Brandon Sanderson's Blog, page 5
May 9, 2023
Dragonsteel 2023 + Weekly Update
Hey! Weekly Update time. [In the YouTube video] I am wearing snazzy clothes because after this I am running to Utah Valley University where I am giving the commencement address, and they are giving me an honorary PhD. So I will be Honorary Doctor Sanderson. Not a real doctor. But it’s a great honor. So I’m very happy about that. Hopefully, my speech goes over well.
But for you guys, I have a couple of updates. Number one, Stormlight 5, Bing! 44%. It is coming along quite nicely so I’m going to bump it up 2%. I’m actually right around just over the 200,000-word mark. But I’m anticipating this at 450,000 rather than 400,000, and so that’s why we aren’t at 50% yet. So we’re just kind of hovering there. It’s more of a gut feeling on these percents than it is an exact science.
Though speaking of the percents, Bing! Skyward Legacy is at 20%. So Janci’s working away on that book, and I am very eager to see how the first draft turns out.
Last bit of announcements, I can talk about Dragonsteel 2023. It’ll be held November 20th and 21st, 2023. Registration opens June 6th. So if you want to register for that, you’ve got about a month until registration opens. And beyond that, we have hotel group rates available. You should be just fine grabbing those rooms right now because we have opened up Dragonsteel large enough that we don’t anticipate selling out in the first few weeks. So you should be just fine getting a hotel room now and then registering on the 6th. You will be able to get a ticket. Now, if you wait until November to register, I can’t guarantee that you’ll be able to get a ticket. But judging on last year and things like that, you’ll be just fine.
Beyond that, exhibitor applications are open. If you’re interested in having a booth at Dragonsteel. There’s a very large, cool exhibitor hall that was very busy, and people had a lot of fun there last year. So if you’d like to come exhibit, you can enter an application. Volunteer applications are open and can be found here. Or you can go to Dragonsteel.com, and it’ll take you there and give you all the information that you need to know.
Thank you, guys, very much. I’ll be back next week with more updates.
May 2, 2023
Teen Author Boot Camp + Weekly Update
Brandon here. Weekly Update time! Stormlight 5 is at, Bing! 42%. That’s a very auspicious number. Things still continue to go well with that. I am working away and keeping going. And Janci has been working on Skyward Legacy, which is at, Bing! 17%. So both books are proceeding quite nicely.
A couple of cool updates for you. The Indie-Go-Go for the White Sand graphic novel. There’s been some trouble with some of the covers, particularly some of the foiling coming off. It’s like a glittery-foil thing that’s on the cover. We saw a thread on Reddit about it. And so we talked to the publisher, who is Dynamite. And they have said that they can return the damaged copies and receive new ones. So check the Indie-Go-Go page for more information. So if you’ve had one that things are going wrong with, they are willing to replace them. So good on them for doing that. And so go to the Indie-Go-Go page for more information.
Kickstarter update. So we are sending out the May box right now. Watch the progress bars and your email for your shipping information. Some people might actually be getting them today. We’ve got them going out. We’re working on them. We will be posting, or have just recently posted, an update about Secret Project 2. And so check that on the page. We’ll keep you up to date. As soon as we know when those books are going to go out we will let you know.
So Teen Author Boot Camp. This is an organization here locally in Utah that I’ve had the privilege of being involved with several times as one of their speakers. It is a very good program for young people wanting to learn to write. So this being Teen Author Boot Camp is not writing for teens. It is teens who are writing. Check the description if you’re interested. They are working on trying to make sure that Teen Author Boot Camp can continue post-pandemic. They’ve had some issues, as a lot of conventions have had. And we wanted to throw a shout-out to them and as much support as you’re willing to give them. It is a very good organization that has helped many people, including my own niece, who attended a number of times and always spoke highly of it.
Finally, we have a Five Favorites with Shannon Hale, one of my good friends and writer buddies locally here. We recorded this a number of months ago and we finally have gotten this up. Shannon is an absolute delight. You should always go see her if she is touring near where you are. And if you can’t get to see her, you should check out the Five Favorites with her. She’s an excellent writer and a good friend.
April 25, 2023
May Mistborn Swag Box + Weekly Update
Hey! Weekly Update time. Stormlight 5, Bing! 41%. Another 2% this week, which is what we like seeing. I’ve been making good progress these last couple of weeks, so I feel great about that. I’m worried about how long the book will be. We’ll deal with that when the time is appropriate. These percentages, again, are based on a 400,000-word book, which none of the Stormlight books have actually been since the first one. But anyway, we’ll see.
Janci says Skyward Legacy is, Bing! 15%. I think that’s the same as last week, so yep, we’ll just keep you updated on that. She is working along through it. We should have her on to talk about her process sometime because I know it’s a little different from the way that I approach books.
A couple of other things that we have for you. In May, for those of you who are participating in the Year of Sanderson, well, the Mistborn book packaging is underway. Everything’s coming together on that.
Still don’t quite have an update for you on Secret Project 2, though things are looking pretty good behind the scenes. The update I got today just said, “Wait and we’ll see next week.” So hopefully we’ll have something next week that we can say. But no promises. It’s kind of up to how things work with the bindery. We are still getting, I think, half a truck, our last bit of Secret Project 1 coming in. That should have come in on Friday last week. So theoretically, that is all done, and everything is here. So hey, if you want to buy Secret Project 1, we have them in stock and are selling them, and they are shipping out immediately. So hopefully we will have good news about Secret Project 2 very soon.
We had a livestream last week, on the 21st. Check that out if you missed it. That was our monthly livestream. The video is up for that.
Last item, this is your last chance to get The Way of Kings ebook on sale for $2.99. It is the Kindle Monthly Deal. So that’s going to be going away very quickly. So hey, if you for some reason are watching my YouTube channel and haven’t read The Way of Kings, which seems like I might be preaching to the wrong crowd, but maybe there’s some of you, or you have friends and family, hey, in the US, I believe, it is $2.99. I don’t think that’s anywhere else. But hey, go pick up a copy. A very inexpensive week to start on the Stormlight Archive.
Weekly Update April 25 2023April 18, 2023
Frugal Wizard Bundle Out Now! + Weekly Update
Hey! Brandon here with your Weekly Update. So I am going to move Stormlight Archive to, Bing! 39%. Two percentage points this week because things have been going decently well. I still feel a little bit behind. I should be getting about 2% every week. But at least what I’m writing, I think, is working really well.
So Janci also has an update for you for Skyward Legacy. We are at, Bing! 15%. So very happy with how that’s going.
A few other little things for you. Tress of the Emerald Sea, Secret Project #1, hit the New York Times bestseller list and the Sunday Times bestseller list in London. So that’s really exciting, considering that most of you already bought the book. People are still hearing about the book and still buying it, and it did very well on the lists last week for its print edition. So the mass market commercial, I guess, the hardcover commercial edition is what was released.
We are just about finished with the Tress preorders. These are the ones that came after the Kickstarter, where we let people, starting in January, order a copy of our hardcover to be shipped once the Kickstarter editions were out. Those are all out. Kickstarter’s done. So we are moving onto those. And in fact, I think those are probably done by now. They aren’t quite done as I’m recording this on Friday, but I think that, last I heard, they would be finished today, or at the latest on Monday. So those should be going out. If you still want a copy of Tress, we do still have those for sale.
Now, Secret Project 2. For those of you who backed it, I will refer you to the Kickstarter page where we’ve been posting updates. The short version is that we’re waiting on news from the bindery. We’ve done a lot of things behind the scenes. You can read a little bit about where we’re trying to speed this one up. We don’t have books in the hand yet. We’ll keep you up to date as soon as we know.
So if you want Secret Project 2 and you didn’t Kickstart it—the name of it being The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England. It’s a very fun romp. It has some fantastic illustrations done by Steve Argyle. If you want to get a copy, we have our same pre-order bundle up, which means that you’ll be able to get the ebook and audiobook right now, sold together. The hardcover will be shipped after all Kickstarters get theirs. We don’t know when that is yet. We will be keeping everyone up to date. So if you would like to get a copy of it, you can buy our bundle. It is also now available through ebook retailers and select audiobook retailers.
Now, if you live worldwide and you want the audiobook, know that the Spotify code that we give as part of our bundle works worldwide. Even though Spotify hasn’t rolled out audiobook sales worldwide, you can actually still get the code that you get from us regardless of where you live. So if that’s something you want, the audiobook of it, and you want to get it on Spotify through us, the bundle is an excellent way to do that, and we will have a code for you. That bundle does include a Spotify code, an ebook, and a print book, eventually, whenever it comes.
So, sorry for the delays on this. I will keep you all up to date as we learn more from the bindery. We have been pestering them and pestering them. I think they’re a little tired of hearing from us, but they are doing a good job getting us the books, and so hopefully we will have more news for you soon.
April 11, 2023
Tress Nears the Finish Line + Weekly Update
Hey! Weekly Update time. Starting off with Stormlight Archive, we are, Bing! 37%. Inching along just a little bit each week as I’m writing myself into this next big sequence. It’s looking pretty good, but we’ll see.
Skyward Legacy, Bing! Still at 12%. We had Janci doing some other stuff for us. She helped out on a few other projects that you’ll know about eventually, little things that we’re doing for various events we have coming that are going to be very fun. But she should be getting back to that sometime soon.
Now, a giant Kickstarter/Secret Project update. I finally get to tell you that we have all of the copies of Secret Project 1 in hand. And indeed, Fulfillment tells me that they should all either be out today or within the next 24 hours. That means if you backed the Kickstarter and you haven’t gotten yours within about a day, go check on the Kickstarter update page and make sure. They’ll post an update when everything has gone out. And if you haven’t gotten yours for some reason, then something must be up with your email or your address or something like that. So check your information on BackerKit. But like I said, they should all be out either now or within the next 24 hours. So give us about a day and then you should be getting them.
From there, the Fulfillment Team says they’re going to go straight into those who pre-ordered Tress from our store. So if you want to get one of these beautiful hardcovers—we still have copies and they will be shipping this week. So this would be a good time to go to the link in the description to pick up your copy.
But if the premium hardcover isn’t your thing—it is a little more expensive—TOR has the commercial hardcover out in stores or on your favorite online retailers, and you can get that edition. It is the same text, just with a little bit different art treatment and without the full color art and things like that that ours have. So you can decide if you want the premium or the regular. It’s still available on all the ebook and audiobook sites. So that is Secret Project 1.
We are going to start packing the May box immediately, as soon as we have all of Secret Project 1 out, we’re going to start packing those boxes for May. And we should start shipping those out before too much longer. I think you guys are going to like this one. It’s got something that when I first pitched the whole idea of the Year of Sanderson, I said, “And I want to do this. I want to do this piece of cool swag.” And the design team did a fantastic job taking my vision and making it a reality. It turned out even better than I imagined it. So there’s something really cool in that one for you.
That is the giant Kickstarter/Secret Project update. Thank you all for your patience. I know this was a bit of a delay. We are doing everything we can to make sure this doesn’t happen for the future books. But we should have all of those out to you very soon for at least the first one.
April 6, 2023
Guest Editorial: Cory Doctorow is a Bestselling Author, but Audible Won’t Carry his Audiobooks
Hey, everyone. I hope you’ll be willing to read another post about the problems with Audible and the current audiobook landscape. It has been a few months since I decided not to put my secret projects up on their platform, and want to keep the discussion going about the topic. To that end, I would like to try something we do only rarely on my website: have a guest editorial. Cory Doctorow (all around great guy and well-known blogger, speaker, and digital rights advocate) reached out to me about these issues. He has a sharp perspective on all of this. Indeed, one of the very first times I ever got an inkling that things were wrong with Audible, was because of a conversation I had with Cory. He’s an excellent writer, and I think you’ll appreciate what he has to say. He’s composed some thoughts on the larger problems with Audible and Amazon right now–not just the ones I highlighted. Give it a read! And if you’re interested, he’s doing his own Kickstarter for the audiobook of his latest novel Red Team Blues (which he refuses to put on Audible), and has posted the details at the bottom. -Brandon
Audible is a monopolist. The audiobook giant – a division of Amazon – controls more than 90 percent of the audiobook market in most commercially significant categories.
Audible built that monopoly the old-fashioned way: by cheating.
Audible is part of the Amazon conglomerate. Like all tech giants, Amazon’s growth strategy was to tap the capital markets to buy out potential rivals when they were just getting started, while selling products below cost to prevent new companies from springing up faster than Amazon could buy them out.
On the way, Amazon played us all. First, it gave customers a good deal, with deep subsidies on common products from diapers to hardcovers. It subsidized shipping and offered free returns.
All the while, the company was scheming to lock buyers to its platform. Some of those moves were overt, like selling us shipping a year at a time, in advance, through a program called Prime. Today, a supermajority of US households get locked into a year’s Amazon shopping through Prime subscriptions.
Some moves were sneakier, like the use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) on ebooks and audiobooks. DRM is a kind of encryption that is marketed to creators and publishers as a way of preventing unauthorized copying.
In practice, pirates find it trivial to remove DRM, or – easier still! – find a copy of the same file that someone else already removed the DRM from. But while DRM doesn’t do much to prevent unauthorized use, it is a supremely powerful tool for preventing authorized use.
Under Section 1201 of 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), it is a felony to provide someone with a tool to remove DRM, even if no copyright infringement takes place. And not just any felony! The penalty for violating DMCA 1201 is a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine…for a first offense.
That means that once you buy an ebook or audiobook that’s locked to Amazon with DRM, only Amazon can unlock it. If you break up with Amazon – or if a writer you love decides to take their books elsewhere – only Amazon can give you permission to move your books to a rival platform.
It’s as if every book you bought at Walmart could only be stored on a Walmart bookcase, to be read in a Walmart chair, under a Walmart lightbulb, and if the author of the book gave you a tool to let you use someone else’s shelves, chair or bulb, Walmart could send that author to prison for five years, for letting you transfer the book they wrote, whose copyright they hold.
The most incredible thing about DRM is that Amazon sold it to the publishers and rightsholders as a benefit, including it in a package of sweeteners and goodies that were designed to lock publishers into the platform – cheap advertising, generous recommendation policies, and high fees for writers who directly published on Amazon through Kindle Direct and the Audible Content Exchange (ACX).
Here we see parts one and two of the platform playbook: in part one, you dangle incentives for buyers, until they are locked into the system; in part two, you shift benefits to sellers, until they, too, are locked in.
In the final act, all the goodies are withdrawn from buyers and sellers alike, and transferred to the platform’s shareholders.
That’s where we are now.
Amazon shoppers can’t help but notice that buying on Amazon has gotten far worse: a search for a common product yields an entire screen of ads, and four more screens that are 50 percent advertising. Amazon’s $31 billion/year “advertising” product is primarily fueled by sellers who bid against each other to be at the top of your search results, whether or not their product is cheaper, better, or more closely matched to your search terms. The more a seller pays for ads, the more sales they get, but they also have to charge more and/or reduce quality to remain profitable after spending so much on advertising.
Sellers, too, are increasingly vocal about their worsening conditions on the platform. For ebook authors, the main culprit is the shifting terms in the Kindle marketplace, from royalty calculations to the ever-changing list of sins that can get you booted off the platform altogether, without explanation or appeal.
But things are much worse for audiobook authors.
Back in 2020, writers who used Audible Content Exchange (ACX, Audible’s self-serve platform for independent writers and small publishers) uncovered a massive wage-theft scandal they dubbed #Audiblegate.
ACX authors had long observed a system-wide decline in their sales figures, which they were at a loss to explain, especially in light of Amazon’s frequent pronouncements about the growth of ACX and Audible.
But eventually, they figured it out. Amazon wanted to lock subscribers to Audible by getting them to buy a book-per-month subscription, which would guarantee that if you wanted an audiobook, you’d get it on Audible, because you’d already paid for it. To make that deal more attractive, Amazon offered an incredibly generous returns policy – after buying an Audible book, you had a year to return it, no questions asked.
Amazon also went to great lengths to make sure its subscribers knew about this offer. When you finished listening to a book all the way through, you’d get a pop-up asking you if you wanted to return it for a full refund of your one-book credit.
If you ignored that come-on, Amazon bombarded you with emails and other invitations to return the book, whether you’d never finished the book, or had listened to it three times in a row and written a glowing review.
How could Amazon afford such a generous returns policy?
Simple: they made authors pay for it.
Every time a listener returned an audiobook, Audible clawed back the royalty that the author would otherwise be due. ACX authors financed their own audiobooks, and were required to guarantee Amazon a seven-year exclusivity window, as well as submitting to having every copy of the book they sold locked to Amazon’s platform for all eternity with DRM.
ACX authors were outraged by #Audiblegate, and rightly so. A campaign launched by Susan May, an ACX author from Perth, Australia quickly gathered steam. One ACX author, the forensic accountant-turned-finance thriller writer Colleen Cross, took a deep dive into Audible’s royalty calculations and determined that the company’s returns policy was just the tip of the iceberg. Amazon misrepresented everything about its royalty scheme, shuffling numbers behind the scenes.
All told, Cross believes that Audible has stolen in excess of $100 million from its authors. The company advertises a 40% royalty for exclusive titles; the true rate is 21%. For nonexclusive titles, Audible promises 25%, but really pays 13%.
Stealing $100 million from authors is a dirty trick indeed, but it would be a mistake to view Amazon as a uniquely immoral company. Amazon is behaving as any monopolist would, free from either the discipline of competition or regulation, holding the whip-hand over its suppliers and customers thanks to DRM lock-in.
The problem with Audible is not that it makes a wide catalog of audiobooks available through a convenient app. The problem is that Audible uses technology, accounting fraud, and market power to steal vast fortunes from creative workers and the audiences who love their books.
It need not be this way. Amazon’s abuse is not the result of some special defect in the character of its managers, but rather, a defect in the structure of the market. Once Congress created a law like the DMCA, designed to help corporations to usurp the relationship between creators and their audiences, this kind of ripoff was inevitable.
After all, Amazon isn’t the only company that uses DRM to extract billions from people who make things and the people who buy the things they make – think of Apple, which uses the DMCA to make installing apps without using the App Store into a felony, and then rakes off 30 cents from every dollar you spend in an app.
Our dysfunctional Congress has been struggling to take action on Big Tech, getting closer with each legislative session – this session’s ad-tech breakup bill is ambitious and well-wrought, with a diverse list of sponsors that includes both Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren. Who knows, maybe this one will pass, and be the first domino in a chain reaction that (eventually) forces Amazon and other tech giants to play fair.
Likewise, the Federal Trade Commission is under new management, a young prodigy named Lina Khan who made her bones writing a seminal paper on Amazon’s market abuse when she was just a law student – just three years before assuming the helm of the world’s most powerful consumer protection agency, which had, for decades, declined to use that power. Perhaps Chairwoman Khan will bring Amazon to heel.
But we have a role to play, too – both as writers and as readers.
I have never permitted DRM on any of my works, which means that none of my audiobooks are for sale on Audible. This is a consequential decision: my agent tells me that it cost me a fully paid-off mortgage and a fully funded college savings account for my daughter.
But for more than a decade, I’ve paid to produce my own audiobooks, to be sold everywhere except Audible, paying incredible narrators like Neil Gaiman, Amber Benson (Tara from Buffy, and a brilliant writer in her own right) and Wil Wheaton to record them at Skyboat Media, a legendary LA studio. These books aren’t cheap to make, and while they sell well relative to other titles on non-Audible, DRM-free platforms like libro.fm, Google Play and downpour.com, the total numbers are still anemic, a tiny fraction of my ebook and print book sales and far fewer than my peers in the field get from Audible.
During the lockdown, I decided to try something different. Using Kickstarter, I pre-sold the audiobook for Attack Surface. The campaign broke every audiobook crowdfunding record, topping $268,000 (a record that Brandon went on to comprehensively smash, of course!).
Last year, I repeated the trick, crowdfunding audio for Chokepoint Capitalism, a nonfiction book I co-wrote with the Australian copyright scholar Rebecca Giblin, about how monopoly in the arts screws over creative workers, and what to do about it.
We made a small exception to our no-Audible policy for this book: we packaged the chapter about #Audiblegate and Audible’s other ripoffs as an “Audible Exclusive” and uploaded it to Audible via ACX. That’s the only part of the book you can get on Audible.
And now, I’m doing it again.
Red Team Blues is the first volume in my new series about Martin Hench, a hard-charging, 67 year old forensic accountant who has spent 40 years unwinding Silicon Valley’s sleaziest finance scams. I wrote it in a white-hot fury during lockdown, from idea to first draft in six weeks flat.
The last time I blasted out a book that quickly, it was Little Brother, which has been a New York Times bestseller three times over, translated into dozens of languages, and adapted for stage. From the moment I finished Red Team Blues, I thought I had something special. A week later, I knew it, after my editor at Tor bought the book and two sequels for a fantastic advance.
The book comes out on April 25th, and it’s already swept the trade magazines, with starred reviews all around. I’m just a few weeks away from an extensive tour of the US, Canada, the UK and Germany.
What’s more, I just got out of the studio, where Wil Wheaton recorded a stupendous audiobook of the novel.
That audiobook will not be sold on Audible.
Instead, I’m in the middle of another successful, high-profile Kickstarter campaign for it. Preselling the audiobook through Kickstarter makes the finances of producing an expensive, high quality audiobook work – and of course, the profits make up for the massive losses I’ve incurred because Audible refuses to carry my DRM-free books.
But more importantly, the audiobook serves as an object lesson to my fellow writers. As a group, writers have to contend with a brutal collective action problem. If a sufficient number of well-regarded, well-selling writers withheld their books from Audible – if only for the ninety days after release – we could bring Audible to heel and force it to give us the option to sell our work without DRM.
After all, the thing Audible fears more than anything else is competition. The company’s most valuable asset is its lock-in over writers and listeners. Without that lock-in, the profits from every sleazy trick would have to be weighed against the losses from writers and readers leaving the platform in disgust.
Remember, all of this starts with control over buyers. Locking you in lets Audible lock us in. If you were to try, say, Libro.fm and discover what a fantastic experience it offered, and shift your habits from automatically buying on Audible to automatically buying on Libro, the company would lose its hold on you – and thus on us.
Convincing a critical mass of writers to push back against Amazon’s abuses won’t be easy, but writers do understand the risk of being at the mercy of a company with a well-deserved reputation for bullying its suppliers and wringing every last cent out of them.
Successful independent campaigns that prove that buyers are willing to shop off Amazon. They prove that readers buy audiobooks because they want to support writers, not buy more rocket ships for Jeff Bezos. A successful indie campaign makes for a hell of a convincer for a hell of a lot of writers.
I hope you’ll consider backing my Kickstarter – in service to a better future for audiobooks, and a damned fine literary experience. To quote my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who read Red Team Blues overnight and emailed me once he’d turned the last page:
That.
Was.
A! F***ing! Ride!
Whoa!
-Cory Doctorow
April 4, 2023
Download Secret Project #2 Now + Weekly Update
Hey! Brandon here with your Weekly Update. Stormlight Archive is, Bing! 36%. Yes. I have
been working hard at Stormlight Archive Book 5, and I actually wrote some interludes. So that was my work this last week. Everything’s still looking good. Just kind of plugging away, moving, moving, moving. I’m just a smidge behind where I want to be, so hopefully I can catch that up as we move through the months here.
So Skyward. Skyward Legacy, which Janci is working on. We actually have her working on something interesting else, just some little tweaks for something else we’re doing, so she’s still, Bing! At 12%, same as last week. But we’ll expect to see that moving up as well.
And a third number for you. Our shipments on Secret Project 1 are really moving into overdrive, now that we’ve actually got the books. We are, Bing! At about 70% shipped so far. So that’s not as far as we wanted to be, but it is pretty good considering how late we got these books. We hope to get the rest of those out very, very soon.
So in the meantime, to tide you over, we have Secret Project #2, the digital files. They’re out. We released them on Friday. You can download your files. Make sure you go through Kickstarter and BackerKit and all the same things that you did on the first one. This is for backers. They aren’t out yet for non-backers. We’ll give you an announcement when they are ready for the rest of you to buy. But right now, if you haven’t gone and grabbed that, go do it.
Last little update is, if you guys are the ones who loved the little coins that we did for Mistborn, kind of in-world coins with Shire Post Mint, they are releasing Era 2 of Mistborn, some new coins from the Wax and Wayne Era, and that’s coming out pretty soon here. And we’ll probably put some pictures up of those for you right now so you can see.
So anyway, wanted to make you aware that that’s what’s going on in our world. I will be back with another update next week. In the meantime, I hope that you guys enjoy Secret Project #2. It’s the one that’s not in the Cosmere. It is me doing something just completely off the wall. This is part of what these secret projects were supposed to mean to me, is no prior expectations for myself or anyone, just write what I am passionate about in the moment. And Secret Project 2, I’m really excited for you to read this. In particular, there’s a lot of kind of extra art in this one. I’ll just point you toward that one. Steve Argyle was our artist and he went above and beyond the call of duty, and we’ll just say way beyond what we asked him to do. And he’s incredible. And we’re really, really happy with how that turned out.
So as the print books go for Secret Project 2, I’ll let you know as soon as I can. Theoretically, they’re going to start binding those as soon as they finish Secret Project 1. But I’ll keep you up to date. Thank you, as always, for your patience. We’re sorry that Project 1 has taken so long to get shipped. We are doing everything that we are capable of doing to make sure that such delays are minimized in the future.
April 3, 2023
Outside
Snow is falling. So I look up.
The world mystifies when you stare up through falling snow. Even standing still, you can soar. Even alone, you are surrounded. Even mundane, you find magic. I’ve spent my life chasing the fantastical, yet everything I’ve ever imagined can be casually matched by someone tilting their head up. The soft. Settling. Aspiration.
Of snow on an otherwise ordinary day.
When I was eighteen, I moved from Nebraska to Utah. Here, snow is fleeting, embarrassed to be an obstruction. But in Nebraska, snow squats. It claims land, builds empires. You fight it all winter, carving pathways, reconquering your sidewalks. The cold digs inside, frosting your bones with a chill that lingers, even after you return to warmth.
I often think of those snowy days, now that I live in a desert. But each year my memories are a little less fresh. We build our lives with layer upon layers of years, like falling snow. And like the new snow, most experiences melt away. In interviews, I’ve been asked to recount my most frightening experience. I struggle to answer because it’s the lost memories that scare me—the unnerving knowledge that I’ve forgotten the majority of moments that made me who I am. Those dribbled away when I wasn’t looking and joined the spring runoff of life.
Fortunately, some experiences do remain. In one, I’m fourteen, and it’s a cold night in Nebraska. My best friend at the time was a boy we’ll call John. Though we went to different schools, he was one of the only other Mormon kids around, so our parents often had us play together. When you’re very young, it’s proximity—not shared interests—that makes friends. This often changes as you age. By fourteen, John had found his way to basketball, parties, and popularity. I had not.
On that day, after a youth activity, another friend suggested we leave to go have some fun. I don’t remember where. Strange, that I’ve lost what this was about, though the rest of the scene is etched into the glacial part of my brain. One of us was old enough to drive, so we headed out to their car.
Five seats. Six teens. They’d already counted.
Without a word to me, the others climbed in. John gave me one hesitant look, then settled into the front passenger seat and closed the door. They left me on the curb. The car vanished, taillights flaring in the night like lit cigarettes.
The memory settled in for the long winter. That night. Watching. Remembering John’s face, which was so strikingly conflicted. Half ashamed. Half resigned.
I was no stranger to being outside. It happens when you’re one of three Mormon kids in a large school. You’ll be at a birthday party, and the wine coolers will come out. Everyone stands there worrying you’ll judge them—while you just want them to stop staring. But you leave anyway, because you know they’ll enjoy themselves more if you and your unusual morals aren’t there to loom.
It should have been different that night though, watching John and the others drive away. They were in my church group—ostensibly, my tribe. They’d still left me outside.
This event shocked me in how dramatic it was, as I wasn’t generally bullied. I tended to be adept at social settings. People generally liked me. At the same time, there was something I’d begun to notice. Something distancing about me.
It happens still. It isn’t that people shun me or don’t want me around; indeed, they seem to appreciate me. When I join a group, I generally end up leading it in some way, and I never sense resentment to this fact. But I also have an air around me. Some writer friends call me the “adult in the room.” I tend to attack projects too aggressively, tend to be the one who steps in and gets things done—even when they don’t need to be done immediately, and when everyone else would rather relax.
This comes, in part, from a certain…oddity about me that started in my young teens, around the time that John drove off. As my friends grew hit puberty, they became more emotional. The opposite happened to me. Instead of experiencing the wild mood swings of adolescence, my emotions calcified. I started waking up each day feeling roughly the same as the day before. Without variation.
Around me, people felt passion, and agony, and hatred, and ecstasy. They loved, and hated, and argued, and screamed, and kissed, and seemed to explode every day with a pressurized confetti of unsettling emotions.
While I was just me. Not euphoric, not miserable. Just…normal. All the time.
Often, it genuinely seems like I exist outside of human experience. It’s not sociopathy. I’m quite empathetic—in fact, empathy is one of the ways that I can feel stronger emotions. I’m not autistic. I don’t have a single hallmark of that notable brand of neurodivergence. It’s also not what is called alexithymia, which is a condition where someone doesn’t feel emotions (or can’t describe them).
I care about people, and I feel. I’m not empty or apathetic. My emotions are simply muted and hover in a narrow band. If human experience ranges between a morose one and an ecstatic ten, I’m almost always a seven. Every day. All day. My emotional “needle” tends to be very hard to budge—and when it does move, the change is not aggressive. When others would be livid or weeping, I feel a sense of discomfort and disquiet.
My emotions do go a little further than this on occasion, maybe once a year. It takes something incredible—such as being deeply betrayed by someone I trusted.
I’m not looking for sympathy; I don’t want to be fixed. I appreciate this aspect of my makeup—and it’s part of what makes me so consistent at writing. When everyone else is in crisis, I’ll just steam along. At the same time, when everyone else is elated by some good news…I’ll just steam along, unable to feel the heights of the joy they feel.
It makes people uncomfortable sometimes. Makes them think I’m judging them. While I’m absolutely not, I do try to be careful how I talk about my condition. Not as something to fear. Something, instead, I’m proud of—not because it makes me better than anyone else, but because it’s me. I like being me.
My neurodivergence came up in a recent interview I did. The interviewer latched onto the fact that I don’t feel pain like others do. (More accurately, some mild pains don’t cause in me the same response they do others.) I asked the interviewer not to mention it in his article, as I felt the tone to our discussion was wrong. I worry about my oddity changing the way people think of me, as I don’t want to be seen as an emotionless zombie. So I try to speak of it with nuance.
As the interviewer ignored my request, I thought I’d talk about it here. Profile myself for you—because this aspect of who I am has deep ties to another happening from my teenage years. In this, I want to answer a big question for you, the one everyone wonders about. The key to understanding Brandon Sanderson.
Why do I write?
Why do I write so much?
Why do I write so much fantasy?
Let me tell you about the first day, that beautiful day, when I found myself inside.
It was when I opened a fantasy novel. I was an isolated kid whose emotions were doing something bizarre. Even John leaving had left me feeling…disturbed more than angry. Alone, and outside. Then I opened a book where I found emotion.
In that story about dragons, and wonder, and people trying impossible things, I found myself. I felt a variety of powerful emotions through the characters—emotions that I remembered from when I’d been younger.
I hadn’t tried reading fiction in a long while, so I was blindsided by this perfect book. The experience transformed me, quick as a boy tilting his head back, looking up, and finding a new world.
When I read or write from the eyes of other people, I legitimately feel what they do. There’s magic to any kind of story, yes—but for me, it is transformative. I live those lives. For a brief time, I remember exactly what passion, and agony, and hatred, and ecstasy feel like. My emotions mold to the story, and I cry sometimes. I legitimately cry. I haven’t done that outside of a story in three decades.
Stories bring me inside.
My second published novel is called Mistborn. It’s about a world where ash falls like snow, and I can linger, looking up through it via a character’s eyes. Near the beginning of Mistborn, the teenage protagonist finds herself standing outside a room. It is full of light and laughter and warmth. But she knows, she knows she doesn’t belong inside that room.
She’s wrong.
Nearer the end of the book, I linger on as similar scene—only now, she’s sitting with the others. Light and laughter. Warmth. Mistborn was the first novel I wrote after getting the call offering me a book deal. Finally—after slaving over a dozen unpublished manuscripts—I knew I was going to be a professional writer. With that knowledge, I wrote Mistborn, the book about a girl who learns to come inside.
While writing Mistborn, I changed. Now that I’d made it inside of publishing—now that I’d joined those authors I’d loved for so long—why would I keep writing? I needed a new goal, and I discovered it that year.
So let me tell you why I write. It isn’t about worldbuilding; that’s a mistake everyone makes about me. Assuming I write because of worldbuilding is like assuming someone makes cars because they love cup holders. It’s also not because I’m Mormon, as some profiles bizarrely conclude. My faith and cultural heritage are both important to me, but if I were any other religion, that aspect of me would rightly be a footnote—not a headline.
I don’t write for plot twists, or dragons, or clever turns of phrase—though I enjoy all of these. I write because stories bring people inside. And I sincerely, genuinely believe that is what the world needs.
Lately, I’ve seen a resurgence of something that genuinely disquiets me: an attempt by some members of our community to hold others outside. Science fiction and fantasy is forever gatekeeping what constitutes good or worthy stories. Like my old friend John, who sought cooler friends, we renounce anything accessible—part of our perpetual (and largely fruitless) plea for legitimacy with the literary establishment.
Thing is, I can’t really get mad when someone does this, because I’ve done it myself in the past. The unfortunate truth is that we all probably have at times. The moment a group finds cohesion—discovering the warmth and peace of being inside—we decide there aren’t enough seats, so we start muscling and pushing. Readers who came in because of the latest popular teen novel? Outside. Fans of the film version of a story, instead of the book version? Outside. People who don’t look the same as the supposedly conventional fan? I suspect they know this struggle far better than I do.
To use a thematic metaphor, it’s like we’re dragons on our hoard of gold, jealously keeping watch, worrying that if anyone new enters, their presence will somehow dilute our enjoyment. The irony is that there is infinite space inside, and if we open the way, we’ll find many of these newcomers are the very treasure we’re seeking.
Fantasy, out of all genres, should embrace the different, even if it doesn’t match our specific taste. This is the genre where anything can happen—and should, therefore, be the most open genre. Only fantasy offers me the full range of emotion. The wonder of exploration. The magnificent highs of epic scope and the miserable lows of cataclysmic terror. In writing it, I can learn. Monomaniacal, I hunt experiences of people different from myself, then explore them in prose until I feel—in some small part—what they do.
This is why I write. To understand. To make people feel seen. I type away, hoping some lonely reader out there, left on a curb, will pick up one of my books. And in so doing learn that even if there is no place for them elsewhere, I will make one for them between these pages.
Those who interview me seem to have trouble understanding this fundamental part of who I am: that writing for me isn’t so much about performance as it is about exploration and elevation. I love prose both literary and commercial. And I think I write great prose. I’ve slaved over my style, practicing for decades, honing it for crisp clarity. My prose is usually intended to convey ideas, theme, and character, then get out of the way—because this is how I strive to bring everyone inside.
That said, I know my goal is impossible. Occasional strolls through the outside are part of being human, and I can’t eliminate that. And even I have to admit that there are lessons to be learned on those lonely paths. For example, contrast is the only way to appraise growth. Emotional alien I may be, but that very alienation has motivated me to understand. I value the connections I’ve made so much more for that struggle.
Moreover, I find that occasionally looking in through a window at everyone else gives a person a more complete perspective. Inside, things can get messy, and a streak of color finds it hard to comprehend the painting. I’m a better writer because of my time spent looking in. I don’t know that I could have written Mistborn if I hadn’t been left on that curb.
This isn’t to discount the pain of those who have been forced outside. Nor is it an advocacy for extended periods spent in the cold. I also don’t know if I could have written Mistborn if the wonderful people of the science fiction and fantasy community (including many of the friends I now work with) hadn’t latched on to me in college and—at times—forcibly pulled me inside to be with them. Beyond that, as I’ve grown older, I’ve found people like Emily, who love me in spite of (and partially because of) my quirks. Blessedly, because of this, my times outside have been increasingly brief.
My goal here is merely to point out (as I’ve had occasion to remember recently) that beautiful moments do accompany the isolation. You can only watch the snow fall when you’re outside. Only then can you look up and experience that mystifying world, where fragments of the sky drift past and lift you toward the heavens.
I’m forty-seven now, enjoying desert snowfalls in early April. The man I am is separated by distance and time from that boy who stood on the curb, and I’ve forgotten most of the steps that led between the two. I still don’t feel strong emotions outside of stories—but I did tell an interviewer lately that I sometimes cry when writing scenes in my books. They just aren’t the scenes that I thought he’d expect.
I don’t necessarily cry when characters die, or when they marry, or even when they find victory. I cry when it works. When it all comes together, and in a beautiful shimmering burst of humanity, I feel what it is to be that character. At those times, I remember what I learned twenty years ago writing Mistborn. That there’s a reason I do this. And even if I’ve lost more memories than I retain, each of them had a point, because they collectively brought me here.
So when you find yourself in the cold, know that sometimes, there’s a purpose to it. Trust me; I’ve been there. I might be there right now. Feeling the cold on my cheeks—but these days, no longer in my bones. Knowing that this will pass, and that it might be for my good. Most of all, looking up so I can appreciate it. The still. Solemn. Perspective.
Of one who stands outside.
March 28, 2023
Secret Project 2 Out This Weekend! + Weekly Update
Hey! Brandon here with your Weekly Update. So let’s get some percentages out of the way.
Stormlight Archive is at Bing! 35%. Things are going along very well, so I am inching that up. Do understand we’ll probably have another giant leap forward when I get to 300,000 words when I know that I’m done with this current plot cycle. That’s where I’ll mark it at 66%. So I might be a little further ahead than that percentage indicates. I might be a little further behind. But that’s where we are right now. Good progress this week.
Skyward Flight from Janci is Bing! 12%. We get three bings today, so hmm! She’s working away on the first book of that follow-up to the Skyward series.
And another percent for you. We are still sending out Tress. We got another giant—I mean these are huge trucks full of books. And we are receiving these trucks regularly. I heaved a sigh of relief when this one came because back in January when we got the first book we were told the next shipment was coming very soon, and then delay, and then delay, and then delay. So when the second truck came in March, I’m like, “Is this going to be just one more truck and then delay, delay? They’d promised us they were coming, but they’ve promised us before. This time, another truck came right after. And there’s another one. They sent us the tracking. We can actually follow the trucks—it’s kind of cool with the GPS—that is on its way.
So they really are coming. And the team has been shipping. And they wanted me to put, Bing! (64%) They are fervently trying to get these all out before the TOR edition goes live in early April. We’re hoping we’ll be able to do that. Because we thought we had lots of time by making sure TOR couldn’t put out their edition until April with ours coming out in January. But you all know how the shipping delays have gone. So at least it’s now happening and our delays should shrink, if there are any, for future books. We’ve been moving lots of things behind the scenes to try to make sure that this doesn’t continue to happen. So I’ll keep you up to date on these Weekly Updates.
Speaking of these, Secret Project 2 comes out this weekend. Digital files are ready. We have recorded the audiobook. We have prepared the eBook. We are going to push them to BackerKit accounts this Friday at midnight Mountain Daylight Time. So you will have your second book. And then I’ll keep you updated on when the print copies of this one come. Again, we’re hoping to have minimal delays for this one but it’s hard to make promises because, you know, we are at the mercy of what people tell us, and sometimes what they tell us is a little aspirational to what actually happens.
One other thing. Mistborn, the eBook, we have a promo this week for $1.99. So hey, share that with your friends if you are interested in sharing the book around. It’s very cheap this week. I always encourage these discounts because, honestly, I think the more people that read the better.
One other thing. This one’s a little bit different because it’s a little more expensive than the $1.99. I’m going to be involved in a writing course with my Spanish publisher, which Penguin Random House in Spain. This will be in Spanish, so it’s not for most of you. But I did want to announce it. It’s a 10-week course starting in April. It will be using kind of my writing lectures as a basis. I will be stopping in for Q&A’s, I think, what is it, twice, during the time. I am not teaching the course. They are teaching it using other instructors like Dan Wells and Mary Robinette Kowal, plus many more, to have a kind of writing course built around using my lectures as curriculum, and I will be involved. Like I said, it’s in Spanish. It’s a little expensive. It’s $399 Euros. Currently, the way that I work, I consider all of my writing education to be for charity. I worry sometimes about the way that someone who gets famous in one field ends up charging people for that same dream, and I don’t want to go there. So the money coming to me from this will all be donated to charity. They are, I hope, going to do a very good job with it. Like I said, it’s a little expensive. That’s not to say that someday I might not do a master class or something like that is actually for profit. I have thought about it. But currently, my tone is, if I’m going to sell dreams, I want to sell the dreams in my books, the stories in my books. And if you want to be a writer, I also want to help you chase that dream, but I don’t want to sell it to
you, if that makes sense. So my part of this will go to a good cause. The Spanish publisher is very good and they are trying very hard to make this worth people’s time. So I hope it is valuable for those of you who are willing to do this in Spanish. My part won’t be in Spanish but most of it will be.
So anyway, thank you all. I will be back next week with more to say.
March 21, 2023
Tress Resumes Shipping + Weekly Update
Hello! Welcome to another Weekly Update. I’m your Brandon, Brandon. So far, I have been
working away since returning on Stormlight 5, and I am at, Bing! 34%. Another percentage point up. Feeling pretty good about that. It’s been just a little hard to get back into the groove. I had to catch up on some email and I did a post on Reddit if you didn’t see it. But it is a longer update on what’s going on with Stormlight 5. The short version is, it’s going well.
Janci sends in a report that the first book of Skyward Legacy is at 6%. So she’s working away at her book as well.
A couple little updates for you. We have Brandon’s Book Club Episode 4 this Thursday, March 23. If you haven’t been watching those, they are great. The team did a wonderful job. And so if you’ve been reading along in Tress you can go and have a nice conversation there, at least watch a nice conversation. Jump down in the comments. Leave your thoughts there.
And, if you haven’t gotten your Tress yet, well, good news. A truckload of books arrived, a very, very large, long truckload of books has arrived. You can see the pictures on the Kickstarter. The team is working hard, and they are shipping them out. They are working as we speak. They’ll be working tomorrow. They’ll be shipping out all next week. They probably won’t get them all out next week. We still have some truckloads to arrive. But these truckloads we’ve been promised are coming much sooner. So we’ll get updates going on there.
The thing you need to know is the books are going out again. I apologize for that delay, and we’re doing everything we can for the next book to try to prevent delays on that one. We will have updates periodically on how that’s going, with the goal to try to ship your books out in April, on time this time. But we don’t always have control over all this. So watch here and we will give you updates and let you know. But for now, Secret Project 1 is on its way out.
Thank you, guys. I’ll be back next week.
