Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Brandon Sanderson (@BrandSanderson), the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Stormlight Archive series and the Mistborn saga; the middle-grade series Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians; and the young-adult novels The Rithmatist, the Reckoners trilogy, and the Skyward series. Brandon has sold more than 40 million books in 35 languages, and he is a four-time nominee for the Hugo Awards, winning in 2013 for his novella The Emperor’s Soul. That same year, he was chosen to complete Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series, culminating in A Memory of Light.
Brandon cohosts (with fellow author Dan Wells) the popular Intentionally Blank podcast and teaches creative writing at Brigham Young University.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: So Brandon, just when we were doing sound check —
Brandon Sanderson: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: What did you do?
Brandon Sanderson: So when I was in kindergarten, I was taught the state song, right? And I have a good friend, Mary Robinette. She worked in stage for a while and we did a podcast together when podcasts were brand new, and she would always soundcheck by doing the “Jabberwock” poem, just this beautiful poetry. She had learned to memorize a poem so that they could get a soundcheck because people generally don’t talk enough for a soundcheck. And so then they come to me and I’d be like, “I’m talking, I’m talking.” You’ve seen it —
Tim Ferriss: I’ve seen it.
Brandon Sanderson: — the stuff that people do.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve seen it.
Brandon Sanderson: And they’re like, “Is that enough? Is that enough?” They’re like, “Still some more,” and you’re like, “Oh, I’m talking, I’m talking.” So I thought, I need a thing, but I don’t know any poetry, but I do know what Ms. Sukup taught me in kindergarten, which is the state song, and so I just started listing off the states in alphabetical order and it became a thing. So now they soundcheck me off with a list of states.
Tim Ferriss: You made it to New Mexico. I’m not sure I could make it past California without making a mistake.
Brandon Sanderson: I still hear the song in my head, “50 Nifty United States.”
Tim Ferriss: All right. Well, let’s leap off of that. Do you have, would you say, in terms of superpowers, an unusual memory, or is there something just to the rhythm and musicality of that that made it stick?
Brandon Sanderson: No, I don’t think I have an unusual memory. Well, I have an unusual one. I don’t have an uncommonly good one. How about that?
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Brandon Sanderson: My wife always jokes I don’t forget a story and that I don’t tend to reread books. I don’t tend to rewatch movies because I’ve seen it, I’ve read it. 20 years or so, I’ll go back and rewatch something, but stories just stick with me. I can tell you about stories that I read when I was still a teenager, but I will forget where my keys are and I will forget people’s names and I will — all of that stuff. I joke that I’ve just got so much RAM and I’ve filled it all with story ideas and so everything else kind of just gets squeezed out the ears.
Tim Ferriss: Well, it seems like where we’re sitting, where we’re sitting at HQ, it seems like the design of Dragonsteel, maybe the intention behind it is to allow you to do that on some level.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, yeah. I mean, everything in our company is built around “Let Brandon cook, and take away from Brandon anything that he doesn’t have to think about or doesn’t strictly need to.” I actually think this is kind of a Tim Ferriss thing, right? Like my water bottle, I don’t have to worry about refilling it and having ice in the morning. I’ve set up a system where somebody does that and I just pick it up and go. The more that I can keep out of my brain that I have to track, the better, because I am always constructing narrative. I’m always working on the story, and so, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s give another example of productivity that I don’t want to say I vetoed, but it was a conversation —
Brandon Sanderson: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: — before we started recording. How many books or book plates do you sign per year?
Brandon Sanderson: So we need between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand times my signature signed. The story is usually I’m sitting here and signing pages while I’m doing anything, because if I have to sign my name a hundred thousand times, then you know —
Tim Ferriss: I’d take up the empty space.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, and we actually used to. Once upon a time, we would get the books, the full books, and I would sit and sign them, and that’s just a massive undertaking. We couldn’t do that anymore. When it got over around 10,000, I’d actually listen to podcasts and go sit and sign books and sign books and sign books. Now we get the pages, like the front page, and we just give them to me in stacks. If anyone wants to see it, my podcast exists so that I can sign the pages. It’s the reverse. I started up because I need to sign these things and I’ll just sit and zip through them normally while I’m doing anything else. But today, I wanted to give you my undivided attention.
Tim Ferriss: I appreciate that. And I’m going to have a lot of super fans of yours, I’m sure, wish and petition me that I would’ve asked a different set of questions. But I’m actually going to start with Seoul, Korea because as I mentioned, I was East Asian studies major, spent formative time, completely changed my life in Japan and other places, Taiwan and mainland China also. Where does Seoul, Korea fit into your life?
Brandon Sanderson: So I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. A lot of us go on two-year missions, can be anywhere. It can be local, it can be overseas. I ended up going to Korea. I got the letter saying, “Hey, this is where we’d like you,” and I’m like, “Where’s Korea?” But I loved my time there. It was really formative for me in multiple ways, one of which is kind of more amusing.
I was, at the time, a chemistry major in college, and I was so happy to be on another continent from chemistry. I had those two years away to really kind of reassess my life and kind of grow up. And most people, when they grow up, they go away from the artistic pursuits because they don’t make a lot of sense. I grew up and came back and said, “I’m going to do this,” right? “I’m going to be a writer.” But living in another culture, living where you are a minority, granted a privileged minority still, but a minority, living and seeing that the way that people’s language influences the way they think about the world, the way that their social mores impact their relationships with one another, and all of these things, was extremely formative for me in understanding how to approach writing a fantastical culture just on a fundamental basis, getting rid of some of these ideas that the way that I do things is the only way to do things.
Tim Ferriss: The Korean language, for people who haven’t been exposed, particularly the writing system —
Brandon Sanderson: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: So Hangul, if people want to learn to read Korean, you won’t be able to understand what you’re reading, but if you want to sound it out, you can learn it in a few hours.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah. We learned it in a few hours. Do you know the story?
Tim Ferriss: Tell the story.
Brandon Sanderson: The story. You know the story.
Tim Ferriss: I do, but I think people will appreciate it.
Brandon Sanderson: Yes. This is obviously mythologized, right? But King Sejong, so King Sejong, he’s the guy on essentially the $10 bill in Korea. He is their George Washington, and Sejong the Great. And what happens, Chinese is a really fascinating writing system because it’s logographic, which means that anyone can read a Chinese character. It’s more of a hieroglyph than it is — you can’t sound it out. And so because anyone can read it, it transcends language in a lot of ways. You can see the symbol for person and know it means person, whether you speak Mongolian, or whether you speak Thai, or whether you speak Japanese or Korean or Chinese, so it makes it a great kind of language for trade. But it also is extremely hard to learn because every concept must have essentially its own letter. And so to be fluent in reading it, you need to learn 2,000 to 3,000 letters.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Brandon Sanderson: And so it was a really bad system for a common people to learn how to read. And King Sejong was like, “My people are illiterate. They can’t learn Chinese. We must have our own writing system that you can sound out, that you sound out Korean.” And he gathered his scholars, and the story is they together created the system that would have no deviations. It read like it sounded. And they designed it based on the movements of the mouth you make. And then King Sejong loved it so much, he wrote it on little leaves and then spread it out because the upper class did not want people to learn how to read and they were very against it. They’re like, “Oh, we don’t want the commoners to read. That’s for us.” Passing the tests in Chinese was a big —
Tim Ferriss: Like Latin for —
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — the high priesthood.
Brandon Sanderson: And so Sejong wrote it on the letters and it blew through Korea and the people picked it up and it was so divinely inspired that they intrinsically knew how to read Korean. And he frustrated the attempts of the nobles from keeping people to read by giving it to people written on leaves. It’s so delightful.
Tim Ferriss: It is an amazing, amazing mythologized story. And the Korean people are very proud of this writing system for good reason. I encourage everybody to just take a few hours. I think there’s even a comic book called How to Learn to Read Korean in 15 Minutes or something like that. Slight exaggeration, it’s going to take you more than 15 minutes —
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — but in 60 minutes you could definitely get the basics and figure it out.
Brandon Sanderson: Definitely gives you a false sense of your own skill. When you learn it, you’re like, “Wow, I’m reading,” and they’re like, “All right, now the actual language, what these things mean.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Good news, if you do learn some Korean, you can hop reasonably easily to Japanese, and in some cases, to Chinese as well. So you might have jeonhwa for telephone, then diànhuà in Mandarin, and then denwa in Japanese. So there’s a lot of overlap. Or if you wanted to say “Tansan mizu o kudasai,” like, “Please give me sparkling water,” in Japanese, it’d be “Tansansu juseyo” in Korean.
Brandon Sanderson: Yep, mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: So anyway, if you get one, then it’s a good branch off to other things. All right, I’m going to cut my linguistics nerding short.
Brandon Sanderson: You need to create a conlang. Have you ever done it?
Tim Ferriss: It? I have actually. So you should explain what that means. But I have actually spent some time on it, and I owe you a huge debt of gratitude because I listened to probably 40 episodes of Writing Excuses.
Brandon Sanderson: Oh.
Tim Ferriss: When I was working on my first real attempt at fantasy worldbuilding a few years ago, and I wanted to incorporate language as a core piece of it. And I spent a lot of time also looking at Tolkien’s work with languages.
Brandon Sanderson: He’s the master.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Unbelievably complex. And I also, at one point, this is actually from my third book, reached out to the gentleman who designed the Na’vi language in Avatar, which in very partial measures stemmed from some of his exposure to some of these East Asian languages as well. But okay, so how would you approach and how do you think about language construction?
Brandon Sanderson: Are you sure we’re not getting too nerdy for your audience?
Tim Ferriss: Ah, you know what —
Brandon Sanderson: This is super nerdy.
Tim Ferriss: You know what? Yeah, folks, look, we’re about to go really deep in the nerd pool, so if you want to skip ahead five minutes, that’s fine, but I’d encourage you to stick around.
Brandon Sanderson: All right, so a conlang is a constructed language. Most people know of Klingon and Elvish, and George Martin has one. And the Na’
vi, you mentioned. These are just invented languages. There’s only one that’s in wide use or “wide” quote unquote, Esperanto. You could almost say that Korean is a bit one because it was actively designed rather than growing organically. But I think it’s hovering in this in-between space. So how do I approach it? I look at what Tolkien did and I say, “Wow, he basically wrote Lord of the Rings because he had these cool languages he was designing and he wanted a place to use them.”
Tim Ferriss: Including crazy scripts.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah. And I said, “I don’t have 20 years to do that, like Grandpa Tolkien. I am really a narrative guy. I really focus on what makes a narrative work. I’m going to break it down.” People think of me as the world-building guy, but I’m not. Certainly, we can talk about this. That’s certainly the thing I’ve used as my branding and marketing. It’s the way that I’ve used to make myself easily recommendable and distinctive. But what I spend most of my time on is narrative.
So when I look at the language, I’m like, “I want to have something that is relevant that works, but I don’t want to spend 20 years.” I usually come up with a few interesting rules that I’ve come up with through my knowledge of linguistics, and I say, “Follow these rules. Whenever you need a word, go back to these rules and build it. Don’t write out the whole language. Don’t come out with how you would say every sentence. Each time you need something, go to the rules, build it up from the fundamentals, and it will all eventually then work.” But it means I end a book with 50 words and maybe a little bit of grammatical structure, not with an entire language that you could speak.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. This I ran into, which is part of the reason why I was revisiting my email exchanges with the person who created Na’vi because I had something like eight greater houses in this fantasy world that I was creating for my own entertainment more than anything else. It’s just an itch I really wanted to scratch, and the extent to which I developed languages was really just for a few exclamations, a few songs, very short, not Tolkien, like 20 minutes on audiobook. And I loved it, but I recognized how you could really trap yourself in quicksand if you tried to get too ambitious.
Brandon Sanderson: We call it worldbuilder’s disease, which sometimes you want to give yourself. It’s fun. But if you spend 20 years worldbuilding every book in today’s market, you’re probably not going to have a career as a professional writer. You might. You might get lucky and write that one book that’ll sell millions of copies and make it so you can live off of just that income. Most of us, it takes a lot more effort and we learn to worldbuild in service of story rather than write stories in service worldbuilding, but everybody gets to do what they want. You scratch your itch how you want to scratch it.
Tim Ferriss: So we’re going to talk about putting in the effort and no man’s land perhaps is one way that we could put it. But I want to ask first about David Farland, if I’m pronouncing the name correctly. So as an undergrad, at least based on the research I did, you took a creative writing class with David Farland, or a writing class. How did that affect you and what lessons might you have sort of grabbed onto that have stuck with you in any way?
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, so I came back from Korea sophomore year of college, and I’m like, “I’m young, I’m stupid. Now’s the time to try to be a writer. This is what I really want to do.” And I suspect we’ll get into later why I really wanted to do that and things like that. But it changed my major to English because I thought that’s what you had to do later. Found out Stephen King and others recommend you major in anything but English. The reasoning being that you should study something that you’re fascinated by and then use that to inform your writing, which is generally pretty good advice. I do recommend that. The cheat code is if you major in English, you can use your writing as your homework. The assignments, you can double use your time. A lot of times you can be practicing your writing, but also turn it in, and so it’s a little easier in some ways.
Changed my major to English, and I took a whole bunch of classes from a whole bunch of professors whom they’re dear to me. I love them. Most of them have retired by now or passed on, but they knew nothing about publishing. This is just very common in the arts. They’ll talk about how to express yourself as a writer, but they won’t talk about how do you construct a sympathetic character. Never heard those terms. They’ll tell you about how to get into a MFA program, but they won’t tell you how to get a publishing deal because none of them have done it. And so again, they did teach me some valuable things, but my senior year, after going through a bunch of these workshops is what we call it, writing workshops. I heard that there was a writer coming in who actually had published something and he was teaching the low level, 200 level class.
By then. I was done taking the graduate courses, even though I wasn’t a graduate yet, and I’m like, “I should probably take this class, even though it’s kind of a step backward. It won’t fulfill any of my credit requirements, but I’m at college to learn, not to check some boxes off of a list.” And so I took his class and it was revolutionary to me. He sat down the first few days, he’s like, “All right, here’s how you actually construct a narrative. Here’s what works. Here’s what doesn’t work. Here are tools.” He really focused, and it became my focus in teaching on here’s a toolbox, because not every tool works for every writer. In fact, you’re generally going to gravitate toward one or two and the rest you’ll find useless. And he took that toolbox approach, and he said, “Some writers do it this way, some writers do it that way. Here’s how you try this. Here’s something to do.” And then he talked about publishing in this way that was mind-blowing because that was the big thing for me was hearing someone say —
Tim Ferriss: The black box.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah. “Here’s my publishing contract,” he said. He passed it around. “Here’s my latest contract. Have a look at it, ask questions, and here’s how you go about getting one of these.” And I took his advice. Back in the early 2000s, publishing and sci-fi fantasy was still very networking focused. It’s actually moved away from that for various reasons. But back then, the best way to break in was to go to the conventions, get into the parties, meet the editors, and start chatting with them and start listening to what they were actually interested in.
The magic question was, what are you working on right now that you’re really excited by? Because this lets you learn the personalities of the various editors. It’s not networking in that none of them knew who I was, but it’s networking in then hearing from them directly what they were buying and why. Then you could go to these 50 editors and say, “All right, these five really seem like they would like my work.” Instead of sending to all 50, I target those five. I met them at a party. I say, “Hey, I met you. Sound like we hit it off. You mentioned that I could send you my work. Here it is.”
And that’s what got me an agent and an editor was doing that, just kind of the Dave Farland method of breaking in. I was the last generation that it worked for. It really doesn’t work anymore. Everyone jokes that in publishing, no one actually wants to publish any authors. No one wants to actually do any work. So any time someone sneaks in, they’re like, “Oh, how did you get into publishing? Oh, really?” And then they close that door so that no one else can get in. We all joke about things like that. It’s not actually true. Everyone actually wants to find great authors and great work, but the industry changes quickly enough that what works for one generation, by the time they’ve broken in, the industry has changed. It just doesn’t work.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m going to come back to the agent and I’ll just plant the seed. I’m going to ask how much writing you did before that happened.
Brandon Sanderson: Okay. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: But before we get to that, I want to ask, are you still teaching the creative writing class at BYU?
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, I am.
Tim Ferriss: Brigham Young University. What is the first class?
Brandon Sanderson: First class, so first class is some things I just told you. I get up and I say to them — actually, the very first thing is I say to them, “During this class, we’re going to pretend you want to be a professional writing writer, earning a full-time living from your writing in the next 10 years. That we’re going to pretend, because most of you…” that’s probably not why they’re there. Most of them, they’re just curious. They may have a book of them, and we have this curious relationship with art in our society. It is, as soon as you say, “I’m going to write something,” people are like, “Oh, when will you monetize it? When will you earn money from it?” And that can be kind of destructive.
Like you mentioned you’re writing a book or you wrote one just because it was an itch. You enjoyed it. I think writing is legitimately just good for people in the same way that working out is good for people, learning to write a narrative and get those thoughts out of your head on a page, it’s just innately good. Most people, when they go play basketball, if they look like me, people aren’t going to be like, “So when are you going into the NBA?” But if you write a book, people will say, “So when are you going to publish it?” And I say to the students, “It’s okay if that’s not your goal. If you want to write just for you — if you want to be on the, I spend 20 years and then produce one book route, totally fine. However, I want you to know everything you would need to shoot for the highest level, which is earning a full-time living as a writer. And everything else falls underneath that.”
So during the class, we pretend that that’s your goal. Once you walk out of it, you can make your own goals, whatever they are. But while we’re there, we pretend that. And then the second thing I say is, “You’re going to have to learn when to ignore me.” And that is really hard to do because I’m an authority. I’m up there. Survivorship bias says who knows what I actually say is going to be relevant? Some of it hopefully, but I can’t really determine what really played a part in me being successful and what didn’t.
And I want to approach it as a toolbox, giving people all of these various tools, some of which are contradictory. Self-contradictory. I can give you examples of that if you want, but you can’t use them all. So you’re going to have to ignore some of the advice of major authors. Some of the things that Stephen King tells you will be wrong — some of the things for you. Some of the things that I tell you will be wrong for you. You have to find your own way. And so I kind of start off with, “I’m going to pretend you want to be a professional writer.” And then follow it up with, “But learn when to ignore me.”
Tim Ferriss: What are some of the contradictory tools or approaches in the toolkit?
Brandon Sanderson: The one I generally use as my prime example is when I was studying this before I broke in, two authors that I admired, I read their books. I read Odd Writing by Stephen King and How to Write Sci-Fi and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card. And I read these books, and I honestly can’t tell you 100 percent if it was in those exact books or other writings of theirs on their websites and things. But Stephen King at one point said, “Do not make an outline. Do not use a writing group. These will destroy your writing.” And Scott Card is like, “I need an outline. It is fundamentally vital for me in order to build my book.” Now, Stephen King is what we generally call — these are George R.R. Martin’s terms. He’s wonderful the way he speaks about fiction. If you’re really interested, anything George says is golden. He calls them gardeners. Stephen King is a gardener. For Stephen King, exploring and discovering his story is the thing that makes him excited. He wants to take a seed. He’ll often say, “I take two really interesting characters and I put them in conflict and have something go wrong, and I see where the story goes, and I just write.” And he says if he has an outline, he feels like he’s already done that process in the outline. So when he sits down to write the book, he has no motivation. He’s not exploring and discovering anymore.
The other group we call architects. Architects like to build a structure and then kind of go and take this little piece and then polish that little piece and see where it goes, and then take the next piece that they’ve already built as part of their structure and build a story around that. And most people are somewhere in between these two extremes. But those were two extremes where I realized I can’t do both of these. I can’t both not have an outline and have an outline. I can have a hybrid approach. But if you try to take both of their advice equally weighted, then you’re going to get nowhere. You can try both methods in different ways, you can try some hybrids. But a lot of things you’ll learn in writing you kind of have to choose one or the other and try it out and see how it works for you.
Tim Ferriss: What are some of the assignments that have most resonated with students or you think best served them even though they might not recognize it?
Brandon Sanderson: So what I generally do is I follow a focus on habits approach. Instead of giving them specific writing exercises, if someone comes up to me and says, “I’m having trouble with X,” I’ll give them a writing exercise to work with that. If someone comes up to me and says, “I am having a lot of trouble going back and revising my chapters over and over again, instead of writing the next one,” I’ll say, “Okay, try writing longhand.” This works for some people. You go, you take a page of paper, you write it longhand, and you tell yourself, it doesn’t have to be perfect until I put it into the computer. You start each day taking what you wrote before and putting it to the computer and then leave it alone and write your next chapter longhand, and then use that process to kind of get yourself back into the writing, but then forcing yourself to do something new. That works for some people.
If people are having trouble with dialogue, I say, “All right, go do the exercise where you sit and listen to people on campus and you just write down exactly what they say exactly as it’s said, and then take it and try to write it under different styles of dialogue.” If you’re writing like Soderbergh, how would you do it? Pick some of your favorite people, go watch their movies, write down the dialogue, and compare that to their real life, and just kind of figure out what kind of dialogue you like to do. Those are exercises.
But in general, I’m only doing that when I’m diagnosing a problem. For the class I’m saying your job, if you want to try to be a professional writer, you’re going to have to write consistently. Nine out of 10 writers that I’ve found do better with consistency. One out of 10 is a binge writer. I don’t understand binge writers as well, but I can talk about that. Those are the people who go rent a cabin, take two months, walk in without a book, come out with a book, and then they don’t write for 10 months. Most people are better served by writing a certain amount every day really consistently, or at least two or three times a week, and building a novel out of good habits. And I focus on that.
I’m like, break it down, set a goal, have a spreadsheet and try to hit your word counts, or at least your hour counts. If you’re having trouble doing this, go to a specific place every day that you do this, that you don’t do a lot of other things. Go to the coffee shop, go to a certain room in the house, turn on certain music that you only turn on when you’re writing. Build that habit so that you are very consistent. Batch your writing time. If there’s something you already do every day, if you already have built a habit to go to the gym, then try to align your life so that you go to the gym and then have an hour to write. Think about what you’re going to write at the gym, sit and write for an hour so that you are adding onto a habit that you’ve already built.
And that’s my focus in the class is to really be consistent. See if you can write, the goal is in the class to write 35,000 words. Class is around a third of the year, if you do that all year, you will end up with 100,000 words, which is your average novel.
Tim Ferriss: How many, just for people listening who aren’t in the writing biz or the writing habit, 100,000 words in a typical trade paperback, or it could be a hardcover, how many pages is that?
Brandon Sanderson: 300.
Tim Ferriss: 300?
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, 350. The Way of Kings is 400,000 words, and we kind of cram stuff in there and we get to 1,000 pages on that. So you can kind of run that. It’s a fourth of 1,000 pages, so it’ll be 250. But here’s the thing. We use dirty tricks in publishing. If you’re reading a thriller or a young adult book, what they’ll do is they’ll put a lot fewer words on a page because they want to increase the pacing. They want to make it feel like you’re zipping through. It’s a page turner. So they’re going to want 50 percent fewer words on every page so that kid picking up that book that’s a reluctant reader is like, “Wow, this one’s really fast.” I don’t have space for that in my epic fantasies. I push the limits of what can be bound. And beyond that, we’re not expecting you to read this book in one sitting. So we can put more on a page that makes it feel dense and thick and meaty, which can be really enjoyable if you want to dig into a new world and things like that.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s hit some top line habits from Brandon. How many words per year on average would you say you put down?
Brandon Sanderson: My goal is 2,000 to 2,500 words a day. So whatever, 10 pages to 20 pages is what I’m looking at. Depends, I mean, I write in the old school manuscript format where everything’s 12 point and in Courier and it’s a holdover from the days when certain typesetting things are done that are too nerdy perhaps to talk about here. But I think in words, so I do 2,000, 2,500.
Tim Ferriss: Those are new words?
Brandon Sanderson: Those are new words. Now when I’m doing revisions, I’m not writing new words. And I would say around a third of my time is spent on revisions depending on the year. And this is the thing, some years I’ll do a lot of words. Some years I do a lot more revisions. And so it really depends. But if we’re looking at 2,000 words a week times 50 weeks, that can produce quite a lot of words. So 10,000 words a week is what that would turn into. That’s 500,000 words a year is what I could theoretically produce. Now, a third of my time’s done to revisions. So really I’m looking at around 300,000 words. A Stormlight Archive book is 18 months of work for that reason and things like that.
Tim Ferriss: All right. We might come back to that and the revision process, but just as promised, to hop back and forth between past and present tense, why did you want to become a writer?
Brandon Sanderson: So this is a fun story. I was not a writer or a reader when I was young, which is, I found, pretty odd for people who were published novelists. A lot of my friends, I’ll talk to them, they’ll be like, “Yeah, I published my first thing when I was two. I came out of the womb with a poem ready to go in my student newspaper,” and things like that. Me, I did read when I was very young. In about fourth or fifth grade, I fell out of it. And this is the era where I lived in Nebraska and there were certain books that people just really liked to read in Nebraska and they usually involved young people on farms, sometimes living in the wilderness on their own, sometimes on a ranch. They had pet dogs and the pet dogs died. And I got three of those in a row where I’m like, I don’t even have a dog, but I’m tired of the dog dying. I know what it’s like to be a kid. I don’t live on a farm, but my grandparents were all farmers and I live behind a farm.
I was in Lincoln. It’s mostly urban, but mostly urban in that Midwest way where you’re in the capital city in a brand new kind of high cost development, but there’s a cornfield in your backyard. That’s just Nebraska. That’s just how we roll. And so I knew all of that. I was not interested in it. And so I fell out of reading.
Eighth grade rolls around. I have a teacher, Ms. Reeder, she doesn’t remember me —
Tim Ferriss: Ms. Reeder?
Brandon Sanderson: Ms. Reeder.
Tim Ferriss: How appropriate.
Brandon Sanderson: Yep, yep. Ms. Reeder, she wanted to be a professor at UC Irvine. So if anyone had a Professor Reader at UC Irvine, this was the same person. But Ms. Reeder, she was my eighth grade English teacher, and I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I cheated on a book report with her. If you’re a smart kid, you realize that the back of the book, even before the internet, basically tells you the entire plot and then you can read the last chapter and you’ll know the whole plot of the book. So it’s like book report, write a summary and why you liked it, and I read the back of the book the last chapter and turned it in.
I made some mistakes and she picked me out, she sat me down and she was actually very good. She’s like, “Something’s not clicking with you with books.” And I’m like, “No, they really aren’t.” And she’s like, “So for your next book report, I just want you to read one of these books on my rack here. These are my favorite books that I have for kids to read. I just want you to actually read it and you can talk to me about it.” And I’m like, “I don’t like books.” She’s like, “Well, just try something different.” So I went to the rack and I always joke, it’s like you can tell the paperbacks have been read by 100 students, right? They got spaghetti stains on them and things like that.
I looked, leafed through and I arrived on this book called Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly, and it really was the cover. The cover illustrator is Michael Whelan, he’s the illustrator who did The Way of Kings in The Stormlight Archive for me. I eventually got him. He just retired. The last cover was the fifth book of The Stormlight Archive, and he’s retired. But he’s done that before. So he might be back. He pulls a Miyazaki sometimes and pops in and out or a Michael Jordan, depending on the field you’re talking about.
But regardless, I picked up this book and it had a cool dragon on the cover. It was all misty and kind of awesome looking. It had a cute girl on the cover. It’s like, hey, I’m 14, maybe this will work. And I take this book. Now, this book should not have worked. This book absolutely should not have. What do you want to give a reluctant reader? You usually want to give them a book about someone their age, usually very similar to them. A reluctant reader, if it’s a young man, you hand him Harry Potter. This is a book about a middle-aged woman going through a mid-life crisis. The story is that there’s a dragon who’s come to destroy the kingdom and the last living person who’s killed a dragon is this guy, and they go hunting him. He lives up in the north because he’s now middle-aged with a family, and he’s like, “I killed a dragon when I was in my 20s. I don’t do that anymore. I’m an old dude now.” They’re like, “You’re the only one who’s ever done it.” He goes to his wife and he’s like, “I guess I’ve got to go kill this dragon. We’ve got to figure out how to do this,” and it’s told from her perspective as they go down and try to figure out how to kill a dragon as middle-aged people and be smart about it, rather than charging it with a sword.
Her story is, she has been told by her teacher she could be the greatest wizard ever. She’s got a raw natural talent, but she has divided her time between studying and having a family. Her teacher’s like, “You really should give up that family stuff. Just really focus on your magic.” But this is her crisis. Through going down, she learns about the dragon magic, and she starts to get really into that.
Not to give spoilers, but there’s an opportunity for her to just go and become what she’d always dreamed, and her crisis is, “Do I go do this right now or do I not?” I’m reading this book and it’s really cool, it’s inventive, and I realized at some point, my mother, she graduated first in her class in accounting in a year where she was the only woman in most of her accounting classes. She had been offered a really prestigious scholarship to go get her CPA, and she had decided not to.
She decided that she wanted to be home with young kids when she had young kids, which I do not think is a decision anyone should make for you, but a decision she made for herself. She later, after having kids, went on and had a really great career as an accountant, but she gave up some really important things that as I’m reading this book, I had always heard these stories. She would tell them, she wants us to know. I always thought, “Of course you did, Mom. Look at me. I’m great. This is what you should have done.”
I’m reading this book and I’m like, “Ditch the kids. Go be a wizard. Wizarding is awesome. The kids will get along, they’ll figure it out.” I get done with this book, and on one hand it’s a silly book about wizards and dragons, and I get done with this book and I understand my Mom better. This book built empathy in me for someone that, I’m a 14-year-old boy, I’m understanding a middle-aged woman in ways I’d never been able to before, and I’d had fun while doing it.
There was a magic to that, and I don’t use that word lightly as a storyteller, as a writer of fantasy, there was a magic to that author, being able to convey a life experience of someone, that just entered my brain and has never left. Just like if you went and saw a magic trick, you’re an analytical type person, you probably want to say, “How did they do it? How did they vanish that thing? What type of mirrors did they use?” I read this and said, “I need to know how this is done. I have to know.” I just started reading voraciously. I went to the card catalog, because I’m old. I’m even older than you.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I remember those card catalogs.
Brandon Sanderson: I went and got the next book in line, just alphabetical because it started with “Dragon,” and I read everything that had dragons in it in the school library, just to figure it out.
Something changed in me that day. I went from a C student to an A student over summer; Cs in eighth grade, As in ninth grade. Why that change? Because I discovered stories about wizards. I discovered there was something I wanted to do. There was now a reason to get good grades.
I was in Nebraska, and UNL is good for some things. I later learned that it actually has a decent writing program, but I wanted a good education and I wanted to go to BYU where my parents had gone. I realized I probably wouldn’t get into BYU because it’s a private school, you do have to have better grades than Cs generally to make it into some of these schools, and so suddenly I had a reason like, “Well, I want to go to a better school.”
Again, I was dumb. UNL is actually a really good school, but as a kid I’m like, “I need to get into this school,” and so my grades went up. I’m like, “I need to be a writer. I need a degree. I need to learn about this. Therefore, I’m going to have to go to college. Therefore, I’m going to have to learn to learn because otherwise I won’t figure out how to do this.” Having a purpose, having a reason to do well, changed my entire outlook.
I was not valedictorian. I was one grade off of it because I took a semester and moved to France, and that tanked my grades. It wasn’t a full semester, about half a semester, but I never caught up on all the stuff that I needed to do. I got a B-plus in one class, but it was totally worth it. Go live in France.
Tim Ferriss: How did you decide to go to France?
Brandon Sanderson: I just took four years of French, and my teacher in French was the best teacher I had, Ms. Dress. When you have good teachers, it changes your passion for a class.
Tim Ferriss: Completely.
Brandon Sanderson: I wouldn’t have picked French as my favorite subject, but it was my favorite class. I had three years of that and she said, “Hey, I’m taking a study abroad to Paris. You’re going to have to miss half a semester. You’ll have to do makeup work, but we’ll live in Paris and go visit all the sites and go to all the museums.” I’m like, “I am in. You’re so passionate about your trips to Paris.” It was so wonderful. Stayed with a host family and then did day trips to just places around Paris, went to Giverny and Versailles and saw everything, and museums every day, and bad grades in math.
Tim Ferriss: Sounds like a good trade, in terms of the B.
Brandon Sanderson: Yes, it was absolutely a good trade.
Tim Ferriss: It’s so parallel to what happened to me with Mr. Shimano in high school. When I transferred schools, ended up taking Japanese. I had no plans to go to Japan, and then six months in, he didn’t go with me, but that’s how the study abroad came about and completely changed everything. But I spent the next few summers catching up at summer school because none of the grades transferred.
Brandon Sanderson: I love Japan. I’ve only been once, but it was just delightful. Just walking around Tokyo is such a surreal and interesting experience.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I tell people it’s like 30 percent Blade Runner and 70 percent DMV. If you live in Japan, it’s just like, “I have to do another carbon copy? Then we have to fax? What is this?” A few of my friends have moved and have since confirmed that that is their experience.
So I’m focusing on — had been focusing on, I’m going to come back to it — the class, because you’ve thought about writing very deeply, and it’s basically a filtering function for ferreting out some of the key ingredients, as you see them, in your writing process.
You mentioned narrative and how, from a positioning perspective, people think of you and it’s very helpful, it’s also valid in some ways as a worldbuilder, but that first and foremost, it’s worldbuilding in service of a narrative, not the other way around. How do you teach narrative? Are there particular books? Is it like a three-act play? Is it the hero’s journey? What are we talking about?
Brandon Sanderson: Right. I do two lectures on narrative. Generally the first day, I do not talk about hero’s journey or three-act structure or any of these things. That’s for the second week, because I do my class as one giant lecture each week, followed by a workshop.
Tim Ferriss: Are these available anywhere?
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, they’re on YouTube.
Tim Ferriss: Amazing. All right.
Brandon Sanderson: We’re doing new ones this year, so you can go watch these two lectures that I’m talking about. The first one, I just talk about the theory of plot. What makes someone turn a page? Why does someone start at page one and then end? What is a page turner? My theory on this is, it is a sense of progress. We like to see things count up as human beings, and the great plots are doing this beneath the hood. They are showing incremental slow progress forward, sometimes backwards, sometimes a little of each, toward a goal.
The idea for a plot is to identify what type of plot it is. If you’re doing a mystery, then that progress is going to be in the form of information. The story starts the characters without the information, the reader without the information, generally, and ends with them gaining the information. The story, the progress, is all about these little bits of information that you get through the story. At its fundamental, this does some fun things.
For instance, buddy cop movies and romances have the same fundamental structure, which is, it’s about a relationship between two people, where slowly you are finding out that they work better together than apart, and so your progress is seeing how they rub each other wrong. But then how, Dave, my old teacher, talked about braiding roses, how if the thorns are pointed outward for these characters rather than pointed inward, they become a defensive bulwark for one another.
Tim Ferriss: What does that mean?
Brandon Sanderson: Braided roses?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Oh, I see. It’s us against the world.
Brandon Sanderson: Us against the world. If you take two roses and you don’t braid them, you stick them together, they poke each other. But if you braid them really well, then all the thorns point outward and these two roses suddenly become stronger together than they were apart.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a very cool imagery.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah. Again, stole that one from Dave, and so the idea for a character plot is you are braiding the roses. Over time, you’re seeing that those points, number one, you see how dangerous they are poking into each other. But then you see how, pointed outward, these people actually work better and kind of the holes, the places where one doesn’t have a thorn and can get hit, another one’s thorn protects and things like that. And over the course of the story, you see that rose get braided to the point that you are saying, “You guys are so much better together than apart. You need to be together.” And then when they either hook up or become partners, again, same story structure, then you stand up and you cheer. So the idea is it is promise.
You promise at the start. In a romance novel, you show two people apart. You show what their thorns are. You promise just by featuring them that they’re going to get together. Buddy cop movie, here’s this cop, he’s a loner, he works alone, but there’s a problem, there’s something that’s hurting. And here’s this other cop, he’s going to retire soon, but he’s missing something in his life. And then you slowly, that’s your promise. Your progress is showing them work well together. And then your payoff is the moment at the end where all that work you’ve put into it comes to fruition as they hook up or in certain stories they don’t. Right? You can be either way, but promise, progress, payoff. That is what makes people love stories and read through on a kind of macro scale.
Getting through an individual chapter is something different, but on a macro scale that is plot and that is, I talk about on the first day, this idea of how to do that, how to have twists that are actually fulfilling promises. And that one’s fun. The best twists don’t just surprise the reader. A complication should surprise the reader, but a twist should be surprising yet inevitable. And if you do it right, people are wanting that twist before they realize it happens. And then it does. And that is day one. Then day two is I’m like, all right, here are some structures that people have used. Here’s your toolbox. Some people use the hero’s journey.
Here’s what the hero’s journey is in brief. Here is what it’s good for. Here are some things to watch out for because the hero’s journey can steer you wrong sometimes. Here’s three-act format, here’s what it’s good at. Here’s maybe some foibles of three-act format. Here’s Robert Jordan’s method, which he called points on the map. Here’s how a lot of screwball comedy is written. It’s called Yes, But/No, And. All of these different tools I try to talk about and say, and there’s a ton more. There’s nine-point story structure, there’s seven-point story structure, whatever. But the idea is here’s some things to try, but keep in mind, promise, progress, payoff. And I feel like that gives sort of an overview of how to build narrative.
Tim Ferriss: Are there any — in addition to your classes of course, and we’ll link to those in the show notes. Are there any books or resources that you encourage people to read to get a better understanding of narrative or these different forms of narrative? And what came to my mind, even though it’s not directed at potential novelists, is a book called Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies that examines different genres within screenwriting.
Brandon Sanderson: So that’s not the original Save the Cat, that’s the new one. So I do recommend Save the Cat, but Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies, I haven’t read that. That sounds good.
Tim Ferriss: It’s fun. Yeah, the first one’s also excellent. I mean, I enjoyed it.
Brandon Sanderson: So Save the Cat is kind of — it’s a really good leaping off point. And if you want the opposite of Save the Cat, On Writing by Stephen King is a leaping off point. And Save the Cat is about structure and On Writing is about the life of a writer and not structure. And those will give you kind of two of the different viewpoints on storytelling. And they’re both very good. My agent always recommends Writing to Sell by Scott Meredith. I find it a little too structure focused.
There is art to writing. And the dirty secret of outlining is you’re still going to have to learn to garden because, yeah, you’ll have these points in the outline, but then when you sit down to write them, you’re a gardener getting between these two points in the outline. And so both skills are really important. But Scott Meredith, I did read that and like it quite a bit.
Tim Ferriss: Where do you fall, in general or now, between the gardening or gardener and architect?
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, so I’ve tried all the tools. I have a middle grade series called Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians, which are pure garden. I actually use a method a little like you know the old show, Whose Line Is It Anyway?
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Brandon Sanderson: I pull a bunch of ideas, I brainstorm a bunch of random ideas, and then I say, “I’ve got to use all of these. Go.” And I write a story without an outline. That’s to practice the tool. And I generally fall these days on a 75 percent outline sort of thing. I do a lot of work building on my plot and I do a lot of building on my setting.
And then I write my way into characters. I feel like that one of the big dangers of outlining too much is characters that feel wooden or cardboard because they’re there merely to get you between point A and point B and then from point B to point C on your outline. And if you have characters that your early readers are like these feel a little wooden, it might be because instead of going according to the character’s motivations, you’re just going according to the outline. And I find that if I let myself write my way into character and then rebuild my outline —
Tim Ferriss: Now writing your way into character, by that you mean you’re creating the setting, the environment?
Brandon Sanderson: And the plot.
Tim Ferriss: And the plot.
Brandon Sanderson: But then I rewrite the plot once I know the character. So here’s my process. I start usually with a couple of really good ideas. I usually want to have multiple interesting ideas for my setting, at least one hook for each character, if not one.
Tim Ferriss: Could you give an example of the starting point?
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, so I’ll build it from one of my books, Mistborn. So Mistborn had a series of ideas. The first idea came, I was reading Harry Potter back in the Harry Potter boom. And I thought, man, these dark lords never get a break. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Wheel of Time. There’s this dark lord. And what happens is some furry-footed British kid throws their ring in a hole and their entire empire collapses. Or there’s a kid you’re going to kill. And the power of a mother’s love protects him. How can you plan for the power of a mother’s love when you’re a dark lord? That’s just a complete oddball. And I think they never get a break.
What if The Dark Lord won? What if Frodo got to the end of Lord of the Rings with the ring and Sauron was there? He is like, “My ring. You know how long I’ve been looking for that? Thank you so much for that. Must’ve been a hard journey bringing that all the way here. Thank you.” And then killed him and took over the world. That’s like, what if? And I thought, that’s a downer of a book. I don’t know that I want to write a book about the traditional hero’s journey that ends with The Dark Lord winning, but it went in the back of the head, right?
And then I have a deep and abiding love of the heist genre. Sneakers is one of my favorite films of all time. Oldie, but goodie. The Sting all the way up to Ocean’s Eleven and The Italian Job, both the old one and the new one, just the inception. You do a good heist, you can get me. And as a writer, some of your lightbulb moments are when you’re like, hey, I love this thing and I’ve never written about it. And that’s gold when you feel like you’ve covered everything and then you realize there’s some area of passion and love that you haven’t tapped at all. And I’m like, I need to do a fantasy heist.
What if I did a heist where every member of this heist crew had a magical talent and they all combined together? I’m like, nobody’s done this. It was really kind of a big deal to me when I realized no one had done this. Because as a writer, you’re always looking for the things that no one has done. The truth is everyone’s done everything. But when you find something, you’re like, I can’t think of a major story that has done a full-on heist in fantasy. I was super excited. Then I realized fantasy heist, Dark Lord won, team of thieves rob The Dark Lord. I have a plot. That’s my inception.
Meanwhile, I want a good idea for each character. And so Mistborn‘s about two characters. One is about Kelsier, who was my concept for him, for myself was the gentleman thief who’d lived his life conning people, kind of small-time cons, but living among upper society where he liked to do, that something went horribly wrong. And he found out, he’s like, “I haven’t been making the world a better place. I haven’t been helping anyone. I’ve just been coasting on my charm,” and has a crisis of conscience on, “Should I be actually using this to do something?” And what happens is his wife is killed, his heist goes wrong, and he decides he wants revenge and he’s going to do it by robbing The Dark Lord. That’s my concept for him. My concept for Vin, who’s the other main character, is this idea of a young woman who lives in this world who has the magical talent and doesn’t know it. And I’m looking for a conflict, right? For her, conflict is she’s managed to remain a good person, but she’s lost her belief that anyone else is good.
She gets betrayed in some ways, that just makes her give up on kind of humanity in general. And the idea is putting them two together. Kelsier, who still kind of has this deep and abiding optimism. He’s like, “I’m going to do something good.” He’s learned optimism, right? He’s learned “I need to do something good with my life.” And it’s by force. And her, who’s lost it, and she becomes the apprentice to him as he recruits her into the team. And this idea of a heist where these two people are growing.
Tim Ferriss: Can I ask a question? Not to interrupt, but did you have all of this before you put pen to paper, metaphorically speaking, to write?
Brandon Sanderson: Yes. This much I had.
Tim Ferriss: And in what form does that exist?
Brandon Sanderson: So it exists for me generally in — I do a new document that says “Setting” at the top, then “Character,” then “Plot,” and the setting will have — “summary: Dark Lord won,” that’s setting stuff. “What does a world look like where The Dark Lord has won and ruled for a thousand years?” In my books, I like to have an interesting use of magic. We can talk about that at some point.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah, we will.
Brandon Sanderson: But what is the interesting use of magic?
Tim Ferriss: That’s how I got into writing excuses.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, is it? How do I walk the line between nerding out and making it feel, like, approachable? Because I don’t want my books to read like an encyclopedia entry or a video game. I want it to read like a new branch of science that’s really fun. And then character. I’ll have these things. And so with the character, you’ll notice these are seeds. Vin is like this. Kelsier is like this. I don’t know yet how their interaction is going to go and how they’re going to be. In fact, I wrote three chapters with Vin, first — three different first chapters, trying different personalities. I started her with an Artful Dodger type, really confident, moving in the underworld, ripping people off, and it just did not work. And then I tried another one, I can’t even remember what that one was. But then I tried a third one, which is the personality she ended up with. Kelsier I kind of had right from the get-go.
Tim Ferriss: All right, it’s my job to do drops, so I’ll do it again. How did you know those first two didn’t work?
Brandon Sanderson: This is where it’s an art.
Tim Ferriss: Is it just like a water feel kind of thing that you’ve acquired over time?
Brandon Sanderson: This is art and not science and sometimes it doesn’t work and you don’t figure it out until late. My most famous series, they’re probably Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive are about tied for most famous. Stormlight, I wrote an entire novel, like 300,000 words long with the character having the wrong personality the entire time and it was only at the end that I’m like, “This is just wrong.” And I threw the book away, wrote it again eight years later with a different personality, and it worked.
But in order to have the characters live and breathe and feel like real people, I feel like I need to give them that volition, which is kind of destructive for all that narrative structure I’ve come up with. But that’s good because having that structure and then saying, “All right, now that I know what this person would do, how does that influence how they would actually approach this structure?” And I’ll go and I’ll change that.
And knowing about promise, progress, payoff, which I couldn’t have named for you back in 2004 when I was writing Mistborn, but I kind of understood intrinsically I could tweak to the character personalities as I went, so that I was making sure that these things were threading the needle, so to speak. Where you’ve got this character and you need them to go through this plot, but you need to make sure they feel like they’re a real person so you can’t hold them to any one point, but you can make it come together, hopefully.
Tim Ferriss: I want to come back to Stormlight for a second because it struck me that you have the ability to put things on the back burner or scrap and effectively start from scratch, restart something, that you’ve put a lot of sunk cost into.
Brandon Sanderson: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: And that is hard for most people, so I am wondering, say, in the case of this character with the wrong personality that you really conclude at 300,000 words or so, “It’s not working the way I want it to work.” What is the inner monologue that you have to get to the point where you’re like, “Park it.” Particularly, I mean we don’t need to get, maybe, into this aspect of it when you have external pressures, maybe you’ve applied pressure to yourself, you maybe have deadlines in mind. How do you get to that point? What is your internal process for that?
Brandon Sanderson: It’s happened to me three major times where I’ve done it and of those, only one did I ever come back to, two of them I parked and have laid fallow. One important mindset that is kind of a ground rule is remembering, as a writer, that the piece of art is not necessarily just the story you’re creating, that you are the piece of art. The time you spend writing is improving you as a writer and that is the most important thing. The book is almost a side product, not really, but it almost is to the fact that you are the art and if you know that, it helps a lot.
One of the things that pros do that amateurs have trouble with in writing is pros throw away chapters a lot, in my experience. You write it and you get done with the chapter and you’re like, “That just did not work. I’m going to toss that and start over the next day.” Amateurs have a lot of trouble with this, in my experience. There’s a lot of causes of writer’s block, but one of the main ones I am convinced, is that you’re writing the chapter wrong, you have enough instincts as a writer because you’ve practiced long enough to know you should throw it away but you don’t want to because you did the work. But your instincts won’t let you continue doing it wrong and you’re not willing to toss it and try over, and so there is that.
What happens with the whole book? You get done with the whole book and one of a couple of things happen, with two of the three of these books I get done and I’m like, “That just doesn’t give me the shine, the feel of excitement that I want this book to have.” There’s something fundamentally wrong with it and I am sometimes not even sure what it is for a while. When I put aside The Way of Kings, the 2002 version, we call it Way of Kings Prime, I put it aside and said, “I don’t know why this went wrong.” It was actually two things, it wasn’t just having Kaladin have the wrong personality. It was that I went into this book wanting to write a giant epic while reading The Wheel of Time, which was one of my favorite book series at the time, it was before I had taken it over. This was five years before I would get that call —
Tim Ferriss: This is a wild story.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, it is a wild story. Game of Thrones was huge at the time and I had been studying Game of Thrones and I’m like, “I want to write something like this.” And so I started with a huge cast up front, not recognizing that both of those examples I gave started with a cast who was relatively small, that over the course of several books grew into this complex web of different characters having different relationships and it had this nice onboarding. And so what I did is I wrote a book that was the beginnings of 10 characters’ stories and didn’t get through any of them. It was too all over the place. And the other was, I had the wrong personality. Something feels wrong and as an artist I just say, “I don’t know what this is yet.” I put it aside.
Once in a while it happens during alpha and beta reads, I’m getting the wrong response. People are reading this book and they’re thinking something completely opposite from what I wanted them to. The parts that I wanted them to enjoy, they’re bored by. Or the character I wanted them to click with, they’re just annoyed by and aren’t interested in and you realize something is just wrong, something is fundamentally wrong with this story and I don’t want to release it until I know what that is.
Sometimes you might figure that out and be able to fix it. Sometimes you might look at that and be like, “You know what? I don’t mind if people have this response. This is the piece of art and this piece of art is going to have this response from some percentage of the audience.” That’s maybe not a selling point, but it is part of the art. But with those three books, I put them aside and with The Way of Kings, I eventually figured out what it was and I tried it again. The other two I haven’t gotten there yet.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s come back to habits and your schedule for writing. Do you still have two primary blocks of writing and could you explain what your current schedule tends to look like?
Brandon Sanderson: So I find that for what I do and where my personal psychology is, an eight-hour block is not sustainable for writing. This means I can do it for a week or two at eight hours, but it’s going to brain drain me, it’s going to exhaust me. I get done with eight hours and I am mentally worn out. I find that if I do two four-hour blocks instead, I never quite get there and it’s more sustainable.
And so what I do is I will get up, I get up late, I get up at around noon or one and I will go to the gym, which is different for me than other people. The gym is writing time for me, I’m not hitting it super hard. I am there to think through what I’m doing, some motion, moving your body number one, it’s good for you, but that’s a side effect for me too I can put on music and I can move and I can think about what I’m going to write.
Then I go and I work from 2:00 until 6:00 these days is usually what I do. 1:00 until 5:00, something like that, and then I’m done. I go, I shower. At 6:30, I’m ready to hang with my family and I’ll be with family from 6:30-10:30. Go out with my wife, hang with my kids, build some LEGOs, play some video games, whatever it is.
I learned early in my career, one of the most important things I ever did was take that time and demarcate it as non-writing time. I found early in my marriage that writing, it will consume every moment possible and I was always anxious to get back to the story. And as soon as I changed my brain and said, no, no, no, no, even if your wife is away 6:30 to 10:30 can’t be writing time, it is off limits. You have to do something else. Suddenly, it was a lot easier for me to be there for my family. And you’ve interviewed a lot of highly productive, highly successful people, I think a lot of them are going to talk about the same thing, that it’s very hard to be there with people when you’re there with people —
Tim Ferriss: Sure, comes up a lot.
Brandon Sanderson: — because your brain is always working on the next big thing.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, this is particularly true with people who work on big, creative projects.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah. And that gave me this permission. It actually came at a moment, I went out to dinner with some writer friends and afterward I’m like, “That was such a great dinner.” And she’s like, “Yeah, but you didn’t look at me once.” And I realized she had become invisible to me because the writing was consuming all, and so I made that change. 10:30, kids are supposed to go to bed; they’re older now, they just don’t. But sometime around there they drift off. My wife goes to bed, she was a school teacher for many years, still kind of keeps a school teacher’s hours and she is wonderful for getting up with the kids, I don’t have to do that and never have. And I go back to work at about 11:00, I write from 11:00 to 3:00.
And then 3:00 to 4:00 or 5:00, is just whatever I want to do. That’s the real goof off time, that’s the go play with my Magic cards time. That’s the play a video game, pop out the Steam Deck time. And this schedule, you’ll notice I don’t have to worry about commuting, which gives me an advantage here, has been really sustainable for me.
Tim Ferriss: So that’s a home office predominantly where you’re writing?
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah. I write from my home office. I do like to move around, I go in the gazebo. Lately I’ve gone in the gazebo when it’s really cold and I hire one of my kids to come put logs on a fire for me and I sit by the fireplace. Sometimes I like to be on the beach. Sometimes I like when I’m around here, I like to be in different places. I can set up a hammock here or there, sit with my laptop, I do not work at a desk. And yeah, that’s really sustainable, it’s worked for me for the last 20 years.
Tim Ferriss: That’s incredible. I got all my best writing done really late at night when I was — I mean, I still am writing, I’m working on a new book, but when I was working on my first few books especially, it was always when everyone else was asleep.
So let’s talk about the non-home environment. We’re sitting in quite a large building, or at least a building with a lot of large rooms.
Brandon Sanderson: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Why do you have this company? Why have you and your wife built this company? Because there are a lot of writers out there who just want to focus on writing. They go the traditional publishing route, which I’m not saying it’s a mutually exclusive choice, but why do you have all this?
Brandon Sanderson: How long do you want to go? This is the big one.
Tim Ferriss: This is a long-form podcast, so we have all the time we want.
Brandon Sanderson: All right. So you’re right, most writers want to sell a book and live that kind of dream you see presented in film and television, which is accurate to the top percentage of writers. Most writers you read about or see in film are the big ones. They’re doing really well, and so they’re off in a cabin telling their story, or they’re the ones that have to be pried away from their easy chair to get them to even do any publicity whatsoever. They want to live that life that is the classic life of a writer.
And there’s some of me that wants that. But the secret is I was raised by an accountant and a businessman. And particularly my mother, that accountant, she instilled into me some aspirations. And I call this my superpower. My superpower is to be an artist raised by an accountant, and I’ve always had a bit of that entrepreneurial sense.
Tim Ferriss: What were the aspirations?
Brandon Sanderson: The aspirations? Well, they started small. They started with, “You know what? I want to be able to make a living from writing.” Got back from Korea and said, “All right, I am not very good at this writing thing, but I really, really love it.” I could tell because when I spent time doing the writing, time didn’t matter anymore. I could spend hours doing this. And it’s the first thing I found other than reading or video games that I could spend hours doing and just come out of it feeling tired but fulfilled. And I’m like, “I want to do this.”
So I sat down and I took what I’d learned, both from my mother, and missions have a regimented structure, and I said, “I’m going to apply this all to writing and I’m just going to start writing books.” And I heard your first five books are generally terrible. I said, “Well, that’s good. I don’t have to be good yet.” It took a lot of pressure off me. I said, “I’m going to write six, and the first five I’m not going to send out to any publishers.”
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Brandon Sanderson: And that’s bad advice for some people.
Tim Ferriss: I can’t imagine doing that.
Brandon Sanderson: Right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, wow. You didn’t even send them out?
Brandon Sanderson: I didn’t send them out.
Tim Ferriss: It was just weight training in the gym for your mind for the number six.
Brandon Sanderson: Yep. I didn’t send them out. Eventually, I shared number five with some people. I got involved with the local science fiction magazine as an editor. I eventually took it over because that’s what I do, and I was head editor, and I eventually said, “Well, I do have a book,” and I started sharing book five with people.
Tim Ferriss: So you didn’t even test readers?
Brandon Sanderson: I didn’t have test readers. I just wrote the books. And again, this is why the advice can be bad. There’s some people out there that would be bad advice for. Pat Rothfuss published his first book and it’s brilliant.
Tim Ferriss: The Name of the Wind?
Brandon Sanderson: The Name of the Wind, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: That is a spectacular book.
Brandon Sanderson: First novel. Now, he did a ton of revisions on that.
Tim Ferriss: I’m sure.
Brandon Sanderson: He spent as much time revising that book as I spent writing mine. But for me, the good advice was, “Your first five books are terrible. Don’t stress.” And so weight training for my mind, I wrote five books.
Tim Ferriss: This was before you had an agent?
Brandon Sanderson: Before I had an agent, before I had anything, before I even knew what an agent was. Before I’d taken Dave’s class. I took Dave’s class the year that I finished the Elantris, which is book number six, I had just finished that one. And so I said, “All right, book six. That’s Elantris.” That’s the one I eventually ended up selling. Those five I’d written in different sub-genres, I knew I liked sci-fi fantasy, but the risk of being too nerdy, my sub-genres, I did an epic fantasy. I did a comedic fantasy, a Terry Pratchett style sort of thing. I did a cyberpunk, I did a space opera, and then I wrote a sequel to my epic fantasy to kind of be like, is this what I want to do?
Tim Ferriss: What characterizes an epic fantasy?
Brandon Sanderson: So epic fantasy, fantasy in short, follows three main lines of descent. One line comes from what we call portal fantasies. And your kind of line of descent of that starts in the modern era with Alice in Wonderland, goes to Narnia, and Harry Potter‘s one more example. This is kids from our world get sucked into a fantasy world and experience it. It’s usually young adult focused. You can trace that all the way back to the old stories, the fairy tales, people go into the woods and then come out of the woods. They go into the fantasy world, come out.
The second line is what we call heroic fantasy. Heroic fantasy’s lines kind of really starts with the Greek epics and Beowulf, but in modern terms, you would recognize Conan as the progenitor. It is heroic men fighting against the monsters of the world and taming them and just kind of destroying them. It’s heroic man versus evil wizard. A lot of the old serials were that. And in modern terms, our grimdark kind of line. You kind of look at Joe Abercrombie as kind of the modern version of that.
Tim Ferriss: So The Blade Itself.
Brandon Sanderson: The Blade Itself, fantastic book.
Tim Ferriss: So fun. Also one of the best voice actors I’ve ever heard.
Brandon Sanderson: Joe is amazing. He’s delightful. Tangent, you want my Joe Abercrombie story?
Tim Ferriss: Yes, please.
Brandon Sanderson: Okay, tangent. I am flying to Spain, and Joe is going to meet me there because we’re both doing con together. It’s called Celsius. I’m actually going back this year. So I’m passing through Amsterdam. And I did a thing back then, maybe we’ll talk about it, I don’t know, I signed my books in airports. I would see a book of mine at an airport bookstore, I would sign it and I would post on Twitter and I’d say, “I signed my book. First one gets there gets to get the book.” This was a thing of mine. My fans loved it. I don’t travel that way as much anymore. And there’s fewer airport bookstores. They’ve all died off. So I don’t really do it anymore. But for a while I did that. They named it Brandolizing.
And I did this thing in the airport. I left my book. I took a picture of it in the spot. And I’m getting in the line to get on the plane and I get a tweet and it’s from Joe, and he says, “Sanderson, my book’s next to yours and you didn’t sign it.” And I tweet back, I’m like, “Well, it’s not my book.” He’s like, “SIGN MY BOOK, SANDERSON!!” in all caps, exclamation point, exclamation point. And so I have to leave the line, they’re calling the line, run to the bookstore, sign Joe Abercrombie’s book, take a picture of it, post it and say, “Your book is signed by me.” And then I did make my flight, but I almost missed my flight signing Joe’s book. So someone out there went and bought Joe’s book signed by me.
Tim Ferriss: How long had you known each other at that point?
Brandon Sanderson: We had met at conventions and been on panels together. And Joe is a riot. If you get a chance, if he’s anywhere that you can go see him, Joe has this magic to turn any panel into am enjoyable panel, no matter who’s on it with him. And so I won’t say that I’m best buds with Joe. I don’t know Joe really well, but we’re professional colleagues, and I love being on a panel with him. He makes me look intelligent and funny, which I love.
But anyway, so we’ve got portal fantasy, we’ve got heroic fantasy. Michael Moorcock, all of that stuff. Then we have epic fantasy. And epic fantasy is termed by a completely different fantasy world. The other two generally have roots in our world. Portal, you start in our world, and heroic tends to be kind of our world. The modern ones aren’t, but Conan takes place in the prehistory of our world and things like that. Epic fantasy really starts with Tolkien. You can say that some of the heroic epics had a big part in this too, Gilgamesh even, and stuff like that. But this idea of epic fantasy is the movement of worlds. The world is at stake. Secondary world is what we call it. It’s very removed from our planet. All new rules, all new world, all new magic. And it’s this idea of, they’re the big thick ones, they’re kind of like historical epics, but in a different world. So that’s their similarity.
And Game of Thrones is this, though Game of Thrones borrows a little from heroic. That’s kind of his secret sauce, is he takes heroic characters and sticks them in an epic fantasy plot, and then they just start getting killed off because they’re living in a much more brutal version of an epic fantasy world than most of them. But epic is me and Robert Jordan and things like that, that’s epic fantasy. It’s just stakes of the world.
Tim Ferriss: Got it. And it and I took us off track a little bit because the question was, why are we sitting in this huge office? And then you’re like, “Well, let’s backtrack.” Artist raised by an accountant.
Brandon Sanderson: Artist raised by an accountant.
Tim Ferriss: And then we came through and you’re like, “Number six.”
Brandon Sanderson: Number six.
Tim Ferriss: That was go time.
Brandon Sanderson: That was go time. Write Elantris. And at that point, my goal was only, I’m going to try to conquer this and become a professional writer. If I can earn a living doing this, I will have been successful. But then I did. Actually, it took me a few more years. I wrote 13 novels before I sold one. I sold number six after I’d finished number 13, which was The Way of Kings Prime. And we can talk about, there’s kind of a dark moment of the soul happens before that where at I’m book number 12 and I’m like, “What am I doing? 12 books and no one’s buying them. Maybe I’m really bad at this.” But anyway.
Tim Ferriss: You started trying to sell them at which book?
Brandon Sanderson: About book six.
Tim Ferriss: About book six, okay.
Brandon Sanderson: And I hit perfectly at Dave’s class. About when I was working on book six, I started sending out query letters and things like that on some of the earlier ones, and started collecting my rejection letters and things like that. And then I took Dave’s class and I started flying out to these conventions and trying to meet editors in person, and just kind of hearing from their mouths what they want, what they’re buying, what they’re interested in, and trying to target my books at them. By that point that I was doing that, I had eight or nine. And six, seven and eight were pretty good books. Any one of those three probably could have broken me out. I didn’t ever publish seven or eight, I just published six.
Then I sell a book and I realize, “Well, now the job is to make this a career,” because I sold my book for a grand total of $10,000 that was broken across three years. So I made $5,000, and then 2,500, and then 2,500. So you can imagine that’s —
Tim Ferriss: It’s a meager sum.
Brandon Sanderson: Meager sum. I fortunately was married to someone who was making very sweet, great income as a public school teacher. She was the sugar mama. We were living on her 22,000 a year as a public school teacher. But she supported me while I was doing that and breaking in with those books. We did meet after I’d at least sold one. So I at least had something to say, “Look, it’s real. It made us $5,000 this year.” Or made me, we weren’t married then, but you know what I mean. So yeah, first year of marriage, I made $2,500. That was the grand total I contributed. But at that point, your job is to get stable. And there’s two danger points. One is never selling a book, but the number two danger point is your second book. We talked a little bit about this. Second book is do or die time, and I can talk all about — it was pretty big do or die for me. But then, it stabilized. Then, things started to work. I hit the bestseller list and then Wheel of Time happened —
Tim Ferriss: That was with the first or the second book?
Brandon Sanderson: It was my fourth that hit — or, yeah, my fourth that hit the bestseller —
Tim Ferriss: Fourth, that hit the bestseller?
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah. Mistborn Three was my first one. Very low on. It was either Mistborn Three. It might’ve even been Warbreaker, but it’s four or five hit, like, The Times list went to 35 then and I hit Number 35, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Still counts.
Brandon Sanderson: Still counts. Still counts. It was for 2,000 copies in a week. It doesn’t sound like very much to be a bestseller, but I hit that bestseller list, then The Wheel of Time happened, and my entire life changed. And I’m sure we’ll get to that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Brandon Sanderson: But about 2012 through 2014, I started to realize some things. Somewhere in there — I can’t remember the exact date. You can look it up. Amazon turned off the ability to buy all Macmillan books and the Macmillan — so Tor, my publisher, is a subsidiary of Macmillan. This was because of their contract disputes. Amazon wanted to price books cheaper to sell Kindles. They wanted the lost lead in order to control the market, which was very smart on their end. But the publishers were panicking about driving book prices to the basement, because if Amazon sells them for a dollar — at the point, Amazon is selling for a dollar and paying us on those books like $8.
And they’re like, “What’s the problem? We sell them for a dollar. You still make your $8,” and the publisher’s like, “Yeah. But people are going to expect books to be a dollar. And when you control the market, you’re going to say, ‘Well, we’re not paying you $8 on these books anymore. We’re going to pay you the 70 cents that you would get off of a $1 book.’” And so, whole panic, big contract disputes, Amazon is working very hard to become dominant in this market and the publishers are fighting them.
And Amazon turns off the ability to buy my books. And this was a wake-up call to me because it told me that the system was no longer what it had been all the way through the course of publishing history. All the way through publishing history, your audience, your buyers were the bookstores, really. Core were the bookstores. If you convinced the bookstores to shelve your books, then people went to the bookstores. And the more books you have on the shelf, the more you sold.
Old publishing adage that Tom Doherty, founder of Tor, very smart man, would say is like, “I want to have 10 books on the shelf, even if only one of them sells. Because eventually, nine of them are going to sell 10 of a copy because everyone will go and say, ‘This must be an important book. They have 10 copies of it here.’ The best advertisement for a book is having as many on the shelf.” And so your fight was to get the bookstores to carry your book.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It was real estate.
Brandon Sanderson: Yep. That was no longer the case. Your audience, your market was not the bookstores. It was only Amazon. Amazon controlled everything. By then, they had Audible and Audible has become the growth segment of the market. They controlled ebooks and they were coming to control print books, right? And having one person be able to turn off my books was a big deal to me.
It happened previously with the Alcatraz books where Borders decided not to carry one of them, but Barnes & Noble did. And so the book succeeded and eventually Borders came around and decided to carry it. There’s only one person. They control your entire career. And I said, “I cannot be subject.”
And that’s when the big entrepreneurial part of my brain said, “All right. Let’s change.” I went to the publishers and I said, “There are certain things that I think we should be doing.”
And publishing, bless their hearts, they’re still trapped in a lot of ways in the 1900s, maybe the 1800s. They do not change very quickly.
And I looked at other markets and I said, “What is music doing? What is movies doing? What were music and movies — what were my friends who were independent comic publishers doing?” You know Howard Tayler, who was on Writing Excuses with me. I’m like, “What’s he doing?” He gives it away for free. If Amazon decides that my books are essentially free, how do I make a living? How’s he making a living? He gives it away for free and he still makes a living.
And I started to see some trends and they involved having a variety of product prices. One was having something really high end that the super fans could buy to display, to show off. Whether that be the vinyl, whether that be the equivalent of going to a concert and buying merch there, whether it be buying the book online that is free but you want to have a copy to show off, all the way down to the really cheap product. And in a lot of ways, if you have the really expensive thing, that subsidizes the really cheap product so that everybody can get the books. Everyone’s served better by a variety of offerings.
Tim Ferriss: Different pricing tiers.
Brandon Sanderson: Different pricing tiers, letting people buy in to what they want. And I realized, if people are buying into the expensive one, you can go lower on the cheap one and the people who can’t afford this or don’t want it are happy. The people who want this are happy. Everyone is more happy. And I went to the publisher, I’m like, “We should be upselling to merchandise. Lord of the Rings released these cool DVDs that came with Gollum bookends, right?” I said, “We should be doing things like that for big books. We should be bundling ebook and audiobook with a hardcover. We should be selling leatherbounds. Really high-end, nice ones, but we shouldn’t be charging what you’re charging.” They were charging 250 for the leatherbounds. I’m like, “That’s too high a price point. We should be doing $100 price point.” And the publisher said to me, “We can’t do this. We can’t do this because the…” And they had some good reasons.
I think they’re not insurmountable, but their reasons were, “Look, the bookstores can’t carry these special editions. We just can’t figure out how to make them work. The bookstores can’t sell merch. The bookstores can’t sell the leatherbounds, because we can’t…” We printed 250 copies of the Wheel of Time leatherbounds and we had so much trouble selling them, because fans didn’t know where to get them. The bookstores didn’t want to carry something that expensive that they weren’t sure if they were going to sell. It was just all a big mess.
And after a few years of this, I had numerous phone calls with the CEO of Macmillan, above even Tom Doherty, like the head dude. And I could not make any inroads and that’s when the voice of my mother whispered, “Well, Brandon, I trained you better than that. Do it yourself,” and I said, “I just have to.” And so, I got my team together and I said, “We are going to try to Amazon-proof ourselves.” That means we are going to direct sale. We are going to start building our own direct to our consumer and I started with the leatherbounds. My decision was, “This was something the market wanted.” I kept hearing from fans they wanted them. I heard from the publisher they can’t sell them. So I went to the publisher, said, “Can you give me those rights back?” And he’s like, “Sure. They’re just free. We can’t do anything with them. Maybe you can.” And that’s, again, to their credit, right? The publishers that are — I’ve had —
Tim Ferriss: I’m guessing in retrospect —
Brandon Sanderson: In retrospect, they may be —
Tim Ferriss: But they couldn’t have done it. They couldn’t.
Brandon Sanderson: They couldn’t have done it, because it had to be direct-to-consumer. Part of the reason is the fans running out to buy the special edition from the bookstore, it’s just that it’s a bad methodology. So I said to my team, “We’re going to build these. We’re going to do leatherbounds.” They sold 250 copies. I want to sell 10,000, right? Well, we’ll start at five. I want to sell 5,000. We ended up selling 50,000, right?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, my god. Now, is that of multiple books? Was that —
Brandon Sanderson: That’s the first one.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow.
Brandon Sanderson: Right?
Tim Ferriss: 50,000 hardbound. Okay.
Brandon Sanderson: Nowadays — yeah. Leatherbound —
Tim Ferriss: Leatherbound.
Brandon Sanderson: Leatherbounds at 100 to 250. Nowadays, our initial print runs are 50,000. Back then, it was 10,000 and then 5,000 and then 5,000 more. And then, things like that. Every one we get in stock will sell. Every one signed that is in stock will just instantly sell. And so there’s obviously a very big market. In fact, such a big market, I cannot physically produce enough of them to sell the signed ones. We have the unsigned ones that people still buy, but the signed ones go instantly.
Tim Ferriss: Quality problem to have.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah. It is a quality problem to have. It means that my time suddenly got a very strange monetary constraint on it, which is something that I try to pay attention to, but not too much. I don’t know if you’ve had this, but do you ever try to put a dollar amount on your time and is that just madness for you?
Tim Ferriss: It is madness. I did that for a very long time. I think it is helpful in some of the maybe earlier, intermediate entrepreneurial stages. So that you don’t find yourself, if you are like me, a perfectionist, micromanaging or doing too much yourself. However, there is a point where I think it just makes you miserable —
Brandon Sanderson: It does.
Tim Ferriss: — because you end up placing so high a per hour value on your time, that every squandered minute is like having a pound of flesh taken and you can drive yourself insane.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah. I wind in that because if I sign my name, that’s $250 because of the leatherbound. But I don’t want to spend my life signing my name, I want to write the books. But the most money I can earn per hour, I can sign 1,000 of those in an hour and that’s 250 each, which is just an unreal — if you think about that, that’s like — yeah. That’s —
Tim Ferriss: That’s bananas.
Brandon Sanderson: That is bananas. My normal writing time, I can put a different dollar amount. It depends on what I’m writing —
Tim Ferriss: Did you ever get pulled — because it happened to me with speaking engagements, different thing. But did you get pulled away from the creative work or the actual wordsmithing at any point or were you able to hold the line?
Brandon Sanderson: So I was able to hold the line, but barely. At one point, I started to get popular enough that people wanted me on a speaking tour, right? And so, I put a dollar amount on it. I’m like, “Well, at that point, a day of writing,” and it’d take me two days, “a day of writing is 25 grand.” So two days, 50 grand. And we put it up there. Instantly, like 10 inquiries. And I’m like, “I don’t want to do that.”
Tim Ferriss: Now what?
Brandon Sanderson: Now what? I just said, “You know what? No, we were wrong.” And part of that is because I don’t feel like I’m $50,000 worth of speaking, right? There are really good motivational speakers that are maybe worth that. I don’t think I am. My time is worth that, but I don’t think their — they would probably disagree. They’re like, “Whatever, we have this money set aside for a speaker. It’s what speakers cost.” But the other thing is that’s what my writing time was, and I love writing. And if I’m going to spend two days writing, I want to spend it writing. And nowadays it would be ridiculous. For me to go do one of these things, it would cost like 400 grand. It’d be even worse.
And so I did have to stop thinking about the hour, whatever. But it is a helpful metric for where you spend your time. Put your time where you’re happy and excited, but also if you can choose among different things that you’re having sidelined, you can do that.
So anyway, that’s beside the point. I gave this challenge to my team and it worked. We started to do all the things that the publishers weren’t doing, and then that’s when I said, “All right, now we’re going to actually build a team and grow.” And we moved to doing crowdfunding because it’s really a lot better. We did pre-orders on the initial ones. We moved to crowdfunding. And that’s when we went, my team all through the teens was maybe 10 people. Probably didn’t even quite get there.
Tim Ferriss: And who were those people? What was the kind of org chart at the time?
Brandon Sanderson: So me and Emily. So Emily runs the business and I run the creative. So she does HR, she does accounting, she does operations is what we call it, and all of that stuff.
Tim Ferriss: And is operations sort of the logistics of manufacturing and shipping everything?
Brandon Sanderson: Yes. It’s manufacturing, shipping, it’s HR, it’s facilities. Basically she’s over that. So if you look at my org chart, Emily and I are at the top and I am over what we call creative development, which early on was one person. All of these were one person. Creative development and publicity are kind of under me.
Tim Ferriss: What did creative development do at that —
Brandon Sanderson: That’s our art team.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it.
Brandon Sanderson: That’s our art team, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: That was art, mm-hmm.
Brandon Sanderson: So art, and then editorial and publicity were me. And then merchandising, events, and facilities were her. And so we started 2007, I hired my first employee. I broke out in 2005. 2007, I hired an assistant editor whose job is to do executive assistant and editorial work for me. Well very, oh, wait, you’re actually our first. Becky’s like, “That wasn’t…” he was our first full-time employee. Our first one, we hired Becky to do shipping. So actually, our first employee is shipping. You’re going to love this. My second book, they have remainders. You know what remainders are.
Tim Ferriss: I do. You should explain for the people listening, though.
Brandon Sanderson: Boy, we’re on a tangent to a tangent. I love this.
Tim Ferriss: You’re pretty good. I’m impressed with your ability to reel it in, though. What you haven’t done, which happens to me all the time, is someone will say, “What were we talking about? What was your question again?” You’re very good at doing the callbacks.
Brandon Sanderson: Well, you’ve been reminding me. So publishing, like Tom Doherty said, he wants 10 books on the shelf and you really want to sell seven of those, seven to eight. If you sell every one, that means you didn’t put enough on the shelf. Someone walked into that store and couldn’t buy a book. If you sell two, you actually printed way too many. Tom would still want them for publicity reasons, but industry kind of common sense says you want to have remainders somewhere around. Remainders are left over at the end of a print run. You want to have around 20 percent. Anything between 30 to 10 percent is fine. 40 percent starts to look sketchy, and less than 10 percent is bad also. So you end up getting thousands of books shipped back.
Elantris, they printed 10,000 and they had remainders on Elantris. Or not Elantris, Mistborn. Elantris, they didn’t have remainders. They didn’t print enough of them. Mistborn, they did. They actually overprinted a little bit. So they had too many remainders. They said, “Brandon, you can have these. It’s a dollar apiece.” I’m like, entrepreneur. What does my mom say? You buy those books at a dollar and you sign them and you sell them at cover price and you use that to supplement your income, right? You’re making $2,500 a year. You need to supplement that somehow. So I bought them all.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, so this is going back early.
Brandon Sanderson: This is way back early. Bought them all, put them in our garage, couldn’t park our car anymore. Then we hired Becky, who’s my sister-in-law, to take the orders. We put them up on my website signed, and it’s a trickle, 10 a week or even that many, but she was shipping that. So first person is shipping. Second person is editorial, executive assistant/editorial. Soon there’s enough editorial work for him that I need another assistant. So then we hire a merchandising person.
Tim Ferriss: What is the merch?
Brandon Sanderson: So the merch at that point was looking at doing t-shirts and stickers and to take over the shipping from Becky, to have a full in-house thing. So that’s when we let Becky go. So she was our first employee. I’m nodding. She’s over here in the corner. She eventually got hired again. She’ll come back into the story.
But then we have a full-time person who is shipping and to come up with merchandising, and then I hire her husband. We hired them as a team for 20 hours each a week, as one 40-hour employee. He was an artist. He’d done all my art for Mistborn. She’s the person we had been offloading our merchandise to so far, that had started doing it. We’re like, “We’re bringing this in-house.” So posters, art prints, all of that stuff. So we hire them.
So then our next employee is right around the same time is publicity and marketing altogether. That’s Adam, whom you’ve met. So then we have our structure all set. We have, for me, I have an editorial person. I have a creative development, which, art person, and I have a publicity person. And then Emily has a person for shipping and for merchandise together. And then she hired a facilities person to, our little office at the time, to clean it up, to change light bulbs and things like that. Then she handled herself, all of the HR, and things like that. That’s where we began and that’s what we were for 10 years, until the first Kickstarter, where things exploded.
And slowly we’ve been adding people to shipping and we’ve been shipping out of the house next door that we bought. And that’s when we said, “All right, it’s time to level up.” And I said, “Everyone’s going to build a department and I want a full team for each one, because we’re going to go somewhere with this now that I have this team.”
Tim Ferriss: Just to give people a visual, so when I got my amazing tour earlier, I remember walking into the warehouse and I was like, I feel like “I’m at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.” This is a gigantic space.
Brandon Sanderson: Books are big.
Tim Ferriss: With levels upon levels upon levels and pallets upon pallets upon pallets. It is really jaw-dropping to walk into that space. Now, you mentioned Kickstarter. I know we’re jumping ahead a little bit, and I’m going to want to come back to Warbreaker and all sorts of other things. But since you already mentioned Kickstarter, I recall very distinctly when your launch video was sent to me by a number of friends.
Brandon Sanderson: Had you ever heard of me? You had listened to —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And so I got this video and I was like, “Oh, this should be fun to watch.” So for people who don’t have any context, this is the big one.
Brandon Sanderson: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: The big one. How do you want to set that up? Because it’s so mind-boggling. I don’t even know which angle to take on it.
Brandon Sanderson: I have a couple of big level up moments in my life. The first one is when I pitched Mistborn, going from Elantris to Mistborn, where I said, “I’m not doing a sequel to Elantris. I’m doing this whole new thing and I’ve got big aspirations.” The next one’s when The Wheel of Time hit me. The next one’s when we started doing our leatherbounds, and the most recent one is our Kickstarter.
Now I say our Kickstarter because it’s the famous one. We’d actually done one before that hit seven million. That was for The Way of Kings leatherbound, when we moved our leatherbounds from — so we did Elantris and the Mistborn books and Warbreaker just as pre-orders during the 20-teens. And then coming to the 2020s, we said, “All right, we’re moving to Kickstarter.”
This happened, actually, because of my friend Howard Tayler who was, he was one of my models where he’s the guy who did a web comic, comic book that he sold the print editions in order to subsidize the free thing online. And he came to me and he said, “Brandon, you should be doing crowdfunding.” I’m like, “We have a nice pre-order system.” He’s like, “No, crowdfunding hits publicity in a different way.” And I realized he’s right. I should have been doing these. One of the problems with the pre-orders is we never knew how many to order. And with a Kickstarter, you get all those orders come in and you have to pay a chunk to Kickstarter, but they have a nice back-end structure.
We investigated that and Kara, my person who’s in charge of fulfillment is like, “This would be so much easier than what we are doing because you can mail merge all these things, and they keep all of this track, all of the stuff with the shipping and the prices. It just makes it so much easier.”
And then there’s the publicity side where you can start adding all of these add-ons and things. And so we tried one out with The Way of Kings leatherbound. It was successful. $7 million, which is pretty good. And then COVID hit.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, so before we get to COVID hits, now, before we get to that, what did you guys learn? What were the key lessons learned with that first prototype run, let’s just say.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, first prototype run. So there’s a couple things. Number one, there’s a whole lot of organization that goes into shipping out 50,000 books at once instead of 50,000 books across 10 years.
Tim Ferriss: Because a lot of folks who do Kickstarter, if they’re successful, get the hug of death.
Brandon Sanderson: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: And they implode.
Brandon Sanderson: Yep, they implode because managing and shipping and keeping everyone happy. When you do what we were doing where we’re sending out a few thousand every month or things like that, people get their books in a timely way. In a Kickstarter, suddenly you have to figure out how to send 50,000 books and keep everyone updated on it. And you have to figure out how to get merchandise and books shipped together or in separate packages.
That’s a really big one because what we found with our books is we could drop ship the books direct from the printer, but not the merchandise, which comes in on different boats from around the world because you’re printing them all in different places. And so we had to figure out how are we doing all the shipping? The logistics do kill a lot of people, and we were able to build that.
So that’s all behind the scenes stuff. That’s a lesson. Having your logistics in place, knowing how you’re going to fulfill if you are successful, is a very big deal. Knowing that you can already produce these things at scale, have them arrive. A lot of people who do Kickstarters don’t understand the sheer fact of these big trucks coming in can only go to certain places, and they can only offload in certain ways. And some of them need a high dock and some of them will have a ramp. And you have to find out where can they deposit these things. If you don’t have a warehouse with a high dock, you better then know that the trucks are coming in with a ramp and a pallet jack. Otherwise they’re going to arrive and be like, “All right, move these.” And you’re like, “What do we do?” We actually had one of those where they’d all had ramps before and then run, arrived without, and they’re like, “All right, how are you getting this out?” And we had to have a bunch of people go into the back of the book and move them off of the pallets by box.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, my God.
Brandon Sanderson: These are all lessons learned. So there’s all these logistical things.
The second thing we learned was that it was true. A crowdfunding campaign where you bring all of the might of your fan base together for one event, cuts through the noise. There’s a certain principle I’ve started calling escape velocity of attention. Escape velocity of attention is, in today’s media environment, people’s attention have a gravitational pull to what they’ve already been paying attention to. They love the things that they love and getting anything else to achieve that escape velocity, to go off and to make a splash. Any idea to not just crash and burn, to get out into the universe and draw the attention of other people is just super difficult. Most things sit on the planet and never get up into the universe where everyone can see it. They crash and burn. And it’s like this layer keeping people’s attention away from paying attention to this thing over here.
In order to make any sort of noise, any sort of attention outside of a very small group, you need a certain amount of attention being paid to it so that you achieve this escape velocity and you blast out. And then the rest of the planets pay attention to it, not just the one that is your little, little planet of attention.
It’s really hard. Launching new books for new authors today is much harder. You might notice, I’ve noticed, there are fewer people who break out now than used to. More authors are earning a living now than used to, but they’re earning less because there are fewer breakouts. There are fewer movie stars than there used to be. There are fewer giant bands than there used to be. And this is all because our attention is, there’s so many things vying for it that we put up this barrier and we don’t want to look up. And it’s very natural. Having a Kickstarter gets that momentum behind you. Starts to make noise.
Tim Ferriss: Executed properly.
Brandon Sanderson: Executed properly. A lot of them flop, but executed — bringing all of your fan base together and making a lot of noise, suddenly more people pay attention to you.
With our Way of Kings Kickstarter, it still only reached our audience. But even reaching your audience is really hard today. All of the social media platforms that we have learned to rely upon and use have found out that people can’t pay attention to everything. They will click too many names, they will want to follow these names, but then there’ll be too much spam of all these names on their feeds. And all of them use algorithms because, number one, they need to monetize somehow. And number two, people follow too many things and it overwhelms most people. So they come and they bounce off of even their social media platforms.
In the early days of social media, if someone followed you on Facebook and you did a post, it showed up on their feed automatically.
Tim Ferriss: No longer the case.
Brandon Sanderson: And that stopped in the 20-teens, where all of them — and so it depended on how many people liked the thing. So if you even want to reach your own audience, you have to have an escape velocity of attention. You have to break through these barriers preventing even your fan base from seeing what’s happening. I still get people who come to me like, “Wow, you did this big Kickstarter. I didn’t even hear about this.” We sold to only 10 percent of our audience with the big one that we’re getting to.
Tim Ferriss: That’s insane.
Brandon Sanderson: That’s only 10 percent. And that’s all that effort to get to 10 percent. And I would say the big Kickstarter was 30 to 40 percent new people. So we really only reached five percent of my audience.
But regardless, it taught us that. It taught me about escape velocity of attention. How to break through, get into the sky and start getting everyone’s attention. Maybe, a little bit. Or at least get high enough that your whole planet that follows you, more of them can see it.
Tim Ferriss: I want to give people just a bit of a carrot dangling on the end of a stick here. And then we’re going to go back to COVID hitting. With the big campaign that we keep referring to, what did that end up totaling?
Brandon Sanderson: It was 41-point-something million, official. 45 when you would do all the people. You have people that can add on extra stuff. The behind-the-scenes was another four and a half or so. We ended right at 45 million. So if you go look at it right now, it’s 41-point-something. Do you have it there? What is it? 41 point —
Tim Ferriss: I don’t have actually the points. I just have roughly 41.
Brandon Sanderson: Roughly 41 million. The previous highest Kickstarter had been 21. And we still have the record.
Tim Ferriss: That’s so wild. All right.
Brandon Sanderson: Here’s what’s wild. It’s for books. If you go look at that top 10, everything else is some cool tech innovation. And we have it for novels.
COVID hits. COVID hits. I have gone through cycles in my life multiple times where I say yes to too many things and then I’m traveling too much. And 2019 was one of those years. As an author, you know this, people want you in person. And traveling is fun. I enjoy seeing the world. So you say yes to a bunch of things and then you end up, as I did in 2019, with three different trips to Europe. And Europe can be kind of exhausting. Three tours in Europe. Multiple tours around here. And I calculated, I’ve been on the road one third of my days.
COVID hits, and 2020 was set for the same thing. And all that gets canceled. No one can travel. And suddenly I have one third of my time back.
In the meantime, I’d started to feel dissatisfied with something in my life. When I was early in my career, I could just have a random idea and I would shelve it until I was done with my current book. But I could have something that was really exciting to me, and when I finished my current book, I could go in and I could write that cool idea.
Warbreaker, that you mentioned, was one of these. Just a standalone book that I wrote — Mistborn Trilogy — between The Mistborn Trilogy, The Wheel of Time, and Stormlight on either side, I have this little standalone book that was a cool idea I had. I love that about fantasy. Some of my favorite fantasy novels are standalone books. Guy Gavriel Kay is very good at them. Lions of Al-Rassan or Tigana are two highly recommended. They’re ’90s fantasy. They’re a little slower than Modern fantasy, really just single volume, really digging into one world but doesn’t overstay its welcome.
I hadn’t been able to do that in a while. I was writing series, all these series, everything I wrote turned into a big series and I didn’t have a place for these wacky ideas. And I started to hit my mid-40s and I started to realize I’m only really going to be able to do this probably till my 70s if I’m lucky. Most authors really slow down when they hit their 70s. This is what people who are fans of Game of Thrones have found. George was always a little on the slower side, and then he hit retirement age and he slowed down. And a lot of authors that happened to. And I started to calculate out, and I’m like, I don’t have room for any of these cool ideas. That makes me sad, makes me sad that I can’t just sit down and write something that isn’t — yeah.
But then suddenly I had a third of my time back. I started watching movies with my kids. They were old enough that we could show them some of our favorite movies. And we showed them The Princess Bride, one of my favorite movies and favorite books.
Tim Ferriss: That’s amazing.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Amazing. Amazing Everything. William Goldman.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, it’s a wonderful, wonderful book. Written by William Goldman, who’s a great screenwriter. He’s written a lot of classics. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was one of his. Just brilliant screenwriter who script-doctored a ton of your favorite movies as well as wrote multiple on his own of your favorite movies.
I was watching this movie and I love just the feel of it, this sort of fantasy that is fun but doesn’t quite take itself too seriously. We got done with that and my wife’s like, “I love that movie.” And she said, “Isn’t it funny that the Princess doesn’t do anything in the movie The Princess Bride? She tries to hit a rat once and she misses. That’s the most she accomplishes. That and marrying the bad guy, almost.” And she’s like, “Wouldn’t it be nice if she did something?”
Tim Ferriss: Mawwige.
Brandon Sanderson: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, mawwige.
Brandon Sanderson: That stuck in my brain. I’m like, what if The Princess Bride. What if — Princess Bride starts with guy goes off to seek his fortune, says, “Wait for me. I’m going to go find my fortune and come back and then we can get married and I’ll have money.” He went off and he got captured by pirates. What if that story happened but the Princess said, “Well, I guess I have to go find him now.” And went to find him. “No one’s going to go find him. Well, it’s down to me.” She has no experience with this, but she’s like, “I’m the only one.” So she goes off. I wrote a story that was more fairy tale-ish. It’s still in my cosmic universe, all my connected things. So it’s told by my storyteller character. Based a little bit off of some Shakespearean Fool vibes from Twelfth Night and stuff like that.
Tim Ferriss: I’m just going to sidebar because we might not get to it.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: You have someone within this company whose sole job, as I understand it, is continuity.
Brandon Sanderson: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: And you have an internal wiki to keep track of everything in this universe so that it interconnects and coheres.
Brandon Sanderson: As good as I am with narrative, I need all of this stuff still, so we have someone.
From his voice, this is the first time I’d done this. All my other books are in my voice. And I said, “What if a character told a story to someone else about this, this young woman?” And it became the story Tress of the Emerald Sea that I wrote without any plans to publish it, without any contracts, without any expectations. I didn’t tell the fans it was coming. I wrote it and just gave the chapters to my wife to read as I was writing it. And it was liberating. With no deadlines, no contracts. Just I wrote it because I had a little extra time.
And I thought that was amazing. That’s something I’ve been missing. And COVID gave me this chance across those two or three years that we canceled everything, that I used that extra time. I fulfilled all of my contractual obligations writing books, but I also ended up writing four novels that were just squeezed between. And I say, these are each 100,000 words. So they’re one Stormlight Archive book. So it’s about 18 months of writing time that I squeezed in there between different things.
I wrote these four books and I realized — well, at about book three, I realized I had something. Something that I could spring on people. And COVID had been so miserable for so many people, it was delightful for me. I’m writing books, I’m watching movies with my kids. No one’s asking me to go on tour anymore. So in the midst of all this, I started to have a plan and I started to have an idea. And I got that fourth one written, and I wrote the fourth one deliberately for the Kickstarter. I’ve realized I wanted one that felt more like my classic novels so that fans who like Mistborn and Stormlight would get something, because number one and number three of that were told from my storyteller voice. And then number two was something completely different, a science fiction novel unrelated to my other stuff. And so I wrote one kind of for the fans. And then I sprung them on my company and said, “There’s four books out of nowhere. Tell me what you think.” And I watched their reaction to finding four unexpected books and the excitement that just moved through the company. And I said, “All right, I’ve got something.” I did it again with a test audience, some of my sworn-to-secrecy early readers.
Tim Ferriss: Do you use the same early readers typically?
Brandon Sanderson: I have a pool of about a hundred of them. And we don’t use them all for every book. We just kind of randomly decide. And I said, “Brandon has an extra book.” And we actually split the hundred into groups of 25 and sent them all four different books. And they all talk on a —
Tim Ferriss: Did you say two groups of 45?
Brandon Sanderson: No.
Tim Ferriss: Sorry.
Brandon Sanderson: Sorry. Four groups of 25.
Tim Ferriss: Four groups of 25.
Brandon Sanderson: Sorry, I probably misspoke on that.
Tim Ferriss: No, no, no. I think I misheard it. Okay. Four groups of 25.
Brandon Sanderson: And they all talk on Discords and things, and we sent them each a different book. And then I watched the Discord as they all realized I had written four books in secret. And I spun this into the video that you watched. I went to my team and I said, “I want to do something.” And they were a little resistant because sometimes some of these big ideas that I have — I’m the big idea person, and they can be really daunting such as the, we’re going to do our own leather bounds, we’re going to start doing Kickstarters. My job is to — we always talk Emily and I, my job is to look and pull people toward that star future. And her job is to say, “Remember to be practical. Remember to be practical. Can we actually accomplish this? What will it take to actually accomplish this?”
And I went to them and I said, “I want to do a video where I pretend that I’m coming out with some big scandal and I’m retiring from writing because I’ve secretly done something just horrible.” Because that had happened, that happens periodically. And it’s probably maybe not be something really fun to make fun of, but you have a lot of writers like, “I have to admit that I plagiarized or I have to admit that…” Anyway, all those apology videos that people — and I said, “I’m going to make a fake apology video. And the reason being is everyone’s going to get gotten by it and they’re going to share it with their friends who’ll get gotten by it.” They’ll just say, “Hey, watch this.” And then you’ll be, “Oh, no, Sanderson, what’s up with him?”
And we’ll tap into that sort of horror mentality that watch a train wreck their car wreck. People want it slowed down if they think Brandon’s going to announce something terrible. And then I hit them. Instead of it being another terrible COVID thing, it was, there’s four surprise books. You get this delightful thing in your life instead. And I knew this would go viral. I just knew it would. They were scared of it because they were like, “This sounds like you have cancer or something, and that’s not something to make fun of.” And I’m like, “Yes, it is not. I agree.” But at the same time I knew it would work and it was — I am a storyteller. And that’s a video with a story. I live for the reveal.
If people read my books, you’ll tell I live for that ending where I’ve been distracting with something and then I pull out that surprise. I love the great twist. I love the really good complication that you’re not expecting. I love when a story comes together right at the end. And that video did it, and it announced a Kickstarter for four secret books. We did not expect to go to $41 million. We were hoping to get to around seven to 10 like we’d done before, but that escaped velocity of attention. I suddenly, it’s the first time in my life where suddenly people are paying attention who are not in my circle of influence, who don’t read epic fantasy. Suddenly news stories are everywhere. Everyone’s talking about it. I get interviewed by legit news media and the closest I had ever gotten to that was The Wheel of Time, way back when. And even then, no one really interviewed me.
Tim Ferriss: Which we’ll come back to.
Brandon Sanderson: I did appear on Colbert Report.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a big one.
Brandon Sanderson: Well, my face appeared. Does that count?
Tim Ferriss: I think that counts.
Brandon Sanderson: So Stephen Colbert had a piece on zeppelins, because he was in character, this is Colbert Report, about how much he hates zeppelins or whatever. And he holds up, because USA Today had done a thing on zeppelins, and he holds up a USA Today page. And there’s my little picture, because “Doofus takes over Wheel of Time” is the bottom story on the page below the fold. And there’s this giant zeppelin story and he holds it up and he points at zeppelins. And then there’s me. My face was on The Colbert Report. It’s pixelated, you can barely tell.
Tim Ferriss: But you appeared.
Brandon Sanderson: But I appeared.
Tim Ferriss: As seen on.
Brandon Sanderson: As seen on Stephen Colbert, Brandon Sanderson, my claim to fame. My fans all tweeted me, this is way back in 2009. It was 2007, it was right when The Wheel of Time happened.
Tim Ferriss: So when you look at this record-breaking success, this Kickstarter, were there aspects of it or packages that just outperformed all expectations?
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, it was the main tier, the buy everything tier. So we did it, again, I like to have people be able to self select it. And so there was a relatively inexpensive ebook and audiobook bundle that you got together, and I think it was $15 each for those.
Tim Ferriss: So, okay, so each book in the audio ebook combo was $15.
Brandon Sanderson: $15, yep. Which is about the price of an audible credit, plus you get the ebook. We thought that was — so for 60 bucks, you got all four books on that. And then the high end we did, you get all four books in our nice editions. They’re not leatherbound, but they’re like a $55 price point. We sold them at 40 on this plus a box every month of Brandon Sanderson swag, of just magical swag.
Tim Ferriss: For how long?
Brandon Sanderson: For a year.
Tim Ferriss: For a year.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, I like the idea of subscription boxes, but I have a problem with them in that there was the big subscription box craze in the late teens, and I feel like their incentive was misplaced. They wanted to keep you going as long as they could. Because of that, they will stretch out the cool objects, they’ll run out of steam. And Adam, actually, in our company, had pitched, “Why don’t we do a subscription box?” And I’d always been hesitant because I feel like you eventually end up with too much crap you don’t want. But I went to the team and I said, “What if we did eight boxes, four books in eight boxes? So across a year you get a book every quarter, and then you get two boxes of swag, and we just make that swag awesome. We put all of our best ideas into it. We make eight really killer boxes, and then we’re done. We don’t ask people to subscribe for longer. You got your cool boxes of interesting stuff.” And that just went great.
Tim Ferriss: What was the price point for that?
Brandon Sanderson: So those were 40 bucks each. I think, also. So the idea is that the book, it’s $40 a month, four of those months you get a book, and then eight of those months you get a $40 box.
Tim Ferriss: Got it.
Brandon Sanderson: That has other cool stuff in it. And $40 was a high enough price point. We could make some really quality cool things.
Tim Ferriss: So it’s like just under 500 bucks for that.
Brandon Sanderson: Yep. And that one, that tier was, I believe, our biggest tier. If it wasn’t that one, it was the tier of just all the books in those editions. Those two were the ones that just went gangbusters. Almost nobody bought the lower tiers.
Tim Ferriss: Did that surprise you?
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, that surprised me. But again, everyone’s happy. They all get to self-select what they want.
Tim Ferriss: Now, how do you explain that based on what you said earlier, which is that you only hit 5-10 percent of your audience and you had 30-40 percent newbies going for the gold? That just strikes me as so unexpected.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, I think part of it is, I would guess the majority of that 30-40 percent were people who had heard of me and had not tried me yet. I wasn’t grabbing people that didn’t ever read, but it was people who’d friends that say, “Hey, Brandon Sanderson.” And these four books were all starter books. They were all meant, even the fourth one, which is kind of tied into things, to be books, you could just pick up and read without knowing any of my other things. And to this day, Tress of the Emerald Sea, you want to hear weird stuff, another tangent?
Tim Ferriss: Love weird stuff.
Brandon Sanderson: Tress of the Emerald Sea. You would think, I have plumbed the depths of my audience, right, doing this Kickstarter, $45 million. Shipped out 150,000 copies of that book with the Kickstarter and all is said and done. That is my best-selling book through an edition bought from the publisher after Mistborn and Stormlight Archive. After the first books of those, not even the sequels. Like after Mistborn One and Stormlight one, Tress of the Emerald Sea, that book sells as much. It’s really comparable. There are the weeks where it beats them. So this book that you would think we’d sold to everybody, the publisher releases an edition expecting, “Well, there’s not much, but we’ll have it on the shelves,” becomes their third best-selling Sanderson book of all time.
Tim Ferriss: How do you explain that?
Brandon Sanderson: It’s because — it’s that escape velocity of attention. People hear about you, they want to try you out, but they don’t know where to start or there’s so many things and something cuts through. People can say, “Tress is a great place to start.” “Book Talk really likes Tress.” It talks about and says, “Great place to start on Sanderson, a little bit more romantic, a little bit more whimsical.” It fits with what a lot of people like on book talk. So they buy it even though. So it’s really interesting. The starter books do sell the best.
And so anyway, we’re going back to we released this thing and those are the ones people want. They’ve heard of me, they say, “Well, I’ll try this thing.” And they become part of something and so they all buy in. And then there’s that thing, we call it “The Year of Sanderson,” and we started shipping these boxes out and people got their boxes and their books, and it was wonderful. It was the best year of my life, right?
Tim Ferriss: That’s incredible. It’s so incredible. So I have a question about the four times 25 people, the test readers.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And this actually ties into some of the questions I wanted to ask about Warbreaker, but let’s focus on the test readers, the four groups of 25. When you have a new book of any type, do you use 25 to a hundred test readers?
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. How do you absorb or evaluate that feedback? I could foresee that being a lot of feedback.
Brandon Sanderson: I pay my team, my editorial team, to condense it into the most relevant information. So this is a big difference between me and a lot of writers, is I look at books a little bit like Hollywood looks at movies with test audiences. I want to know what my audience is going to say about a book before I release it. Sometimes it’ll change what I write, often it will, sometimes it won’t. I just want to know. I want to understand how it’s going to perform, what people are going to think of it. And a lot of writers do this with a couple of early readers. I find that doesn’t give me an actual test audience. It doesn’t give me the pulse of an audience. I need like 20 to 30, if not 40 to 50 people reading it. Even that’s just a tiny percentage of the audience. But it’s been really key to me. It started when I was a nobody before I sold, before I had an agent, before I had an editor. I actually sold to an editor before I got an agent, so I’m reverse.
But back before I had any of that, and I was head of that magazine, I started using those readers and passing out my books, and I would print off physical copies, because this is the late ’90s, and I would have a pack of gel pens of different colors and I’d say, “Pick a color. Write your name in that color so I know who’s writing the comment. Read through the book and write your feedback all in that color. Go ahead and respond to what other people have written.” And they would pass around my friends and they would all take a different color, and you’d have these conversations in the margins about what people thought of certain scenes. And I saw that and I’m like, “This is really handy.”
Tim Ferriss: Did you ask for particular types of feedback to focus it? What —
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah. So what I want is just, I don’t want people to fix the book. I want people to give their descriptive responses to the book. If you were just reading this as a professionally published thing, where are the places you’re bored? Where are the places you’re confused? Where are the places that you’re standing up and cheering? Where are the places that, you know? Where are you engaged? Where are you not engaged?
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Brandon Sanderson: Just what are you enjoying? Don’t tell me what’s wrong. Don’t tell me what to fix. Tell me where you’re bored and tell me where you’re confused.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Brandon Sanderson: Tell me where you’re excited and tell me where you’re turning the pages so fast you have to come back and write your feedback because you don’t want to stop to write your feedback.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Brandon Sanderson: And that became really valuable to me. And so when we moved beyond that and I was actually published, I started making spreadsheets where I’m like, “You get the book, go on the spreadsheet, and go to the chapters tab on the spreadsheet, on like a Google Sheet, and go look and respond to what people are saying.” You just make a comment, say, “I feel this about this chapter,” and then respond to what other people are saying. And then each chapter fills up with giant conversations about that chapter, almost like you have a book club out there reading the book and having a discussion.
Tim Ferriss: And you want people to respond to things because it helps you spot patterns?
Brandon Sanderson: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: Someone’s like, “Yeah, I started dragging here. I didn’t really understand why this character did this.” And then you have somebody like, “Yeah, me too. Yeah, me too.”
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, exactly. Or they’ll say, “No, no, no, it was this.” And the first one was like, “Oh, that made sense. I went back and read it.” You’ll see emerging where the problems are and where they aren’t and nowadays what we let people do is they just add a check mark next to it if they agree with it and if they disagree, have them write out why.
Tim Ferriss: And that’s in a spreadsheet or are you using something —
Brandon Sanderson: It’s in a spreadsheet. We use Google Sheets. No, no. We started using an actual program. Peter, who’s head of editorial was like, “We need an actual program that’s secure and that can track — like people will write a line number where they have their comment now and stuff. So we actually use a program, but sometimes we still use Google Sheets for kind of what we call —
Tim Ferriss: Is that program an off-the-shelf program that —
Brandon Sanderson: One of my beta readers, which is what we call these people, worked for the company and pitched it to us.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it.
Brandon Sanderson: And the name of it’s escaping me right now.
Tim Ferriss: It’s okay.
Brandon Sanderson: I can find out what it is.
Tim Ferriss: Well, we can figure it out.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, we’ll figure it out.
Tim Ferriss: Maybe put it in the show notes if we can find it.
Brandon Sanderson: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: So part of the reason I’m asking is that I started working on this book six, seven years ago.
Brandon Sanderson: Is this your fantasy?
Tim Ferriss: No.
Brandon Sanderson: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: No, this is a different book. This is an entire book on saying no and just basically finding clarity in a world of noise.
Brandon Sanderson: That’s a really good book to write.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And I started working on it. It’s the first book I ever shelved. I was like, “You know what? I’m not quite ready to write this.” And I canceled the contract, returned the biggest advance that I ever received, and now I’m working on it, but I’ve found myself just paying attention energetically to what’s energizing me or draining me. The idea of serial release. Very exciting.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, that’s really big nowadays.
Tim Ferriss: Because I’ve never done it.
Brandon Sanderson: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve never done it. And that raises a whole lot of questions, which is one of the reasons I wanted to talk about Warbreaker and releasing early drafts for free on the website with Creative Commons and all that.
Brandon Sanderson: Let’s go to that and just saying, let me finish what I do with the beta reading.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Brandon Sanderson: I give all that to my team.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Brandon Sanderson: I go read the end of part summaries and the end of book summaries. They take the rest, they distill it, and then they actually put it into a copy of the book, the manuscript, just interstitials. “They said this at this point. They said this at this point.”
Tim Ferriss: Ah.
Brandon Sanderson: So I never even have to go to the document except to read like, “End of part one. What are people’s general responses?”
Tim Ferriss: And these are comments in a Word doc or something like that?
Brandon Sanderson: Yes. Comments in a Word doc. Just in-track changes so that I see, “Here’s a big discussion that happened here.” They only take like 10 to 20 percent of it and put it in, so.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. What are the criteria for selection? If they’re only taking 10 to 20 percent, is that just —
Brandon Sanderson: It’s Peter and Karen and they know me really well.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Brandon Sanderson: These are people that I’ve worked with since college.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay.
Brandon Sanderson: And so it’s over time and I will star and say, “This is a good comment. This is one that I, you know.” And they handle editorial. They’ll see what I revise and what I don’t, and they’ll know in the future, “Watch for this.” And do remember, I’m going and looking at the end of part and reading all of people’s general comments. So this is just for a given chapter if there’s a speed bump or something like that. But they figured it out.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. And then looking at Warbreaker, why did you release it in the way that you released it? Maybe you could just describe how you went about doing it.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, so Warbreaker happened after I wrote The Mistborn Trilogy and I was chatting with Cory Doctorow, kind of a famous tech blogger and Creative Commons advocate. My every interaction with Cory has been really positive, like super class act. I was once at the Hugo Awards, and this is like the Academy Awards in sci-fi fantasy, and I was nominated and you get a little pin if you’re nominated to wear around in your lapel. And I didn’t know that. It was in my basket. I didn’t know it was there. He saw I didn’t have mine. I’m like, “Oh, I don’t have my pin,” and he took off, because he had several. You wear any nominations you’ve had during that night, and so he took off one of his and he just pinned it on me. That’s the kind of class act Cory is.
Tim Ferriss: Classy.
Brandon Sanderson: And so I was talking to him and he really believes and believed that attention is people’s most valuable commodity. Not their money, their attention. If you can get their attention, you will eventually be able to, in some ways, get money from that audience to support yourself, but he says start with attention. And this was really smart. He released all of his books in the Creative Commons, and he’s a big advocate for that. I realized at the time — I had Mistborn coming out, and this was right when Wheel of Time was being announced. It was way back when. It was 2007.
I wrote a lot of the book, but there were parts I hadn’t written. So the idea was I started releasing the chapters just on forums to let people give feedback to me, trying a serialized version of the book with the main goal being see how an audience online gives feedback different from my beta readers, but also to have a chance to kind of bring my audience together into one place. And then when it was done, I released the book under the Creative Commons, partially as an experiment. Giving away the book for free, how does this impact the sales of the commercial edition? I wanted data on that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Brandon Sanderson: And the data says it doesn’t really impact it.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Brandon Sanderson: It sells just as well as Elantris does, even a little bit better, and Elantris wasn’t released in the Creative Commons. It doesn’t sell as well as Stormlight or Mistborn, but those are my breakouts, my standout successes, and I don’t think that has anything to do with it.
Tim Ferriss: Have you released any books after that with Creative Commons?
Brandon Sanderson: No. I keep wanting to do another one, and I haven’t found the right one to do, but I am planning to do that at some point.
Tim Ferriss: How did you find the feedback online in the forums differed from beta testers?
Brandon Sanderson: It was about the same.
Tim Ferriss: It was?
Brandon Sanderson: It really was. But remember, we’ve got an insular audience of super fans at that point. That’s the only people paying attention to me in 2007.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Brandon Sanderson: Now, it would probably be different, but I can get a little bit of that by watching — we do re-release one chapter a week or two chapters a week of new books leading up to launch to about a third of the book, and I can go read the threads on Reddit about that. And they actually mirror the beta readers really closely.
Tim Ferriss: Amazing.
Brandon Sanderson: It’s really interesting. There are a few things. This newest book surprised me. Only one thing surprised me, and that is in the newest book, people are responding to modernized language more than I expected them to.
Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by that?
Brandon Sanderson: Epic fantasy. You walk this line in epic fantasy. Do you use “Okay,” or do you use “All right?”
Tim Ferriss: I see what you’re saying.
Brandon Sanderson: Right?
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Brandon Sanderson: And I’ve been moving The Stormlight Archive toward modern language across the course of the novels as we’re preparing to kind of go a little bit more what we call magepunk. A little more modern for the next books.
Tim Ferriss: Magepunk.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I’ve never heard that. It’s great.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah. It’s not my term. It’s just what people kind of call when fantasy magic becomes technology. So if you watch any sort of film or thing where you have ships powered by a magical technology, we’ll call that magepunk.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s like Hextech in Arcane.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, Hextech. Arcane is magepunk. That’s the straight-up subgenre of that. And so I was taken by surprise on that. People are kind of responding against that, and I think this could just be like people want more sincerity in their media nowadays. I think they’re tired of media being cynical.
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Brandon Sanderson: And this is a sign, maybe. I don’t think it went cynical, but this is like a danger sign of that. So they’re like, they would like me to pull back. They want me to call it courting instead of dating and just kind of stay a little bit more with that fantasy feel. That one took me by surprise. My beta readers didn’t spot that. Everything else in those threads were things my beta readers spotted that either that I left because I felt this was integral to the narrative I’m telling. If it’s negative, it’s all right for it to be negative. This is the piece of art. Some people don’t like Impressionists, but you can’t make Impressionism better by not being Impressionists.
Each piece of art is going to have things like that.
Tim Ferriss: Quick question. When you’re releasing, say, chapter by chapter up to a third of a new book, what is your cadence of releasing those chapters? Is it once per week?
Brandon Sanderson: Once per week is what we’ve been doing. I could see value in twice a week. But once a week, everyone gets together, the threads on Reddit are really cool.
Tim Ferriss: Where do you release those chapters?
Brandon Sanderson: We release them on Tor’s website, Tor’s publicity website. Right now it’s called Reactor, used to be Tor.com, and that’s a good place for them.
Tim Ferriss: Why not release them on your own site or in some other way?
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, good question. So there’s arguments for that. The thing about it is we’ve found, over time, personal websites are important, but they’re much less important than social media or aggregate websites in today’s mind economy.
Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by aggregate websites?
Brandon Sanderson: So Tor’s website is a website that just has posts every day, things like shared blogs or places you go to that find a whole bunch of articles.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Brandon Sanderson: Right. What we’ve found is, for instance, people will come to me to buy their print books. They will not come to me to buy their ebooks. We had an ebook store, maybe we will put it back up. We might even have a view that we’re selling now. We sell in the tens of copies of my ebooks. People like their platform. They want to have a Kindle and buy the books on their Kindle, which makes perfect sense. They do not want to go somewhere else, buy an ebook, and load it to the Kindle, even if it’s cheaper somewhere else. Those who control the platform control the world.
He who controls the spice controls — well here, it’s you control the platform. That’s why Amazon did what it did. That’s why Amazon worked so hard to make Kindle a thing, even going so far as to pay out millions and millions of dollars in order to try to corner that market and gain that mind share of going to Kindle. I don’t mind Tor trying to turn their website into that. It helps other authors, fans get used to going there.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s great. No, it’s like the tech world. It’s like the Hacker News.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah. Yeah. Stuff like that. And we link to it on my website. It’s not like it’s not there, so I don’t have a big problem. We might’ve even double-posted them on my website. I can’t remember. But normally we just do them on Tor. But you said something I want to ask you about.
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Brandon Sanderson: Tell me if this is treading — if we want to tread lightly, or if this is — but you’d still take advances?
Tim Ferriss: Well, so I took advances on my past books. I considered profit-share agreements. And actually, when I was beginning to consider rebooting, dusting off and rebooting that book that I’d had on the back shelf, I spoke with a number of larger publishers who, as humans, I like a lot and they on the phone were very enthusiastic about doing some type of very generous profit-share agreement. And then they sent me the contracts and there was so much Hollywood accounting that I found it to be insulting. I’m like, all right.
So there’s this X percentage double-digit distribution fee and then there’s a promotional fee that is an in perpetuity, even though they’re not going to do very much promotion, and maybe that’s for two to four weeks if they do any, but then they’re going to move on to their new roster. And I just found the deal structure is so generally insulting that if I ran the math, I realized this is not that much better than the traditional deals that I’ve been selling. But I’m foregoing the advance, not because I don’t have confidence in the books, but I like having the publishers experience some sunk cost so that they’re incentivized with loss aversion.
Brandon Sanderson: There is that argument. That is the big argument.
Tim Ferriss: But at this point with the new book, I’m not planning on doing any of that and the field is wide open to the experimentation that I could do and I haven’t figured it out. I’ve thought about keeping audio and ebook, although I’ll come back to that. I’d love your perspective on this and then maybe doing a print-only deal because I do not have, as you do, the facilities. I’m almost perfectly happy to farm that out with an appropriately specced agreement. The deal terms need to make sense. But then there are even arguments for me to, say, license with a reversion of rights. friend of mine, Hugh Howey —
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah. I know Hugh.
Tim Ferriss: — is so smart with this. But as you noted before, I used to have an audiobook club with Audible. This was back in the day with ACX when you could get up to 75 percent royalties.
Brandon Sanderson: Before they killed that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And I understand, as a business, as you amass more and more critical mass in terms of control of a market, you can then change your compensation scheme with royalties. But as soon as it got to the point where it’s like, okay, I’m going to max out at whatever it is, 25, 35, I was like, this is no longer worth the time that I would put into it. So I stopped doing it. So I’ve thought about keeping audio and ebook. I’m still considering it, but the fact of the matter is it seems like larger publishers have negotiated superior deal terms. So even — no?
Okay. That’s the pitch that I keep getting, which is even if you get a lower percentage of the total, in absolute dollars, you’re still going to make more because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So this is all very current for me, but I don’t care about advance at this point in my life.
Brandon Sanderson: So what they’re saying on audiobooks has some truth. Not true on ebooks. So I’ll just say you there, though there is one thing that the New York publishers get away with in ebooks that you can’t get on your own. Even I have not been able to fight them down on this. They will let the New York publishers charge more than $10.
Tim Ferriss: Ahh, yeah.
Brandon Sanderson: And so there is that.
Tim Ferriss: This is on ebooks.
Brandon Sanderson: On ebooks.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Brandon Sanderson: On audio, so this can get technical and nerdy.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, let’s do it. I like technical and nerdy.
Brandon Sanderson: So on ebooks, basically, the publisher is getting 70 percent of price. It’s $10, they’re getting seven bucks sent. As an indie author who’s doing it yourself, you will get seven bucks, but they will take out a tiny distribution fee at Amazon, which is super annoying. If you have a lot of artwork, it can get higher. Usually it’s only like 10, 15¢. But they will take that out where they don’t for the New York publishers. So that’s one of the big differences. The other thing is they’ll let the New York publisher charge 14.99 for their book.
You, they will only let charge 10. If you go over 10, they’ll only give you a 20 percent instead of a 70 percent royalty. They really need to bend that or break that.
Tim Ferriss: They want to keep you between what is 2.99 and 9.99?
Brandon Sanderson: Yep. So if your book is priced at 9.99, as an ebook, there is almost no incentive to go to New York. Audiobooks, New York has negotiated all of their payments from Audible based on cover price of the book. So they can change the cover price of the book and get different things going on. But almost everything on Audible sells by credit and getting out of the publishers how much they get off of a credit is like pulling teeth. Getting out of Audible how much you earn off of a credit is like pulling teeth.
Because in their sense, and this is the big problem with audiobooks, I don’t like that you are the customer of Audible, not the customer of the authors. When you sign up for Audible, and Audible is a great company, don’t get me wrong. They made huge advances in audiobook distribution, readability. They’ve improved that market quite a bit. They are a net positive for everyone, but they control so much of the market that they’re able to do some of these practices that we talked about. But beyond that, people sign up for a subscription fee.
This is partially Apple’s fault, Apple and Google. Because if you buy an audiobook through Audible’s app, Google and Apple want to take 30 percent of that. And the publishers don’t want to do that. 30 percent is egregious. It’s insane. There’s all sorts of lawsuits going on them taking that much. But because of that, they do the subscription service. So you sign up for the subscription on their website, Google or Apple get none. You get a credit every month. You can spend a credit. None of that credit goes by credit, but then that turns all the audience into subscribers to Audible.
So if Audible stops carrying a book, people just stop buying it. Once again, he who controls the spice, he who controls the platform, controls everything, which means that they get to say, well, it’s a credit. What is a credit? Well, a credit is divided this way and we give out this many free books as part of the promotions with credits. And so that plays into it. And some of the credits go for books like this. And so they have this huge spreadsheet that to their cred — credit? I’m saying credit too much.
They have started being more open with how that spreadsheet works for us and we can plug in the numbers and see. They only started doing that in the last year as we push them. But it turns out that there’s all this shenanigans. They get $15 and after all our work and things, we get on average like four bucks out of that 15. The publishers do have something where they’re getting a little bit more. But at the end of the day, I earn more this way than I do with the publishers, even though the publishers can make up for it a little bit by having certain weird deals on what they get paid.
At the end of the day, I really wish we could push audiobooks into that transparent you get 70 percent of that 15 bucks is what should go to the author or certain percentage of that to the author, certain percent of the reader. Narrators don’t get royalties, which is kind of a thing. And I just really wish we could pierce that and make it happen, but we haven’t been able to.
Tim Ferriss: So it sounds like, if I’m hearing you correctly, your advice would be to hold onto it, do it yourself.
Brandon Sanderson: So it depends. But ebook, yes. I have found that my system that I have, which is a profit share, and we took a sledgehammer to that contract that you got offered and eventually got it to a place where it was good. It’s really close to a straight-up profit share. There’s a few little Hollywood accounting things they do, but they have to account them very clearly and we end up doing with our profit share, 10 to 20 percent better than we used to do. As much as 50 percent better in some cases.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s not trivial.
Brandon Sanderson: It’s not trivial. So I could actually get those action numbers. I should get them and see, but it’s significant what we’re making more with the profit share. But my best thing has been trust. They took a print-only deal. I have ebook and audiobook and I have a profit share on the print with them. And then the ebook and audiobook, the ebook, straight up, is better. The audiobook we make more, but we would make almost the same with the publisher.
Tim Ferriss: And are you just interfacing directly with Amazon platforms for the —
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, Amazon and everyone else, doing my best. Amazon would pay us better if we put them only on Amazon, but I refuse. And that’s one of the reasons the publisher’s deal, it’s a little better. Amazon gives them the deal that they give. If you’re exclusive to Amazon as an indie, they force you to be exclusive to get the good deal. They give that deal to the publishers, but they can be on everything. So yeah. It’s all so messy, right?
Tim Ferriss: It’s messy.
Brandon Sanderson: This is all in the weeds, but here’s the takeaway. The power is in two people’s hands right now. It’s in the creators and the platform controllers. It’s not in New York’s hand anymore. And that’s in some ways bad because those are good people. I think most creatives in the audio industry hate their business. Most authors are pretty — like you said, the people are good. The contracts, sometimes you have to take a sledgehammer to, but I generally don’t mind New York. They generally, I think, try to treat authors well. They just need, but in this new world, we control the content. And if you can figure out how to control your platform also, then that’s king. But you as a content creator, I think, should be looking at the platforms and learning how to manipulate all the different platforms so that you can have the best world you can. So that’s where we live right now.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s go back to the list of your inflection points for a second, because I’ve made promises I want to keep with my listeners, namely. So we have Mistborn, Wheel of Time, leatherbound, and then the COVID Kickstarter.
Brandon Sanderson: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: We have not covered The Wheel of Time. So for people who don’t even recognize the name, what is this? And then how did you end up becoming involved?
Brandon Sanderson: So I talked about the three kind of genres of fantasy. For the ’90s and early 2000s, the flag bearer of the best-selling epic fantasy was The Wheel of Time. It was eventually dethroned by Game of Thrones when the television show Game of Thrones came out. Until the television show, Wheel of Time was the top.
Beyond that, Robert Jordan got sick in the early 2000s with a rare blood disease. And because of this, his book releases slowed down quite a bit, and that’s when Game of Thrones was taking off. But for all of my childhood, Wheel of Time was the kind of flag bearer for epic fantasy. It was the heir to Tolkien, so to speak, and selling millions of copies, doing really, really well. And he got sick. He was really positive. But then in 2007, he passed away, having left his series unfinished. And I was a fan of this series. I had grown up reading it. It was one of my favorites. And I did not know him or his wife.
His wife was his editor. It’s actually really fun. She was his editor before she was his wife. And so I always joke that that’s a good way to make sure your editorial direction gets taken. You marry your author. But she had discovered him in Charleston where she’d moved away from the big city. She was Tor’s editorial director. She kind of helped Tom Doherty build Tor. She’s the editor, if you guys know your sci-fi fantasy. She was the editor of The Book of Swords by Fred Saberhagen. She’s the editor of the book Ender’s Game.
Tim Ferriss: Great book.
Brandon Sanderson: Really, really top-notch editor. And then she discovered Wheel of Time. And so he passes away in 2007 and before he passes away, he asks her to find someone to finish his series. He decides he does want it finished. He puts that on her. She considers it a dying request. So 2007 happens and one morning I get up and there’s a voicemail on my phone. As we’ve talked about, I get up late and that’s even later for New York, right? By the time I get up, it’s three p.m. in New York.
Tim Ferriss: Now is there something that happened before the voice memo or no?
Brandon Sanderson: So there is, but I didn’t know it. So I get this voice memo from someone I’d never met, but I knew by reputation, says, and I know every word in inflection.
Tim Ferriss: All right, let’s do it.
Brandon Sanderson: 200 times. “Hello, Brandon Sanderson. This is Harriet McDougal Rigney. I am Robert Jordan’s widow. And I would like you to call me back. There’s something I want to talk to you about.” Just that by itself. So I get this voicemail and I’m like, “Robert Jordan’s widow, Harriet McDougal, the editor? Uh, okay.” So I call her back and I don’t get a response. She’s out getting a massage, I later find. So I call my agent. No, I call my editor. He doesn’t respond. He never responded. Moshe, he kept hours even weirder than mine when he — he’s still around, but he was my editor. He’s retired since then. But Moshe, a great guy. I know this is something that you’ve talked about, bipolar.
So there are huge swaths of time where you just couldn’t get a hold of him. He self-medicated with the History Channel, and so sometimes you’d have to find out how to get a hold of Moshe. And so he didn’t answer. Not a big deal. Call my agent, he always answers. He’s very professional, doesn’t answer. So I’m freaking out and my wife sees me, and I am not a nervous person. I’m not a person that emotions strike very powerfully. That’s just my own weird neurodivergence, I don’t generally feel strong emotions, but that day I’m walking in a circle babbling and she’s like, “What’s going on? I’ve never seen Brandon like this.” And I’m like, “Robert Jordan’s wife just called me.” And she’s like, “What? What’d she want?” And I’m like, “I don’t know.” So I finally called Tor. I reached an editor at Tor, who’s one of the managing editors. And he says, “Oh, that. Yeah, it’s what you think it is. I’ll get her to call you back.”
I’m like, “What do I think it is?” Well, I knew that I’d written a little thing about Robert Jordan on my website a few days earlier, just kind of talking about how much he’d meant to me. It’s very short. It’s like three paragraphs. So I’m like, “Maybe she wants to talk about that. Why would the widow call you to talk about your piece?” But you’re not wanting to assume anything. Again, I didn’t know any of them. So she calls me and she says, “Well, I’m looking for someone to finish my late husband’s work, and I was wondering if you’d be interested.” And I literally responded, “Bah.” I can talk. I’m a talker. I could not talk.
Tim Ferriss: Turned into a sheep.
Brandon Sanderson: I turned into a sheep. I actually, I wrote her an email that night after not sleeping all night that said, “Dear Harriet, I promise I’m not an idiot.” That was the first line. I’m like, “I couldn’t speak because this is so unexpected.” And I spent that night thinking, I’m like, “Man, if I say yes to this and I screw it up,” we have seen how major media properties have had someone take over for them and then maybe not do as quite as good a job as the fan base has wanted and what that has done perhaps to reputations and things like that.
Tim Ferriss: And just so we can place this in time, where in your career were you?
Brandon Sanderson: This is 2007. I only have three books out, maybe two. I have two books. No, three. I have three books out I have Elantris and Mistborn, and then the first of my kids’ series, the ones I discovery wrote. I’m about to go on tour for my second Mistborn novel. This is before I’ve blown up. I blew up on Mistborn Two. We can talk about that moment before. That’s the first one. Mistborn Two is where the publisher knew I — so they didn’t know yet. They still thought I was maybe going to be a failure as a writer. We’ll get to that. So the publisher had not brought my name up to her when she’d asked who should finish it.
Tim Ferriss: Thanks, guys.
Brandon Sanderson: Nobody mentioned me because Mistborn had been floundering for reasons we’ll talk about. Mistborn had been floundering. My name was not mentioned, but somebody that day, her name was Elise Matthesen, and I’m very thankful to her, was printing off things on the internet, nice things that people had said about Robert Jordan. And she printed off my thing and she put it in the stack. And that night, Harriet read it with the other things. And I mentioned that he had influenced my writing. And she’s like, “Well, this is really eloquent. He wrote this really well. He’s a writer.” So she called Tom Doherty.
Tim Ferriss: Are there any lines that stuck out to her in particular?
Brandon Sanderson: It was the last line. I believe I wrote something along the lines of, “You go quietly, but you leave us trembling,” just something. And so she calls Tom and says, “What about this Brandon Sanderson guy?” And he’s like, “Oh, yeah, he’s one of our authors. I’ve read one of his books. It’s pretty good. Let me send you one of his books.” Because he was super excited it was one of his authors she was asking about, because a lot of the names that came up were not his authors. The main one that kept coming up was George Martin, because he and Robert Jordan were friends. Well, George was already behind on his books in 2007 and the publishing industry would not stand for him taking someone else’s book series.
Tim Ferriss: Going on a side quest.
Brandon Sanderson: Side quest. But a lot of the names that came up were not Tom’s authors.
And so he’s like, “Oh, it’s one of my authors.” And so he sends her Mistborn. And so she’s like, “Well, before I read this book, I should find out if the young man’s interested. Maybe he doesn’t want to do this.” And so that’s when she called me and asked if I was interested. And that’s when I baahed like a sheep. And then I wrote her that email that night and said, “I’ve thought about it a lot. And I thought, if someone’s going to do this and it can’t be him, I want it to be me, because at least I know I’m a fan.”
I always use this Venn diagram, this Venn diagram of pretty good sci-fi fantasy writers and pretty big Robert Jordan fans. There are bigger Robert Jordan fans out there than me, hardcore, by far. There are better writers than me. Terry Pratchett, I always call the greatest writer of my generation. There are amazing writers. George is a fantastic writer. I would probably rank George as the greatest living sci-fi fantasy writer. But there’s Jane Yolen, who’s just incredible.
But if you put that Venn diagram together, there’s not a lot of people in the middle there that are pretty big Robert Jordan fans, and I think pretty excellent sci-fi fantasy writers. And that was me. And so I realized I want it to be me because if it doesn’t go to me, it might go to someone who’s a good writer but doesn’t know the books. And so she said, “All right, well I’m considering. There’s some names I’m considering.” It was me or George, I later found out. And when she tells this story, she says, “There was really only one, it was Brandon,” because she knew by then she couldn’t have George. So she went and she read Mistborn, and then she thought on it. She took a month, she read Mistborn and thought on it for a month. I went on tour not knowing if I was going to finish The Wheel of Time and not being able to tell anybody, and that’s when Mistborn Two just exploded. And then at the end of that tour, she called me and she said, “I want you to do it.” Actually, it was in the middle of the tour. I was still on tour when she told some of the other people, it’s because they came and met me. So I didn’t have to wait that long. It was pretty excruciating. It was probably only two weeks. And she calls me and says, “I would like you to do it.” And so I call my agent, I say, “They’re going to offer us a deal, take it.” And he says, “Well, we’ll negotiate.” I’m like, “No, no, no. This is just a yes. Whatever they offer, you just say yes.” And she was very generous. It was a good deal right off the bat, my agent’s like, “Wow, there’s not even really that much to negotiate.” He went to bat, he forced me to let him to go to bat on some foreign percentages just so agents have to flex their muscles, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yes.
Brandon Sanderson: But I just said yes. And then by December I had the manuscript, and then I got the call in September, October, and the manuscript, he’d written 50 pages of the final book so —
Tim Ferriss: Wow. Okay. So we could spend, I’m sure, another three hours talking about how you pieced everything together and worked on that. But I want to pick up on something you said because I don’t know anything about it, and I’m in the process of reading Mistborn right now and I’m ripping through it. So when you said it was floundering, I was like, huh, that’s interesting. Why was it floundering?
Brandon Sanderson: So when you are a new author, you have a shiny new author glow with your first book, and you get picked up a little bit more for reviews. You get picked up more by people who are like, “Oh, I’ve never heard of this person.” There’s a certain demographic of reader who’ll just read a first book by an author to try them out. That is why generally, publishers recommend that you take your first book and you write a sequel to it as your second book, right? Because when you jump from a sequel to a different series, you lose a percentage of audience.
And so I had the shiny new author thing. We sold about 10,000 copies in hardcover of Elantris, which is really good for a debut author. It’s even better now. Back then it was good. Now it’s fantastic. And Tom Doherty called me, he’s like, “Well, we want a sequel to Elantris.” And I said, “No, I’ve got this idea of Mistborn and I really want to do this.”
One of my real goals, my powerful goals early on, was I wanted to build an audience for me, not for a given book series. I wanted to write in a lot of different subgenres. I wanted to do a lot of different things. I wanted the flexibility to do this thing called The Cosmere, which is probably bigger than this podcast can get into, but if you haven’t read the books, it’s like the MCU but for fantasy, and I did this two years before the MCU’s first movie came out. It’s where it’s an interconnected universe of a whole bunch of different planets with all these epic fantasy and there’s characters.
Tim Ferriss: MCU is all the Marvel —
Brandon Sanderson: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: All the Marvel universe.
Brandon Sanderson: All the Marvel movies where you have, like — and so Mistborn, Elantris, Warbreaker, I’ll have this one character who’s traveling between these planets with a mysterious objective behind the scenes. His name is Hoid, and you’ll see him in all three of them. He’s a main character in Stormlight then. And I wanted to do this big thing, and I was really ambitious about it, and I wanted to build something bigger than Elantris in a sequel. And the publisher, he’s like, “It’s a bad idea.” I’m like, “It’s a bad idea except it’s investing in my future. If I do it right, then when I finish Mistborn and go to something else, they will follow me to the something else.” Because so many authors get trapped in one series.
Tim Ferriss: We were talking about this before we started recording that, that was also sort of after The 4-Hour Workweek. It was like, well, then I can do The 3-Hour Workweek and The 2-Hour Workweek or The 4-Hour Workweek for Single Mothers, and so on. And I was like, no, no. This is a window where I can potentially buy my freedom to work in a lot of different things.
Brandon Sanderson: And we have the exact same wavelength on that. But Tom Doherty, he’s a publisher, not an editor. His job is to look at the business. And he was right. So Elantris came out, sold 10,000, Mistborn One comes out in hardcover and it sells fewer. The audience that liked Mistborn did like Elantris. A certain percentage of them just didn’t move to Mistborn because it wasn’t a sequel. I no longer have the new author shiny glow, so that people who are looking for a book are like, “Oh, I saw that before. Let’s pick up this other book by a new author.” So, well, Mistborn is a stronger book than Elantris by manyfold. Elantris is my sixth book, Mistborn is my 14th. I learned a lot. It’s still one of the best starting points, and so it’s a much stronger book, but I get fewer sales.
They release the paperback and the paperback has a dreadful cover. I love the illustrator. He did the hard covers of all of them, but once in a while, the cover just doesn’t click. And this cover was one of the worst covers that I’ve had. It didn’t click with my audience, and that paperback came out and just crashed. Just completely tanked. And that’s the most dangerous point my career has had. I was right then thinking I’m going to be a middle grade author writing these kids books because that’s the only thing. That’s the new thing. But I went to my agent and we went to the publisher and said, “We need a new cover. This cover is not clicking.” And we fought and we fought and we fought. And I said, “Remember way back when you released The Wheel of Time, you released, like, a $4.99 version?” I think it was $3.99 then. “Do a $4.99 version of Mistborn. Let’s jump start my career, do a new cover.” And Tom Doherty, again, to his credit, I had to fight him, but he said, “Yes.” We released a new paperback a few months before Mistborn Two with a new cover and that one, boom, it sold.
Now, there’s this thing in publishing called the Death Spiral, much bigger back in the bookstore days —
Tim Ferriss: Doesn’t sound good.
Brandon Sanderson: — if you sell 10,000 of your first book and then 8,000 or 7,000 like Mistborn sold, what do they order for your third book?
Tim Ferriss: 5,000.
Brandon Sanderson: 5,000. It’s called the Death Spiral. So they ordered like 5,000 copies of this —
Tim Ferriss: Then it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Fulfilling, because you don’t have the exposure in the retail points that you then —
Brandon Sanderson: You don’t have the space on the shelf. People can go to bookstores and not find the book if you’re down to that many copies and things like that. And so Death Spiral is what they call it. And already we got the orders for Mistborn Two and they were bad. They were on the Death Spiral. But then the paperback, that paperback, we got selling. And so what happened is Mistborn Two came out, instantly sold out.
Tim Ferriss: All right, so hold on. I got to pause this for a second. What else contributed to the relaunch of that lower price paperback of Mistborn One, besides the cover, was there anything else?
Brandon Sanderson: It was the lower price point and it was the cover. Those are the only things we changed. Now, you’ll love this. Publishing is weird. They were not willing to release a new version of the book with a new cover until we said “It’s a new edition. It’s the cheaper…” Until — when they had in their head it was a new edition —
Tim Ferriss: It’s got a different ISBN, guys. It’s a whole new game.
Brandon Sanderson: Whole new game. They were willing to put a new cover on it. So actually it was the $4.99 thing that worked. We were at our wits’ end until I thought of that and pitched it. And they’re like, “Oh, yeah, a $4.99 edition. We do those.” And then suddenly they’re willing to repackage it and put a new cover on. It has a big red banner, $4.99, it has the nice cover blurb from Robin Hobb. But the hardcover had that too. But the cover was a little more targeted at what was popular then. Photorealism was starting to be a thing for fantasy, partially because of Jim Butcher’s books. We use the same illustrator cover artists as Jim Butcher’s books, and it has that sort of urban fantasy feel. Mistborn was really well-primed to take off, partially because of Hunger Games. Teenage girl protagonist and a kind of dark future world. In fact, in Taiwan it released before Hunger Games and it became The Hunger Games, meaning the market wanted a dark, dystopian teen YA.
Tim Ferriss: That’s fascinating.
Brandon Sanderson: And we outsold Hunger games there. The Hunger Games became the Mistborn, and Mistborn became The Hunger Games in Taiwan because we beat it to market. We didn’t here and we didn’t market it as YA. It’s an adult. It’s got two viewpoints, one a teenager, one adult, but it was really good for the market. And so the fact that it was really good for the market, it felt dystopian, but it wasn’t using all the dystopian tropes that eventually killed the dystopian sort of thing. It was no one had read a fantasy heist since about the same time as The Lies of Locke Lamora came out, which is another one —
Tim Ferriss: Scott Lynch?
Brandon Sanderson: Yes, Scott Lynch. Fantastic.
Tim Ferriss: That is a really fun series.
Brandon Sanderson: A fantastic book. And he and I had this on separate continents, the same idea, and got him out around the same time. And I highly recommend that one too. And his is more heisty even than mine. Mine takes more of the epic fantasy direction, like Kelsier’s trying to overthrow the empire by robbing. But all of those things meant that when Mistborn actually got covered right, it really started selling. And then it would’ve been better if there would’ve been books for people to buy, but instantly selling out week one made the publisher go, “Oh…”
Tim Ferriss: “Wait a minute.”
Brandon Sanderson: And then they went to reprint and then there was this clamor online people emailing bookstores, emailing the publisher, “Where is our Mistborn Two? We have to have Mistborn Two.” And that fueled Mistborn Two. Eventually with all the reprints going to 12,000 to 15,000 in hardcover. And that primed Mistborn Three to hit the bestseller list.
Tim Ferriss: Wow. What a story. So I want to touch on something you mentioned. Lies of Locke Lamora, and maybe that’s heistier per se, but one thing we haven’t talked about is magic systems. And so I feel like that is something that really shines and it’s part of the reason why I wanted to dig into Mistborn also, with the allomancy and magic systems, how do you think about magic systems? I mean, I have the three laws of magic here in front of me, but I could read them. How do you want to lead into magic systems? People are going to think to themselves, if they haven’t heard this term, what the hell is a magic system?
Brandon Sanderson: Let me talk about it in a way that for the audience, I’m going to avoid getting into too many in the weeds. I’m going to avoid getting into the weeds too much. I don’t want to give you encyclopedia entries and things like this, but I found when I was writing something that I really love in worldbuilding, and that is I love in history, the time period of the Scientific Revolution, the time period between Newton and about the early 1900s where people were learning to apply science to everything they did, where they were saying, “Hey, wait, all these things we assume, what if we use the Scientific Method on them?” And then they started to discover. Newton believed in alchemy and he tried to apply the Scientific Method and couldn’t get it to work, which is one of the reasons people started saying, “Well, maybe alchemy isn’t actually scientific.”
Tim Ferriss: And spending time, it was like a third of his time. I mean, it was a lot of time.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah. He tried so hard to be able to transmute lead into gold or whatever. And turns out we can do it. We just need an atom smasher. But regardless, this idea of spontaneous generation, people used to think that if you left meat out and it rotted, it spawned flies, and that’s where flies came from. Scientific Method says, well, let’s try some tests and see, and lo and behold, it’s not that. It’s that eggs are being laid. All of this stuff up until, like I said, the 1900s, where I read an article once from the time period about someone who’d gone and studied the science of digging ditches. The whole theme of it was, if we can help the ditch diggers, we help everyone. Here’s how they can labor more effectively so it isn’t as hard on their joints, so that they are more efficient, but also so that they’re happier and they get tired less. Here’s a whole article of science helping everyone, and that period of superstition becoming science, I love.
It’s so interesting, and that’s why Mistborn‘s actually set — a lot of epic fantasy’s set around in an analogous of the 12- to 1400s. Mistborn‘s set in about 1820s to 1840s, if it were on Earth. They don’t have gunpowder for various reasons, but they’re right pre-Industrial Revolution where science and fantasy and superstition are colliding.
What I found I really like reading is fantasy worlds that take a little bit of science fiction worldbuilding, and a little bit of science fiction aesthetic and say, “What if you apply the Scientific Method to something that in our world doesn’t exist, but in their world is a new branch of physics,” and that lets my characters explore science and magic together. What is real? What isn’t real? What works? What doesn’t work? Mistborn has a periodic table of the elements, where they’re discovering that they can use certain metals to do certain things that are magical. It doesn’t exist in our world. The difference between fantasy and science fiction to me is science fiction says this thing could happen. Let’s construct toward that. What are the possibilities that would lead to it? Arthur C. Clarke says, “I think we can do satellites with geosynchronous orbits. Here’s all the science. I’m going to write a book where they can do that, and then later on we’ll figure it out.”
Fantasy, for me, starts with the cool idea and justifies it through the text, without real science. I want to have people who use these metals to bounce around like ninjas. You can drop a coin and you can push off of it, and through Newton’s laws, if it’s pushed against the ground, you’re launched upward. If you’re pushing on it and you throw your weight against it, it shoots across the room. How much can I do with that just by playing with vector science and things? Again, I don’t want to get in the weeds, but the idea is people applying their intellect to magic and that’s a magic system.
What is the magic system? What do people have access to? Lord of the Rings has several magic systems. One is the one ring. It’s what we call a hard magic system. Lord of the Rings, if you put on the ring, you turn invisible, but Sauron can see you. Very simple. It corrupts people along the way. There are three rules to the ring and you can understand them. Making a hard magic doesn’t mean that it makes sense, right? Superheroes are generally hard magics, even though it’s, like, bonkers. Superman gets powers from sunlight. Makes no sense with external logic, but internally it’s consistent. He gets his powers from the sun, and he can do X, Y, and Z. That’s what we call a hard magic system.
Gandalf —
Tim Ferriss: So rules that are internally consistent?
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, rules that are internally consistent that the characters can figure out and use. That’s a hard magic system. Frodo can put the ring on and vanish from Sauron’s eyes, but will pay the cost — or he’ll vanish from everyone else’s eyes, but he’ll be seen by Sauron. So he can pay the cost to get some short-term gain for some long-term detriment by using the ring. Perfectly within the realm of he can access it and use it. Gandalf is what we call a soft magic system. You never really know what Gandalf can do. In the movies, they do this brilliantly by being like he holds up his staff and the sun rises, and did he shoot sunlight at the orcs or is it just like, what’s going on?
But Gandalf shows up and magical things happen. The other characters can’t control this. You don’t see it being controlled by the narrative. He just does things and those are cool magic systems. You can do all kinds of stuff with that. I found a niche in hard magic systems, that intersection where people are applying their logic. It’s so much fun. I talked about Mistborn. You can drop a coin and launch in the air. You can throw it and push it at someone. You throw it, you push it at someone, it hits them. Then, you get launched backward. Suddenly, I can have characters having to figure out puzzles in combat. We’re having a fight scene, but the fight scene is how can I get in position to hit this metal against him?
It’s so engaging to write. It’s so much fun. It makes every fight scene just a fun little puzzle box to try to figure out. So, because I like that, I decided to use it as part of my branding. It’s so hard to stand out. I know I like these things. I know I’m going to be doing it in my books. So, I became the magic system guy. I’ve thought about it a lot. So I released my three laws. It’s just kind of they’re rules that I follow, mostly because I did something wrong at some point and I’m like, “That broke my magic system. How can I fix that?” And I came up with a rule thumb for myself that I could follow, and I use those to build the magics the way I do them. It’s not the only way to do. It’s not the only good way to do it, but it was helpful to have a thing that was mine.
What are you going to get when you come to one of my books? You’re going to get — at the core, I want an interesting story about interesting characters, but I can’t brand that way, because that’s what everyone does. So what’s the branding? You’re going to get science fiction worldbuilding and a fantasy story. You’re going to get people discovering how magic works that’s repeatable, and they’re going to be able to use it in order to solve problems and make their lives better, or at least manipulate them in certain ways. All of my books are going to have that sort of feel, and that’s what became my thing.
Tim Ferriss: So, if you don’t mind, I’ll read these three and have some follow ups.
Brandon Sanderson: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Sanderson’s three laws of magic. So the number one is an author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic. Number two, weaknesses, limits and costs are more interesting than powers. That’s one that I latched onto. Three, the author should expand on what is already a part of the magic system before something entirely new is added, as this may otherwise entirely change how the magic system fits into the fictional world. So the second one is the most self-explanatory to me, the power of constraints, and it can be applied to a million things, but I find that to be very accessible to me. Could you expand on number one and number three?
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, sure can. So, number one, if you — and I’ve actually added a word to this, a little phrase to this. Author’s ability to solve problems in a satisfying way with magic in a story is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.
So let’s posit two storylines. In one, your character is going to use — in both of them, your character is going to use the magic to save the day at the end. In the first one, the character spends the majority of the book off and on figuring out how this magic works, to the point that they realize by the ending, “Wait, everyone’s been doing this wrong. Here’s the rules. Here’s how they got misled. If I make this one little tweak, suddenly I’ll be able to fix the problem that no one else is being able to fix.” At the ending, they realize that. They solve that problem, and boom, they have taken their wits, their intelligence, their progress. We say promise, progress, payoff. The payoff is to the actual progress of the story.
This person has been studying their entire time. They’ve learned how the magic works, so at the end, they’re able to pull off something that no one else could, and you believe it because of all that work.
In the other one, they get to the end. They are unable to solve the problem, but then through the power of just caring really a lot, they figure it out and save the day.
Tim Ferriss: A mother’s love.
Brandon Sanderson: A mother’s love. See, this is why I use the satisfying way. The mother’s love protecting Harry is not actually a bad thing because that wasn’t supposed to be a plot element.
Tim Ferriss: Sure, I’m poking fun a little bit.
Brandon Sanderson: But it is poking fun. Jo deserves it. We can poke fun at her because J.K. Rowling was really good at internal logic in a given book, and then she’d throw it out the window for the next one, right? Time-Turners — actually in the Time-Turner book, makes sense how they’re used. She sets up the rules. She uses them. Book four, they forget they can time travel and don’t ever use them. But, regardless, you can see what’s going on here. The idea of Sanderson’s first law is any plot element, but magic and fantasy — a lot of people who don’t read fantasy, they point at it and be like, “I can’t believe any of the stakes because anything can happen.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s like the Deus ex machina.
Brandon Sanderson: Deus ex machina.
Tim Ferriss: Playwright can’t figure out the ending, so the god descends from the rafters and —
Brandon Sanderson: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: Voila.
Brandon Sanderson: But the thing is, any book is that way. If you want to write a book where at the end — the romance novel in a perfectly realistic setting, that they just get together because you decide, you can just deus ex machina that. You can deus ex machina the thriller. Any book, the reader, the author can do that. With a goal, we have an extra tendency toward that with magic. So the charge that we do that is not unsubstantiated, right?
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Brandon Sanderson: Occasionally, authors are like, “Well, I have magic, so I’ll snap my fingers and save the day.”
But as a reader with a magic system, if you make it so that we understand so that like Star Wars. Star Wars is such a perfect example. We believe that Luke can shoot the missiles down the tube when he’s using the force. Why? Well, through the course of the story, we’ve seen Obi-Wan Kenobi use this magic. We’ve seen Luke struggle to use this magic. We see targeting computers, they fire and they miss. The targeting computers are fallible. We’re at the big moment, and then use the force loop. Obi-Wan is there. We have seen the whole time Obi-Wan preparing him, and he takes off the thing, and he shoots. We believe that he can do that because set-up and payoff, promise, progress, payoff.
And that’s what Sanderson’s first law is. If you’re going to use magic at the end of your story to solve the problem, promise, progress, payoff.
Now, if you want a soft magic, use it to cause problems, or you can use it to solve problems in an unsatisfying way. And sometimes you want that.
When Gandalf saves the fellowship from the Balrog, it’s actually kind of unsatisfying because Gandalf is dead. And you watch the movie — Peter Jackson, again, brilliant movies. After Gandalf dies, everyone is down and like flopped down and crying and broken because the magic use isn’t satisfying. Gandalf didn’t get up there and save the day. He sacrificed himself, and it actually hits with a very different emotion. It’s, instead, an escalation.
Tim Ferriss: That’s an example of soft magic causing a problem.
Brandon Sanderson: Exactly. And so yes, Gandalf did save them from the Balrog, but the cost is bigger than — like the whole point of that is not, “Yay, Gandalf.” It is huge complication. Gandalf kept the fellowship together. What’s going to happen when Gandalf isn’t there to prevent Boromir from taking the ring? And then, he pays that off, the fellowship shatters. Brilliant use of both a soft magic and a hard magic for what they’re really good at.
George is good at this, too. He uses a lot of soft magics. And whenever someone uses magic in Game of Thrones, you get scared because people are going to die, and things are going to go wrong, and everything’s going to suck even worse because of using the magic. And that soft magic is brilliant for that. It creates a sense of mystery and danger and sorrow.
Tim Ferriss: Right. Sort of an unpredictability that’s exciting. Whereas solving problems, the audience is just like, “Oh, come on.”
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, exactly. And they both do different kinds of things. And so, if you understand this, you can have the emotions you want in the stories, right?
And Tolkien, very wisely, he uses the ring to solve problems and escalate in certain ways. Like Sam being able to put on the ring to go save Frodo after Frodo is taken by the orcs, you totally buy that Sam can do that because you know what the ring can do. It solves a problem. It’s actually you’re like, “Yay, Sam. Good job.”
And that’s a heroic moment. He gets Frodo back, right? Frodo’s alive. Everything’s happy because Sam manipulated the magic that he’s learned to the end. And then, he gives up the ring, and you’re like, “Good job, Sam. You have done it.” Lord of the Rings is just a great manual for how to do both of these things.
Tim Ferriss: So we’re going to come to number three, the third law, in a second.
But I just want to recommend to folks, I had an opportunity to spend some time in Oxford for the first time, and it is, just from a literary perspective, so fun to walk around Oxford and to see all of the influences and the pubs and so on where Tolkien and C.S. Lewis used to grab drinks, and I always blank on the third.
Brandon Sanderson: Yep, everybody does, [inaudible 00:03:58]
Tim Ferriss: Or, like, yeah, sorry, pal, or His Dark Materials, right? And Phil —
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, Phil Pullman. Excellent —
Tim Ferriss: — and that entire world, which I have to just air a grievance, which is when things get slotted, this is me being naive, I guess, but into young adult, my assumption always was as a so-called adult, like young adult is easier to read.
But it seems to be when the protagonist is a young adult because I remember reading The Golden Compass, and I was like, “I do not understand these 300 nautical terms.” It was a very, very intricate book.
Brandon Sanderson: I’ll tell you this, no one knows what to do with The Golden Compass because Lara’s actually, like, eight, and so, it’s not young adult. The age group that that would be would be middle grade or chapter books. It was shelved in both sections. No one knows what to do with that.
And that’s an example of breaking the rules fantastically and it working out really well. I don’t remember how old she is, but she’s not young adult age. She might be 10, but, yeah, young adult can be just as complicated as adult, and it’s mostly a marketing thing.
Like Mistborn, all my books, Mistborn shelved as adult everywhere, but eventually towards like, let’s release a young adult version, put it in young adult section. Why not? Maybe new people will find it.
Skyward, which is my actual young adult series is shelved as adult in the UK because they’re like, “Well, we just want to package it the same as yours and sell it to your audience.” And I’m like, okay. So they packaged it and put it in the adult section. So all marketing.
Tim Ferriss: Tomato, tomato.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: The third law.
Brandon Sanderson: Third law, all right. Third law, tell you the story of what went wrong.
In Mistborn —
Tim Ferriss: It’s actually a great first line for your next book.
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, let me tell you what went wrong.
In Mistborn, I came up with three separate magic systems for three books and each book. They’re all there in the first one. There’s allomancy, this thing that Sazed does, which is mysterious. It’s kind of in the first book, Sazed’s magic is a soft magic. Even though I know all the rules, you don’t know what he can do. And when he solves problems with it, it’s like, used to create mystery and questions, and even some danger, right?
Book two, I start showing you how it works so that it becomes now understandable and things like that. And then there’s hemalurgy. So each book, I wanted to explore a different aspect of the magic.
When it came to do The Stormlight Archive, I had started to fall into a trap, and the trap is bigger is better. And this is what killed the original Stormlight Archive, so you’d think I had learned this lesson. But people started to say, “You had three magic systems in Mistborn. How many will you have in The Stormlight Archive?” And I’m like, “There’s going to be 30 magic systems. It’s going to be so epic, all right?”
Then I sat down and I was building all this and I’m like, this is the wrong way to approach the book. 30 magic systems are not better than three. Three well-done magic systems are way better than 30 non-well-done magic systems. I need to sit down and say, “What is my book actually about? What is the worldbuilding that’s really going to enhance the story? Let’s talk about that and do a really good job of it.”
This is in video games. There’s this great series called The Elder Scrolls, and one of the first games to ever procedurally generate dungeons. And they pitched one of their games as like, “There’s a thousand dungeons you can explore.” But the truth is all those thousand dungeons are built out of 30 different elements recombined in different ways, and so you were bored after the second one. Later on —
Tim Ferriss: Oops.
Brandon Sanderson: — they realized if they just take hand care and they build a well-crafted dungeon, they put fewer of them in, everyone’s happier. It works way better.
But people would talk about those early Elder Scrolls games and be like, “It’s an ocean an inch deep.” You want to avoid that in your storytelling.
So the idea is that with the third law, it challenges me to re-examine what I have and to go deeper, instead of just expanding to say, look, you’ve got something interesting. And it’s not just magic.
Like this character. Can you dig a little deeper into who this character is, instead of adding a new one to make your story wider, but more shallow? And it’s just a challenge to me to do a good, thoughtful job on my worldbuilding, instead of always pretending bigger is better.
Tim Ferriss: Got it. So the third law is to protect yourself, remind yourself of —
Brandon Sanderson: Yeah, of all of them are. The first one happened because I added something. You’ll get there. I had an editor, and my editor said, “The ending of Mistborn One isn’t quite as spectacular as we want. Can you do something, make…”
Tim Ferriss: Spice it up?
Brandon Sanderson: “…spice it up?” And I said, “Cool. Yeah, I’ve got this thing I’m going to do in the second book. I’ll just let it happen in the first book.” But I hadn’t set it up.
And then the first book came out and people still really liked it, but a lot of them are pointing at that and being like, “That felt a little like a deus ex machina.” I’m like, it is. I didn’t set this up at all. It just is out of nowhere right at the end. I’m like, why does it work sometimes and not others? And that’s where this law came from.
And flaws are more interesting. It’s the same directions. It’s like, looking at all the powers that I’m adding and trying to play with them and things and realizing that Superman is interesting because of what he can’t do. Superman as a character is interesting because he has a moral code, which is a limitation he puts on himself. And the best stories happen either because of his moral code, will he break or not, because of the people that he loves, which are also kind of a limitation, or because he encounters someone who has kryptonite and his powers are taken away.
Those are the great three Superman stories. All of them don’t center on what his powers are, centers on what he can’t do. He can’t get Lois to fall in love with him. He can’t always protect everybody. He can’t violate his code, and he can’t do anything when kryptonite’s around. Then suddenly you’ve got conflict and story.
Tim Ferriss: Brandon, sir, we’ve covered a lot of ground. I could keep going for a very, very long time, but you’re doing the majority of the talking, so you’re doing all the heavy lifting here.
Is there anything we have not covered that you would like to cover, or anything that you would like to say to my audience, request of my audience, point my audience to?
Brandon Sanderson: Boy. I never know how to do —
Tim Ferriss: Haiku that you’d like to wrap things up with? Lay on the plane with a little dance? I don’t know.
Brandon Sanderson: There is a Zeroth law.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. Yes.
Brandon Sanderson: Zeroth law. So Asimov added a Zeroth law. I added one cheekily, right?
And I guess what I’d say to your audience is thank you for putting up with me nerding out for three hours. If they want to try something, I would recommend Mistborn or Tress of the Emerald Sea, depending if they want something more heisty and actiony or something more whimsical.
But Sanderson’s Zeroth law is: always err on the side of what’s awesome. And this came about because I realize sometimes I don’t follow the rules. Sometimes I come up with something that’s just too cool to not put in the story. And at the end of the day, I’m writing stories because I want to do interesting things with character, with plot. I just want things to be cool.
And so I came up with this little rule to myself, which is, all of this is good, all of this is important. But when you’re writing, if you come up with something really cool, try it out. Even if it breaks the outline, if it breaks the magic system, try it out and see if it makes the story better. Because if it does, you’ll figure out a way to make it work. You can revise so that it’s foreshadowed. You can fix that. Err on the side of what is awesome.
Tim Ferriss: Try it. Give yourself permission.
Well, I, for one, am glad you didn’t end up being a chemist, so I very much appreciate the time. This is an incredible life and world and collection of worlds that you guys have all helped build with the team behind you and putting out ungodly numbers of words per year. It’s just phenomenal.
And where can people find you? Where’s the best place to find all things?
Brandon Sanderson: It’s brandonsanderson.com. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Easy.
Brandon Sanderson: Easy to find. Everything’s on there. Sample chapters.
Warbreaker, the free book, is on there because now, like you said, I need to get a new one. It was written in 2006, so it’s been a while, but it’s on there for free. You can read a bunch of everything.
We got socials. YouTube’s a pretty good place for me, too. My writing lectures are there. I do a weekly update every week on YouTube where I come on and say where I am in my writing process for the current book. So I like to do lots of outreach.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, amazing. Well, I can’t wait to see what you do next, and I’ll be certainly watching. And for people who are interested in anything we talked about, I will link to everything in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. Thank you, Brandon, for all the time.
Brandon Sanderson: Thank you.
Tim Ferriss: And for hosting me. What a fun trip. And to everybody out there, until next time. Just be a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself. And thanks for tuning in.
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