortable asking you for more money yet. So look for the Words of Radiance campaign to be pushed back again to Spring. This won’t actually change when you would have gotten your books for your Kickstarter, because if you see, I’m still signing the pages and getting these things all done. And so we’re still, all along we’ve been eyeing doing this Kickstarter, even if it was in September/August, and you getting your books by Christmas of next year. We just can’t ship out things that are not Year of Sanderson this year. Obviously, we have too much to do. So even though we’re pushing it back, don’t worry. We’re still going to send these in and get them bound and shipped to us.
So look forward to that crowdfunding campaign next Spring, probably early Spring 2024 sometime. I’m thinking March-ish is probably where we’ll end up. And again, don’t worry. The books will still be ready, assuming—we’ll do everything we can to get those ready. If the bindery gets them to us, our goal will be to send those books for the holiday season that year. But we will keep you updated on that as we learn more. I’m going to finish signing these. I’ve only got a few left to sign, and then we’re going to ship them all off to the bindery. And theoretically, they’ll start sending us large numbers of Words of Radiance Leatherbounds. So look forward to that, Kellyn. Find a place for them in the warehouse. We do have a nice, new warehouse that the secret projects Kickstarter paid for. So thank you, all, for that. Now we have a nice warehouse to put all these books in.
And so we will be back next week with another Weekly Update. Sorry, this one rambled just a little bit.
