← The Tim Ferriss Show
The Tim Ferriss Show
#794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems
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- [00:01]
Tim Ferriss
Boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job every episode to deconstruct world class performers, to figure out how they do what they do, what you can use, what you can emulate. And this episode ended up being a masterclass. I had so much fun with it. My guest who I've wanted to interview for years is Brandon Sanderson. He is the number one New York Times bestselling author of the Stormlight Archive series and the Mistborn saga, the middle grade series, Alcatraz vs. The Evil Librarians and the young adult novels, the Rhythmatist, the Reckoners trilogy and the Skyward series. He has sold more than 40 million books in 35 languages, he has architected 40 million plus dollar Kickstarter campaigns 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, which is a big, big big deal. Culminating in A Memory of Light. Brandon co hosts with fellow author Dan Wells the popular intentionally blank podcast and teaches creative writing at Brigham Young University. We did this one in person, which made all the difference in Brandon's massive cavernous offices right next to his warehouse. It was a hell of a ride and we covered a lot of ground and a lot of really nitty gritty tactical advice related to fiction, business, publishing, innovating across the board, how he architected his record breaking Kickstarter campaign and much, much more. You can find him@brandonsanderson.com that's B R A N D O N Sanderson.com and you can find him on X Instagram and YouTube Brand Sanderson. That's B R A N D Sanderson and I definitely recommend checking out all of those. So we're going to hop right into it. Get into the Meat and Potatoes A lot of varied terrain with Brandon Sanderson. First, just a few words from the people who make this podcast possible. Listeners have heard me talk about making before you manage for years. All that means to me is that when I wake up, I block out three to four hours to do the most important things that are generative, creative, podcasting, writing, et cetera. Before I get to the email and the admin stuff and the reactive stuff and everyone else's agenda for my time. For me, let's just say I'm a writer and entrepreneur. I need to focus on the making to be happy. If I get sucked into all the little bits and pieces that are constantly churning. I end up feeling stressed out. And that is why today's sponsor is so interesting. It's been one of the greatest energetic unlocks in the last few years. So here we go. I need to find people who are great at managing and that is where Crescent Family Office comes in. You spell it C R E S S E T Crescent Family Office I was introduced to one of the top CPG investors in the world. Crescent is a prestigious family office for CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs. They handle the complex financial planning, uncertain tax strategies, timely exit planning, bill pay wires, all the dozens of other parts of wealth management and just financial management that would otherwise pull me away from doing what I love most. Making things, mastering skills, spending time with the people I care about. And over many years I was getting pulled away from that stuff at least a few days a week and I've completely eliminated that. So experience the freedom of focusing on what matters to you with the support of a top wealth management team. You can schedule a call today@CrescentCapital.com Tim that's spelled C-R E S S E T CrescentCapital.com Tim to see how Crescent can help streamline your financial plans and grow your wealth. That's crescentcapital.com Tim and disclosure I am a client of Crescent. There are no material conflicts other than this paid testimonial. And of course all investing involves risk, including loss of principal. So do your due diligence. I have been fascinated by the microbiome and probiotics as well as prebiotics for decades, but products never quite live up to the hype. I've tried so many dozens and there are a host of problems. Now things are starting to change and that includes this episode's sponsor, Seeds DS01 Daily Symbiotic. Now it turns out that this product, Seeds DSO1, was recommended to me many months ago by a PhD microbiologist. So I started using it well before their team ever reached out to me about sponsorship, which is kind of ideal because I used it unbidden, so to speak. Came in fresh. Since then it has become a daily staple and one of the few supplements I travel with. I have it in a suitcase literally about 10ft from me right now. It goes with me. I've always been very skeptical of most probiotics due to the lack of science behind them and the fact that many do not survive digestion to begin with. Many of them are shipped dead DOA. But after incorporating two capsules of seeds DS01 into my morning routine. I have noticed improved digestion and improved overall health seem to be a bunch of different cascading effects based on some reports. I'm hoping it will also have an effect on my lipid profile, but that is definitely TBD. So why is seeds DSO1 so effective? What makes it different? For one, it is a 2 in 1 probiotic and prebiotic formulated with 24 clinically and scientifically studied strains that have systemic benefits in and beyond the gut. That's all well and good, but if the probiotic strains don't make it to the right place, in other words your colon, they're not as effective. So Seed developed a proprietary capsule in capsule delivery system that survives digestion and delivers a precision release of the live and viable probiotics to the colon, which is exactly where you want them to go to do the work. I've been impressed with Seeds dedication to science backed engineering with completed gold standard trials that have been subjected to peer review and published in leading scientific journals. A standard you very rarely see from companies who develop supplements. If you've ever thought about probiotics but haven't known where to start, this is my current vote for Great Gut Health. You can start here. It costs less than $2 a day. That is the DSO one. And now you can get 25% off your first month with code 25 Tim and that is 25% off of your first month of seeds DSO1@seed.com Tim using code 25 Tim all put together. That's seed.com Tim and if you forget it, you will see the coupon code on that page one more time. Seed.com Tim Code 25 Tim Optimal. Minimal.
- [06:47]
Brandon Sanderson
At this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question? Now is the only perfect time. What if I did the opposite?
- [06:58]
Tim Ferriss
I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeletal. So Brandon, just when we were doing soundcheck.
- [07:13]
Brandon Sanderson
Yes?
- [07:14]
Tim Ferriss
What did you do?
- [07:15]
Brandon Sanderson
So when I was in kindergarten I was taught the States song 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 sound check by doing the Jabberwock poem. Just this beautiful poet poetry. She had learned to memorize a poem so that they could get a sound check because people generally don't talk enough for a sound check. And so then they come to me and I'd be like I'm talking, I'm Talking. You've seen it, the stuff that people do. 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 sound check me off of the list of states.
- [08:06]
Tim Ferriss
Hey, you made it to New Mexico. I'm not sure I could make it past California without making a mistake.
- [08:10]
Brandon Sanderson
I still hear the song in my head. 50 nifty United States.
- [08:15]
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?
- [08:26]
Brandon Sanderson
No, I don't think I have an unusual memory. I have an unusual one. I don't have an uncommonly good one. How about that? My wife always jokes I don't forget a story and that I don't. I don't tend to reread books. I don't tend to 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. Right. 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 squeezed out the ears.
- [09:13]
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.
- [09:26]
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, you know, 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.
- [10:03]
Tim Ferriss
Let's give another example of productivity that I don't want to say I vetoed, but it was a conversation before we started recording. How many books or book plates do you sign per year?
- [10:15]
Brandon Sanderson
So we need between 50,000 and 100,000 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.
- [10:30]
Tim Ferriss
Know, you need to take up the empty space.
- [10:32]
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 podcast 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 me in stacks if anyone wants to see it. My podcast exists so that I can sign the pages. It's the reverse. Right. I 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.
- [11:10]
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 have asked a different set of questions. But I'm actually going to start with Seoul, Korea, because as I mentioned, I was an East Asian studies major, spent formative time, completely changed my life in Japan and other places, Taiwan and mainland China also. Where does Seoul, Korea fit into your life?
- [11:38]
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 saying that the way that people's language influences the way they think about the world, the way that their social mores impact their relationships with one another and all 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.
- [13:04]
Tim Ferriss
The Korean language for people who haven't been exposed, particularly the writing system.
- [13:09]
Brandon Sanderson
Yes.
- [13:09]
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.
- [13:17]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah, we learned it in a few hours. Do you know the story?
- [13:21]
Tim Ferriss
Tell the story.
- [13:22]
Brandon Sanderson
The story. You know the story.
- [13:23]
Tim Ferriss
I do, but I think people will appreciate it.
- [13:24]
Brandon Sanderson
This is obviously mythologized, right? But King Sejong. So King Sejong, he's the guy on the. Essentially the $10 bill in Korea. He is their George Washing and Sejong the Great. And what happens. Chinese is a really fascinating writing system, right, because it's logographic, which means that anyone can read a Chinese character. It's more of a hieroglyph than it is. You can't sound it out, right. Because anyone can read it. It transcends language in a lot of ways. You can see the symbol for person and know it means person, whether you speak Mongolian or whether you speak Thai or whether you speak Japanese or Korean or Chinese. So it makes it a great kind of language for trade. But it also is extremely hard to learn because every concept must have essentially its own letter. And so to be fluent in reading it, you need to learn 2,000 to 3,000 letters. 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, you sound out Korean. And he gathered his scholars, and the story is they together created this system that would be 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. They, you know, passing the Tests in.
- [15:06]
Tim Ferriss
Chinese was a big Latin for the high priesthood.
- [15:10]
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.
- [15:26]
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, but in 60 minutes, you could definitely get the basics and figure it out.
- [15:47]
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.
- [15:57]
Tim Ferriss
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 zhenghuang for telephone, then dien hua in Chinese, in Mandarin, and then daen wang in Japanese. So there's a lot of overlap. Or if you wanted to say, please give me sparkling water in Japanese, it would be in Korean. So anyway, if you get one, then it's a good branch. Off to other things. All right, I'm going to cut my linguistics nerding short.
- [16:32]
Brandon Sanderson
You need to create a conlang. Have you ever done it?
- [16:35]
Tim Ferriss
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.
- [16:48]
Brandon Sanderson
Oh, did you?
- [16:49]
Tim Ferriss
When I was working on my first real attempt at fantasy world building 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.
- [17:04]
Brandon Sanderson
Is the master.
- [17:05]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Unbelievably complex. And I also, at one point. This is actually from my third book, reached out to the gentleman who designed the navi language in Avatar, which in very partial measure stemmed from some of his exposure to some of these East Asian languages as well. But. Okay, so how would you approach and how do you think about language construction?
- [17:30]
Brandon Sanderson
Are you sure we're not getting too nerdy for your audience? This is super nerdy.
- [17:33]
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.
- [17:41]
Brandon Sanderson
All right, so a conlake is a constructed language. Most people know of Klingon and Elvish, and George Martin has one. And the Navi you mentioned, these are just invented languages. There's only one that's in wide use or wide 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. He wanted a place to use them. Right.
- [18:20]
Tim Ferriss
Including crazy scripts.
- [18:22]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah. And I said, I don't have 20 years to do that. Like Grandpa Tolkien. I'm. I'm really a narrative guy. I really focus on what makes a narrative work. I'm going to break it down. People think of me as the world, as the world building guy, but I'm not. That's certainly the thing I've used as my branding and marketing. It's the way that I've used to make myself easily recommendable and distinctive. But what I spend most of my time on is narrative. And so when I look at the language, I'm like, I want to have something that is relevant, that works, but I don't want to spend 20 years. And so I usually come up with a few interesting rules that I've come up with through my knowledge of linguistics. And I say, follow these rules. Whenever you need a word, go back to these rules and build it. Don't write out the whole language. Don't come out with how you would say every sentence each time you need something. Go to the rules, build it up from the fundamentals, and it will all eventually then work. But it means I end a book with 50 words and maybe a little bit of grammatical structure, not with an entire language that you could speak.
- [19:26]
Tim Ferriss
This I ran into, which is part of the reason why I was revisiting my email exchanges with the person who created Navi, because I had something like eight greater houses in this fantasy world that I was creating for my own entertainment. More than anything else, it's just an itch I really want 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.
- [20:00]
Brandon Sanderson
We call it world builder's disease, which sometimes you want to give yourself. It's fun. But if you spend 20 years world building 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 world build in service of story rather than write stories in service of world building. But everybody gets to do what they want. You scratch your itch how you want to scratch it.
- [20:34]
Tim Ferriss
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 grabbed onto that have stuck with you in any way?
- [21:04]
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. Right? This is what I really want to do. And I suspect we'll get into later why I really wanted to do that and things like that, but I changed my major to English because I thought that's what 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, you know, you can double use your time. A lot of times you can be practicing your writing, but also turn it in, and so it'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, right? 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 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, like, the first few days, he's like, all right, here's how you actually construct a narrative. Here's what works, here's what doesn't work. Here are tools. 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. 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.
- [23:36]
Tim Ferriss
Someone say, the black box.
- [23:37]
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 in SCI fifantasy 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 that 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 Farlan method of breaking in. I was the last generation that 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 anytime 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.
- [25:27]
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.
- [25:35]
Brandon Sanderson
Okay, yeah.
- [25:35]
Tim Ferriss
But before we get to that, I want to ask, are you still teaching the creative writing class at byu?
- [25:42]
Brandon Sanderson
I am.
- [25:42]
Tim Ferriss
Brigham Young University. What is the first class?
- [25:45]
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 while they're there, right? Most of them, they're just curious. They may have a book in them. And we have this curious relationship with art in our society. It is as soon as you say, I'm going to write something, people are like, oh, when will you monetize it? When will you earn money from it? And that can be kind of destructive. Right? Like you mentioned, you're writing a book just. Or you wrote one just because it was an itch, you 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 and page 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 spent 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 in what shit, of course. And I want to approach it as a toolbox, giving people all of these various tools, some of which are contradictory, right? Self 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.
- [28:23]
Tim Ferriss
What are some of the contradictory tools or approaches in the toolkit?
- [28:28]
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% 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 that if he has an outline, he feels like he's already done that process in the outline. So when he sits down to write the book, he has no motivation. He's not exploring 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.
- [30:34]
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?
- [30:45]
Brandon Sanderson
What I generally do is I follow a focus on habits approach. Instead of giving them specific writing exercises, I can give them, 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. And 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 said, and then take it and try to write it under different styles of dialogue. If you're writing like Soderbergh, how would you do it? Pick some of your favorite people, Go watch their Movies, write down the dialogue and compare that to the real life and just kind of like figure out what kind of dialogue you like to do. Those are exercises. But in general, I'm only doing that when I'm diagnosing a problem for the class. I'm saying your job. If you want to try to be a professional writer, you're going to have to write consistently. Nine out of ten writers that I've found are that do better with consistency. One out of ten is a binge 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. Right. Most people are better served by writing a certain amount every day, really consistently, or at least two or three times a week and building a novel out of good habits. And I focus on that. I'm like, break it down. Set a goal. Have a 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 go, 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 where 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 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 a hundred thousand words, which is your average novel.
- [33:51]
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?
- [34:03]
Brandon Sanderson
300? Yeah, 350. The Way of Kings is 400,000 words. And we kind of cram stuff in there and we get to a thousand pages on that. So you can kind of run that. It's a fourth of a thousand pages. So it'd 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 just zipping through. It's a page turner, right? So they're going to want 50% 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.
- [35:04]
Tim Ferriss
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. It's the new year and many of you no doubt are planning for the year ahead. I'm doing the same. And of course one thing that tends to be top of mind is setting financial goals, getting your finances in order and but it's a mess out there. The hyper complexities of the US economy, global economy can be very confusing and there's a lot of conflicting advice. But saving and investing doesn't have to be complicated. Here's something refreshingly simple to use and that's Wealthfront. Wealthfront is an app that helps you save and invest your money. Right now you can earn 4% APY. That's annual percentage yield on your cash from partner banks. With the Wealthfront Cash account. That's nearly 10 times the national average according to FDIC.gov so don't wait. Earn 4% APY on your cash today. Plus it's eligible for up to 8 million in FDIC insurance through partner banks. And when you open an account today, you'll get an extra $50 bonus with a deposit of $500 or more. There are already more than 1 million people using Wealthfront to save more, earn more and build long term wealth. So check it out. Visit wealthfront.comtim to get started one more time. That's Wealthfront. This is a paid endorsement of Wealthfront. Wealthfront Brokerage isn't a bank. The APY is subject to change. For more information, see the episode Description let's hit some top line habits from Brandon how many words per year on average would you say you put down.
- [36:40]
Brandon Sanderson
My goal is 2,000 to 2,500 words a day. So, you know, 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 incurier. 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 2500.
- [37:09]
Tim Ferriss
Those are new words.
- [37:10]
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. 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, third of my time's done to revision. 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.
- [37:57]
Tim Ferriss
All right, we might come back to that in 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?
- [38:09]
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 are 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 2. I came out of the womb with a poem ready to go in my student newspaper and things like that. Me, I. 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 like 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 like three of those in a row where I'm like, I don't even have a dog. But I'm tired of the dog dying. I know what it's like to be a kid. Like, I don't live on a farm, but my grandparents were all farmers, right? And I live behind a farm. I was in Lincoln. It's mostly urban, but mostly urban in that Midwest. Way where you're in the capital city in a brand new kind of high cost development, but there's a cornfield in your backyard. That's just Nebraska, right? 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. Reader. She doesn't remember me. Ms.
- [39:42]
Tim Ferriss
Reader.
- [39:43]
Brandon Sanderson
Ms. Reader.
- [39:43]
Tim Ferriss
How appropriate.
- [39:44]
Brandon Sanderson
Yep, yep, Ms. Reader. 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 and I made some mistakes and she picked me out, she sat me down and she was actually very good. She's like, something's not clicking with you with books. And I'm like, no, they really aren't. She's like, so for your next book report, I just want you to read one of these books on my rack here. These are my favorite books that I have for kids to read. I just want you to actually read it and you can talk to me about it. And I'm like, I 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 that have been ready by a hundred students, right? They got spaghetti stains on them and things like that. It's just. And I looked, leafed through and I arrived on this book called Dragonsbane by Barbara Hamly. And it really was the COVID The COVID illustrator is Michael Whelan. I would eventually. 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 cool dragon on the COVID It was all misty and kind of awesome. Looking, it had a cute girl on the COVID 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. Like, 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, right? This is a book about a middle aged woman going through a midlife crisis. The story is that there's a dragon who's come to, you know, destroy the kingdom. The last living person who's killed a dragon is this guy. And they go hunting him. And he lives up in the north 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. And they're like, you're the only one who's ever done it. And so he goes to his wife and he's like, I guess I got to go kill this dragon. We 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. And her story is, she has been told by her teacher she could be the greatest wizard ever. She's got raw natural talent. But she has divided her time between studying and having a family. And her teacher's like, you really should give up that family stuff. Just really focus on your magic. But this is her crisis. This is what. And through going down, she kind of learns about the dragon magic and she starts to get really into that. And not to give spoilers, but there's an opportunity for her to just go and become what she'd always dreamed. And her crisis is, do I go do this right now or do I not? And I'm reading this book and it's really cool. It's inventive. And I realize at some point my mother, she graduated first in her class in accounting in a year where she was the only woman in most of her accounting classes. 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 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 that she and 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. And I get done with this book and on one hand it's kind of a silly book about wizards and dragons, right? And I get done with this book and I understand my mom better. And 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. And 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 magician to that author. Being able to convey a life experience of someone that just entered my brain and has never left. And I said, just like if you went and saw a magic trick, you're an analytical type person. You probably want to say, how did they do it? How did 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. And I just started reading voraciously. I went to the card catalog because I'm old, I'm even older than you.
- [45:21]
Tim Ferriss
Oh, I remember those card catalogs.
- [45:23]
Brandon Sanderson
And I went and got the next book in line, just alphabetical because it started with dragon. And I read everything that had dragons in it in the school library just to figure it out. And something changed in me that day. I went from a C student to an A student over summer. C's in eighth grade, A's in ninth grade. Why that changed? Because I discovered stories about wizards. I discovered there was something I wanted to do. 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. And 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's 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 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. And having a purpose, having a reason to do well, changed my entire outlook. And I. I was not valedictorian. I was one grade off of it because I took a semester and moved to France. 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. So I got a B plus in one class. But it was totally worth it. Go live in France.
- [47:02]
Tim Ferriss
I was going to. How did you decide to go to France?
- [47:05]
Brandon Sanderson
I took four years of French, and my teacher in French was the best teacher I had. Ms. Dress. And when you have good teachers, it changes your passion for a class, right?
- [47:17]
Tim Ferriss
Completely.
- [47:18]
Brandon Sanderson
You know, I wouldn't have picked French as my favorite subject, but it was my favorite class, and so I had three years of that. And she said, hey, I'm taking a study abroad to Paris. You're 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. And I'm like, I am in. You're so passionate about your trips to Paris. And it was so wonderful. Like, stayed with a 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 sounds like.
- [47:57]
Tim Ferriss
A good trade in terms of.
- [47:59]
Brandon Sanderson
Absolutely a good trade.
- [48:00]
Tim Ferriss
And 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 with summer school because none of the grades transferred.
- [48:21]
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.
- [48:30]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. I tell people it's like 30% Blade Runner and 70% DMV. If you live in Japan, it's just like, I have to do another carbon copy, and 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. 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 world builder, but that first and foremost, it's world building 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. What are we talking about?
- [49:29]
Brandon Sanderson
So I do two lectures on narrative and generally the first day I do not talk about hero's journey or three act structure or any of these things. That's for the second week because I do my class as one giant lecture each week followed by these.
- [49:45]
Tim Ferriss
Available anywhere?
- [49:46]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah, they're on YouTube.
- [49:47]
Tim Ferriss
Amazing.
- [49:48]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah. You can watch the. 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? And 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. And the idea for plot is to identify what type of plot it is. If you're doing a mystery, then that progress is going to be in the form of information. Story starts without the characters, without the information, the reader without the information generally, and ends with them gaining the information. And so the story, the progress is all about these little bits of information that you get through the story. And at its fundamental. This does some fun things. For instance, buddy cop movies and romances have the same sort of fundamental structure, which is it's about a relationship between two people where slowly you 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 own 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.
- [51:26]
Tim Ferriss
What does that mean?
- [51:27]
Brandon Sanderson
Braided roses?
- [51:28]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Oh, I see. So it's Sort of us against the world.
- [51:30]
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.
- [51:44]
Tim Ferriss
That's a very cool imagery.
- [51:45]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah. Again, stole that one from Dave. And so the idea for a character plot is you are braiding the roses, and 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 the kind of the holes, the places where one doesn't have a thorn and can get hit, another one's thorn protects and things like that. And over the course of the story, you see that rose get braided to the point that you are saying, you guys are so much better together than apart. You need to be together. And then when they either hook up or become partners again, same 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 he has, you know, there's a problem, there's something that's hurting. And here's this other cop. He's going to retire soon, but, you know, 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. It 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, you know, I talk about, on the first day, this idea of how to do that, how to have twists that are actually fulfilling promises. And that one's fun. The best twists don't just surprise the reader. A complication should surprise the reader, but a twist should be surprising yet inevitable. And if you do it right, people are wanting that twist before they realize it happens. And then it does. And that is day one. Then day two is. I'm 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 some, 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 comedies are. 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.
- [54:39]
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.
- [55:03]
Brandon Sanderson
Okay, that's not the original Save the Cat. No, that's the new one. So I do recommend Save the Cat, but Save the Cat Goes to the Movies. I haven't read that. That sounds good.
- [55:10]
Tim Ferriss
It's fun. Yeah. The first one's also excellent. I mean, I enjoyed it.
- [55:13]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah. 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 in Save the Cat's about structure and on writing's about the life of a writer and not structure. And those will give you kind of two of the kind of 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.
- [56:05]
Tim Ferriss
So where do you fall in general or now between the gardening or gardener and architect?
- [56:13]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah. So I've tried all the tools. I have a middle grade series called Alcatraz vs. 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? Sure, I pull a bunch of ideas, I brainstorm a bunch of random ideas and then I say, I've got to use all of these. Go. And I write a story without an hour. That's to practice the tool. And I generally fall these days on a 75% 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. 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.
- [57:18]
Tim Ferriss
Now, writing your way into character, by that you mean you're creating the setting, the environment and the plot and the plot.
- [57:26]
Brandon Sanderson
But then I rewrite the plot once I know the character. Here's my process. So I start usually with a couple of really good ideas. Right. I usually want to have multiple interesting ideas for my setting. At least one hook for each character.
- [57:42]
Tim Ferriss
If not, could you give an example of this starting?
- [57:45]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah. So I'll build it from one of my books, Mistborn. Right. So Mistborn had a series of ideas. The first idea came, I was reading Harry Potter back in the Harry Potter book. And I thought, man, these dark lords never get a break, right? 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's like, my ring. You know how long I've been looking for that? Thank you so much for that. Must have been a hard journey bringing that all the way here. Thank you. And then killed him and took over the world, right? 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. You know, Sneakers is one of my favorite films of all time. Oldie but goody. The Sting all the way up to kind of, you know, the. The Ocean's Elevens and the Italian Job. Both the old one and the new one. Just the inception. You can you do a good heist. You can get me. And as a writer, some of your light bulb moments are when you're like, hey, I love this thing and I've never written about it and that's gold. When you, you know, you feel like you've covered everything and then you realize there's some area of passion and love that you haven't tapped at all. I'm like, I need to do a fantasy heist. What if I did a heist where every member of this heist crew had a magical talent and they all combined together. I'm like, nobody's done this. It was really kind of a big deal to me when I realized no one had done this. Because as a writer, you're always looking for the things that no one has done it. The truth is everyone's done everything. But when you find something, you're like, I can't think of a major story that has done a full on heist in fantasy. I was super excited. Then I realized fantasy heist, Dark Lord won Team of thieves Rob the Dark Lord. I have a plot that's like, that's my inception. Meanwhile, I want to a good idea for each character. And so Mistborn's about two characters. One is about Kelsier, who is 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. Right? 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. I'm looking for a conflict. Right. For her, 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 that 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 he's like, by force. And her, who's lost it. And she becomes the apprentice to him as he recruits her into the team. And this idea of a heist where these two people are growing.
- [61:42]
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? Yes.
- [61:51]
Brandon Sanderson
This much I had.
- [61:52]
Tim Ferriss
And in what form does that exist?
- [61:54]
Brandon Sanderson
So it exists for me generally in I do a new document that says does setting at the top, then character, then plot. And the setting will have some of the Darklord one. That's setting stuff, Right. What does a world look like where the Dark Lord is 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. Yeah, we will. But what is the interesting use of magic?
- [62:19]
Tim Ferriss
That's how I got into writing excuses.
- [62:20]
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. Right. 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. Kelskier, I kind of had right from the get go.
- [63:08]
Tim Ferriss
All right, it's my job to interrupt, so I'll do it again. How did you know those first two didn't work?
- [63:13]
Brandon Sanderson
This is where it's at.
- [63:14]
Tim Ferriss
Is it just like a water feel kind of thing that you've acquired over time?
- [63:17]
Brandon Sanderson
This is art and not science. Just. And sometimes it doesn't work and you don't figure it out till 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 that. All that narrative structure I've come up with. But that's good, because having that structure and then saying, all right, now that I know what this person would do, how does that influence how they would actually approach this structure? And I'll go and I'll change that. And knowing about 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, 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.
- [64:43]
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. And that is hard for most people. So I'm 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 may have deadlines in mind. How do you get to that point? What is your internal process for that?
- [65:39]
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 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 becoming. You are the art. And if you know that, it helps a lot. One of the things that pros do that amateurs have trouble with in writing is 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'm convinced, is that you're writing the chapter wrong. You have enough instincts as a writer because you've practiced long enough to know you should throw it away, but you don't want to because you did the work, but your instincts won't let you continue doing it wrong. And you're not willing to 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 all. With two of the three of these books, I get done, and I'm like, that just doesn't give me the shine, the feel, the feel of excitement that I want this book, book to have. There's something fundamentally wrong with it, and I'm 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, which is a wild story. Yeah, it is a wild story. Game of Thrones was huge at the time and I've 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 like 10 characters stories and didn't get through any of them. It was too all over the place. And the other was I have the wrong personality. Something feels wrong. And as an artist, I just say, I don't know what this is yet. I put it aside once in a while. 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 Way of Kings, I eventually figured out what it was and I tried it again. The other two, I haven't gotten there yet.
- [69:42]
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?
- [69:57]
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 2 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 two until six these days is usually what I do. One until five, something like that. And then I'm done. I go, I shower. 6:30 I'm ready to hang with my family. And I'll be with family from 6 until 6:30 to 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 I think, I mean, 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.
- [72:09]
Tim Ferriss
Sure. Comes up a lot.
- [72:11]
Brandon Sanderson
Your brain is always working on the next big thing.
- [72:14]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. This is particularly true with people who work on big creative projects.
- [72:17]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah. And that gave me this permission. It actually came in a moment. My wife. 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 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, they drift off. My wife goes to bed. She was a schoolteacher for many years, still kind of keeps a schoolteacher'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. I write from 11 to 3 and then 3 to 4 or 5 is just whatever I want to do, that's the real goof off time. That's to go play with my magic cards time, that's the play a video game, pop out the steam deck time. And this schedule, you'll notice I don't have to worry about commuting, which gives me an advantage here. Has been really sustainable for me.
- [73:23]
Tim Ferriss
So that's a home office predominantly where you're writing.
- [73:26]
Brandon Sanderson
I write for 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. That's really sustainable. It's worked for me for the last 20 years.
- [73:51]
Tim Ferriss
That's incredible. I got all my best writing done really late at night when I was. I mean, still I'm writing, working on a new book, but when I was working on my first few books especially, it was always when everyone else was asleep. 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. Why do you have this company? Why have you and your wife built this company? All right, 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?
- [74:32]
Brandon Sanderson
How long, how long do you want to go? Yeah, this is the big one.
- [74:35]
Tim Ferriss
This is a long form podcast. So we have all the time we want.
- [74:38]
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 those the big ones. They're doing really well and so they're off in a cabin telling their story. Or they're. They're the ones that have to be pried away from their easy chair to get them to even do any publicity whatsoever. Right. They want to live that life. 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. Right. And I've always had a bit of that entrepreneurial sense.
- [75:35]
Tim Ferriss
What were the aspirations?
- [75:36]
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. Right. I could spend hours doing this, and it's the first thing I found, other than reading or video games, that I could spend hours doing and just come out of it feeling tired but fulfilled. And I'm like, I want to do this. So I sat down and I took what I'd learned both kind of from my mother and kind of missions have kind of 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. Wow. Right? And that's bad advice. Imagine. For doing people right.
- [76:46]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Wow. You didn't even send them out.
- [76:47]
Brandon Sanderson
I didn't send them out.
- [76:48]
Tim Ferriss
It was just. It was just weight training in the gym. For your mind, for the number six.
- [76:52]
Brandon Sanderson
Yep. I didn't send them out. I did. Eventually. I shared number five with some. Some people. I got involved with the local science fiction magazine as an editor. I eventually took it over because that's what I do. And I was head editor. And I eventually said, well, I do have a book. And I started sharing book five with people right around that time.
- [77:13]
Tim Ferriss
You didn't even have test readers.
- [77:15]
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.
- [77:26]
Tim Ferriss
Name of the Wind.
- [77:27]
Brandon Sanderson
Name of the Wind. Yeah.
- [77:27]
Tim Ferriss
That is a spectacular book.
- [77:29]
Brandon Sanderson
First novel. Now, he did a ton of revisions on that. He spent as much time revising that book as I spent writing mine. But 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 and then I sat down.
- [77:44]
Tim Ferriss
So this was before you had an.
- [77:45]
Brandon Sanderson
Agent, 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 Elantris, which is book number six. I had just finished that one. And so I said, all right, book six, that's the launcher. So that's the one. I eventually ended up selling. Those five I'd written in different subgenres. I knew I liked sci fi fantasy, but the risk of being too nerdy, my subgenres, 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?
- [78:21]
Tim Ferriss
What characterizes an epic fantasy?
- [78:24]
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 of the more example this is kids from our world get sucked into a fantasy world and experience. It's usually young adult focused. You can trace that all the way back to the old stories of the fairy tales. People go into the woods and then come out of the woods. They go into the fantasy world, come out. Right. The second line is what we call heroic fantasy. Heroic fantasies line 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.
- [79:31]
Tim Ferriss
So the blade itself.
- [79:32]
Brandon Sanderson
The blade itself, Fantastic.
- [79:34]
Tim Ferriss
Oh, so fun. Also one of the best voice actors I've ever heard.
- [79:39]
Brandon Sanderson
Joe is amazing. He's delightful. Tangent. You want my Joe Abercrombie story?
- [79:43]
Tim Ferriss
Yes, please.
- [79:44]
Brandon Sanderson
Okay, tangent. I am flying to Spain, right? 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. 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 Brandalizing. Yeah. And I did this thing in the airport. I left my book. I took a picture of it in the spot, and I'm getting in the line to get on the plane, right? And I get a tweet, and it's from Joe, and he says, sanderson, my book's next year's and you didn't sign it. And I'm like, well, it's not my book. He's like, sign my book, Sanderson, in all caps, exclamation and 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, because. Yeah.
- [81:06]
Tim Ferriss
How long had you known each other at that point?
- [81:09]
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 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 professional colleagues, and I love being on a panel with him. He makes me look intelligent and funny, which I love. So we've got portal fantasy, we've got heroic fantasy. Right. Michael Moorcock, all of that stuff. Then we have epic fantasy. And epic fantasy is termed by 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. Right. Gilgamesh even, and stuff like that. But this idea of epic fantasy is the movements 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 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. Epic is me and Robert Jordan and things like that. That's epic fantasy. It's just stakes of the world.
- [82:55]
Tim Ferriss
Got 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.
- [83:04]
Brandon Sanderson
Artist raised by an accountant.
- [83:05]
Tim Ferriss
And then we came through and you're like, number six.
- [83:07]
Brandon Sanderson
Number six.
- [83:08]
Tim Ferriss
That was go time.
- [83:09]
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 way of Kings Prime. We can talk about. There's kind of a dark moment of the soul happens before that, where I'm at 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, when did you start.
- [83:47]
Tim Ferriss
You started trying to sell them at.
- [83:50]
Brandon Sanderson
Which book about book six? Right around. 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 realized, 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 a meager sum. 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 was. I at least had something to say. Look, it's real. It made us $5,000 this year, but. Or made me. We weren't married then, but you know what I mean? And so, yeah, first year of marriage, I made $2,500. That was what I. Grand total. I contributed. But at that point, your job is to get stable. And the danger point after you like, there's two danger points. One is never selling a book. But the number two danger point is your second book. We talked a little bit about this second book is like do or Die time. And I can talk all about like 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.
- [85:53]
Tim Ferriss
That was with the first or the second book?
- [85:55]
Brandon Sanderson
Oh, it was my fourth that hit. Or. Yeah, my fourth that hit.
- [85:57]
Tim Ferriss
Fourth that hit the bestseller.
- [85:58]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah, it was Mistborn 3 was my first one. Very low on. It was either Mistborn 3, it might have been Warbreaker, but it's four or five hit like the times list went to 35 then. And I hit like number 35. Right.
- [86:10]
Tim Ferriss
Still counts.
- [86:11]
Brandon Sanderson
Still counts. Still counts. It was for 2,000 copies in a week. Doesn't sound like very much to be a bestseller, but I hit that bestseller list and the Wheel of Time happened and my entire life changed. And I'm sure we'll get to that. 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 toward my publishers, subsidiary of Macmillan. This is because their contract disputes. Amazon wanted to price ebooks 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 was 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, you know, dominant in this market, and the publishers are fighting them. And Amazon turns off the ability to buy my books. And this was a wake up call to me because 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 had 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.
- [88:21]
Tim Ferriss
It was real estate.
- [88:22]
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. 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 and Noble did. And so it was still the book succeeded. And eventually Borders came around and decided to carry it. There's only one person. They control your entire career. And I said, I cannot be subject. And that's when the big entrepreneurial part of my brain said, all right, let's change. I went to the publishers and I said, there are certain things I think we should be doing. And publishing blessed their hearts. They're still trapped in a lot of ways. In the 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 Taylor, 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 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. Different pricing tiers, 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 bookends. Gollum bookends 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 Leather Bounce, really high end, nice ones. But we shouldn't be charging what you're charging. They were charging 250 for the lever bounce. I'm like, that's too high a price point. We should be doing a hundred dollar price point. And the publisher said to me, we can't do this. And they had some good reasons. I 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. We, the bookstores can't sell the Leather Bounds because we can't, you know, we printed 250 copies of the Wheel of Time Leather Bounds. And we had so much trouble selling them because fans didn't know where to get them. 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 sales to our consumer. And I started with the leather bounce. My decision was this was something the market wanted. I kept hearing from fans, they wanted them. I heard from the publisher, they can't sell them. So I went to the publisher, 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.
- [92:40]
Tim Ferriss
The publishers are, I'm guessing, in retrospect.
- [92:43]
Brandon Sanderson
In retrospect.
- [92:46]
Tim Ferriss
But they couldn't have done it.
- [92:47]
Brandon Sanderson
They couldn't have done it because it had to be direct to consumer. Part of the reason is like the fans running out to buy the special edition of the bookstore. It's just there's a bad methodology. So I said to my team, we're going to build these, we're going to do leather bounds. They sold 250 copies. I want to sell 10,000. Right. Well, we started five. I want to sell 5,000. We ended up selling 50,000. Right.
- [93:10]
Tim Ferriss
Now is that of multiple books?
- [93:13]
Brandon Sanderson
That's the first one.
- [93:14]
Tim Ferriss
Wow.
- [93:15]
Brandon Sanderson
Right?
- [93:15]
Tim Ferriss
50,000 nowadays, yeah.
- [93:18]
Brandon Sanderson
Leather bound.
- [93:18]
Tim Ferriss
Leather bound.
- [93:19]
Brandon Sanderson
Leather bounds at 100 to 200 nowadays. Our initial print runs are 50,000. Back then it was 10,000, and then 5,000 more, then 5,000 more and then things like that. Right. Everyone we get in stock will sell. Everyone signed that is in stock will just instantly sell. And so there's obviously a very big market, in fact, such a big market. I cannot physically produce enough of them to sell the signed ones. We have the unsigned ones that people still buy, but the sign ones go instantly.
- [93:50]
Tim Ferriss
Quality problem to have.
- [93:51]
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?
- [94:12]
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 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.
- [94:45]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah, I win in that because if I sign my name, that's $250 because of Leatherman. 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 a thousand of those in an hour and that's 250 each, which is just an unreal. If you think about that, that's like.
- [95:08]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, that's bananas.
- [95:09]
Brandon Sanderson
That is bananas. My normal writing time, I can put a different dollar amount, depends on what I'm writing.
- [95:14]
Tim Ferriss
Did you ever get pulled because it happened. It's 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?
- [95:27]
Brandon Sanderson
So I was able to hold line, but barely. At one point I started to get popular enough that people wanted me in on the speaking tour. And so we put a dollar amount on it. I'm like, well, at that point, a day of writing, and it take me two days. A day of writing 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.
- [95:50]
Tim Ferriss
Now what?
- [95:51]
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. 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 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 said, you can do that. So anyway, that's beside the point. I gave this challenge to my team and it worked. Right. We started to do all the things that the publishers weren't doing. And then that's when I said, all right, now we're going to actually build a team and grow. And we moved to doing crowdfunding. It's really a lot better. We did pre orders on the initial ones. We moved to crowdfunding, and that's when we went. My team, all through the teens was maybe 10 people probably didn't even quite get there.
- [97:13]
Tim Ferriss
And who were those people? What was the kind of org chart at the time?
- [97:17]
Brandon Sanderson
So me and Emily. So Emily runs the business and I run the creative. Right. So she does hr, she does accounting, she does operations is what we call it and all of that stuff.
- [97:31]
Tim Ferriss
And is operations sort of the logistics of manufacturing and shipping? Yes, everything.
- [97:36]
Brandon Sanderson
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.
- [97:54]
Tim Ferriss
And what did creative development do at that time?
- [97:56]
Brandon Sanderson
That's our art team.
- [97:57]
Tim Ferriss
Okay, got it. That was art.
- [97:59]
Brandon Sanderson
Art. 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 hire an assistant editor whose job is to do executive assistant and editorial work for me. Well, very soon. Oh, wait, you're actually our first. Becky's like you. That wasn't. He was our first, like, 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?
- [98:37]
Tim Ferriss
You should explain for the people listening, though.
- [98:39]
Brandon Sanderson
Boy, we're on a tangent. To a tangent. I love this.
- [98:42]
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 you talking about? What was your question again? You're very good at.
- [98:52]
Brandon Sanderson
Well, you're good at reminding me. 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%. Anything between 30 to 10% is fine. 40% starts to look sketchy. And less than 10% is bad also. So you end up getting thousands of books shipped back. Right. 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 2003, $500 a year. You need to supplement that somehow. So I bought them all.
- [100:05]
Tim Ferriss
Okay, so this was, this is going.
- [100:07]
Brandon Sanderson
Back early, 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.
- [100:33]
Tim Ferriss
What is the merch?
- [100:34]
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 Elantris or Mistborn, saying Elantris for Mistborn. And she's the person we had been offloading our merchandise to so far that it started doing it. We're like, we're bringing this in house. So posters, art, prints, all of that stuff. Then our next employee, 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 right 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 kind of our little office at the time to clean it up, to make sure people need to change light bulbs and things like that. And then she handled herself all of the HR and things like that. And that's where we began. And that's what we were for like 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'd bought. And that's when we said, all right, it's time to level up. And I said, everyone's going to build an apartment and I want a full team for each one because we're going to go somewhere with this now that.
- [102:23]
Tim Ferriss
I have this team, 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. Books are big 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 going to be 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, I had a.
- [103:08]
Brandon Sanderson
Number of friends you had listened to writings, used to.
- [103:11]
Tim Ferriss
So I got this video and I was like, oh, well, this should be fun to watch. So for people who don't have any context, this is the big one. Yes, 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.
- [103:28]
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 sequel to Elantris. I'm doing this whole new thing and I've got big aspirations the next one is 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 7 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 2000s, we said, all right, we're moving to Kickstarter. This happened actually because of my friend Howard Taylor, who was. He was one of my models, where he's the guy who did a webcomic comic book that he sold the print editions in order to subsidize the free thing online. And he came to me and said, brandon, you should be doing crowdfunding. I'm like, we have a nice preorder 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 preorders is we never knew how many to order. Right. And with a Kickstarter, you get all those orders come in and you have to pay a chunk to Kickstarter. But they have a nice backend structure. And we investigated that. And Kara, my person who's in charge of fulfillment is like, this would be so much easier than what we're doing because you can mail merge all these things and they keep all of this track of all of the stuff with the shipping and the prices. It just makes it so much easier. 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 King's Leatherbound. It was successful. $7 million, which is pretty good. And then Covid hit.
- [105:16]
Tim Ferriss
Okay, so before we get to dun, dun, dun, dun, Covid hits. Now, before we get to that, what did you guys learn? What were the key lessons learned with that first prototype run?
- [105:28]
Brandon Sanderson
Let's just say 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.
- [105:40]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, right. Because a lot of folks who do Kickstarter, if they're successful, get the hug of death.
- [105:46]
Brandon Sanderson
Exactly.
- [105:46]
Tim Ferriss
And they implode.
- [105:47]
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. Right? 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. Like a lot of people who do Kickstarters don't understand, like 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 have need a high dock and some of them will have a ramp. And you have to find out like, where can they deposit these things. If you don't have a warehouse with a high dock, you better then know that the trucks are coming in with a ramp and you know, a 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. So 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 like escape velocity of attention. Escape velocity of attention is in today's media environment. It's like people's attention have a gravitational pull to what they've already been paying attention to. And they love the things that they love. And getting anything else to achieve that escape velocity, to go off and to make a splash to 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. And 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 there's this layer keeping people's attention away from paying attention to this thing over here. And in order to make any sort of noise, to get any sort of attention outside of a very small group, you need a certain amount of attention being paid to it so that you achieve this escape loss and you blast out and then the rest of the planets pay attention to it, not just the one. That is your little, little planet of attention. And it's really hard. Like launching new books for new authors today is much harder. 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'd, like, put up this barrier we don't want to look up. And it's very natural. And so having a Kickstarter gets that momentum behind you, starts to make noise executed properly. Executed properly, and a lot of them flop. But ExecutePro, bringing all of your fan base together and making a lot of noise, suddenly more people pay attention to you. And with our Way of Kings Kickstarter, it still only reached our audience, right? 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. And so in the early days of social media, if someone followed you on Facebook and you did a post, it showed up on their feedback automatically, no longer the case. And that stopped in the 2000 and tens. And so it depended on how many people liked a thing. So if you even want to reach your own audience, you have to have to have an escape velocity of attention. You have to break through these barriers, preventing even your fan base from seeing what's happening. I still get People who come to me like, wow, you did this big Kickstarter. I didn't even hear about this. We sold to only 10% of our audience with the big one that we're getting to. Right.
- [111:01]
Tim Ferriss
That's insane.
- [111:02]
Brandon Sanderson
That's only 10%. And that's all that effort to get to 10%. And I would say the big Kickstarter was 30 to 40% new people. So we really only reached 5% of my audience. But regardless, it taught us that taught me about scape 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.
- [111:27]
Tim Ferriss
So 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?
- [111:41]
Brandon Sanderson
So it was 41 point something million, official 45. When you 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.
- [112:01]
Tim Ferriss
I don't have actually the points. I just have roughly 41.
- [112:04]
Brandon Sanderson
Roughly 41 million. And the previous highest Kickstarter had been 21. And we still have the record.
- [112:12]
Tim Ferriss
Wild.
- [112:13]
Brandon Sanderson
Here's what's wild. It's for books, right. If you go look at that top 10, everything else is some cool tech innovation.
- [112:20]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
- [112:20]
Brandon Sanderson
And we have it for novels. So Covid hits, right? Covid hits. I have gone through cycles in my life multiple times where I say yes to too many things and then I'm traveling too much. And 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. Europe can be kind of exhausting. Three tours in Europe, multiple tours around here. And I calculated I've been on the road one third of my days. Covid hits. And I had 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 just little standalone book that was a cool idea I had and I love that about fantasy. Some of my favorite fantasy novels are standalone books. Guy Gavriel K is very good at them. Lions of Al Rasan or Taigana 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. And 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. 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. Right? 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. But then suddenly I had a third of my time back and I started watching movies with my kids. They were old enough that we could show them some of our favorite movies. And we showed them the Princess Bride, one of my favorite movies and favorite books.
- [114:57]
Tim Ferriss
It's amazing. Yeah, amazing. Amazing everything.
- [115:00]
Brandon Sanderson
William Goldman it's wonderful. Wonderful book. Wonderful. Written by. By William Goldman, who's a great screenwriter. He's written a lot of classics. Butch Cassidy and Sundance. Kid was one of his and just brilliant screenwriter who script doctored a ton of your favorite movies as well as wrote multiple on his own of your favorite movies. And so 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. And 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, right? Like, 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?
- [115:49]
Tim Ferriss
Marriage.
- [115:50]
Brandon Sanderson
Yes.
- [115:50]
Tim Ferriss
Oh, marriage.
- [115:52]
Brandon Sanderson
So that stuck in my brain. I'm like, what if the Princess Bride. What if, you know, 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. What if 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, right? 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 and that. I wrote a story that was more fairytaleish. 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, like, Twelfth Night and stuff like that.
- [116:37]
Tim Ferriss
I'm just going to sidebar because we might not get to it. You have someone within this company whose job, sole job, as I understand it, is continuity. And you have an internal wiki to keep track of everything in this universe so that it interconnects and coheres.
- [116:55]
Brandon Sanderson
As good as I am with narrative, I need all of this stuff still. So we have someone. So from his voice, this is the first time I'd done this. All my other books are in my voice. I said, what if a character told a story to someone else about 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 a hundred thousand 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. And I wrote these four books, and I realized. Well, at about book three, I realized I had something. Something that I could spring on people. And Covid had been so miserable for so many people. It was delightful for me. I'm writing books. I'm watching movies with my kids. No one's asking me to go on tour anymore. And so in the midst of all this, I started to have a plan, and I started to have an idea, and I got that fourth one written, and I wrote the fourth one deliberately for the Kickstarter. I 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.
- [118:43]
Tim Ferriss
Voice.
- [118:44]
Brandon Sanderson
And then number two was something completely different. It's a science fiction novel unrelated to every Myler stuff. And so I wrote one, kind of for the fans, and then I sprung them on my company, said, there's four books out of nowhere. Tell me what you think. And I watched their reaction to finding four unexpected books and the excitement that just moved through the company, and I said, all right, I've got something. I did it again with test audience, some of my sworn to secrecy early readers.
- [119:16]
Tim Ferriss
Do you use the same early readers?
- [119:18]
Brandon Sanderson
Typically, I have a pool of about 100 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 100 into groups of 25 and sent them all four different books, and they all talk.
- [119:35]
Tim Ferriss
Did you just say two groups of 45?
- [119:37]
Brandon Sanderson
No. Into. Sorry. Four groups of 25. Four groups of 25. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, I probably misspoke on that.
- [119:43]
Tim Ferriss
No, no, no. I think I misheard it. Okay. Four groups of 25.
- [119:46]
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. I kind of have to. My job is to. We always talk, Emily and I. My job is to look and pull people toward that star future. And her job is to say, remember to be practical. Remember to be practical. Can we actually accomplish this? What will it take to actually accomplish this? And I went to them and I said, I want to do a video where I pretend that I'm coming out with some big scandal and I'm retiring from writing because I've secretly done something just horrible 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, car wreck. People want to slow down if they think something. 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're like this, you know, sounds like you have, like, 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. I am a storyteller, and that's a video with a story. Sure, right. Like, I live for the reveal. If people read my books, you will tell. I live for that ending where I've been distracting with something, and then I pull out that surprise. I love the 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 7 to 10, like we'd done before. But that escaped velocity of attention, right? I suddenly. It's the first time in my life where suddenly people are paying attention who are not in my circle of influence, who don't read epic fantasy. Suddenly, news stories are everywhere. Everyone's talking about it. I get interviewed by, like, you know, legit news media. And the closest I had ever gotten to that was the Wheel of Time way back when. And even then, no one really interviewed me. Yeah.
- [122:52]
Tim Ferriss
Which we'll come back to.
- [122:53]
Brandon Sanderson
I did appear on Colbert Report.
- [122:55]
Tim Ferriss
That's a big one.
- [122:57]
Brandon Sanderson
Well, my face appeared. Does that count?
- [123:02]
Tim Ferriss
I think that counts.
- [123:03]
Brandon Sanderson
So Stephen Colbert had a piece on zeppelins because he was in character. This is Colbert Kraborg 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 like 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 board. It's pixelated. You can barely tell.
- [123:33]
Tim Ferriss
But you appeared.
- [123:34]
Brandon Sanderson
But I appeared.
- [123:35]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. As seen on.
- [123:36]
Brandon Sanderson
As seen on Stephen Colbert. Brandon Sanderson, my claim thing. My fans all tweeted me. This is way back in 2009. It was 2007. It was right when the Wheel of Time happened.
- [123:49]
Tim Ferriss
When you look at this record breaking success, this Kickstarter, were there aspects of it or packages that just outperformed all expectations?
- [124:03]
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 in. And so there was a relatively inexpensive ebook and audiobook bundle that you got together and I think it was $15 each for those.
- [124:23]
Tim Ferriss
Okay, so each book in the audio E book combo was 15.
- [124:28]
Brandon Sanderson
$15. Yep. Which is about the price of an audible credit. Plus you get the E book 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 leather bound, 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.
- [124:54]
Tim Ferriss
For how long?
- [124:55]
Brandon Sanderson
For a year.
- [124:55]
Tim Ferriss
For a year.
- [124:56]
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 of 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 and eight boxes. So across a year, you get a book every quarter, and then you get two boxes of swag, and we just make that swag. Awesome. We put all of our best ideas into it. We make eight really killer boxes, and then we're done. We don't ask people to subscribe for longer. We just. You got your cool boxes of interesting stuff, and that just went great.
- [125:51]
Tim Ferriss
What was the price point for that?
- [125:53]
Brandon Sanderson
So those were 40 bucks each, I think, also. So the idea is that it's $40 a month. Four of those months you get a book, and then eight of those months you get a $40 box that has other cool stuff in it. And $40 was a high enough price point. We could make some really quality cool things.
- [126:10]
Tim Ferriss
It's like just under 500 bucks for that.
- [126:12]
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 their high. Those editions. Those two were the ones that just went gangbusters. Almost nobody bought the lower tiers.
- [126:27]
Tim Ferriss
Did that surprise you?
- [126:28]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah, that surprised me. But again, everyone's happy. They all get to self select.
- [126:32]
Tim Ferriss
Now, how do you explain that? Based on what you said earlier, which is that you only hit 5 to 10% of your audience and you had 30 to 40% newbies going for the gold. I mean, that just strikes me as so unexpected.
- [126:45]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah, I think part of it is. I would guess the majority of that 30 to 40% were people who had heard of me and had not tried me yet. I wasn't grabbing people who'd never. That didn't ever read, but it was people who friends would say, hey, Brandon Sanderson. And these four books were all starter books. They're all meant even the fourth one, which is kind of tied into things 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.
- [127:16]
Tim Ferriss
Love weird stuff.
- [127:17]
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. Right. With the. With the Kickstarter and all said and done, that is my bestselling book through an edition. But from the publisher, after Mistborn and Stormlight Archive, after the first books of those, not even the sequels after Mistborn 1 and Stormlight 1, Tress the Emerald Sea that book sells as much. It's really comparable. There are weeks where it kind of beats them. So this book that you would think we'd sold to everybody, the publisher releases in addition, expecting, well, there's not much, but we'll have it on the shelves. Becomes their third best selling Sanderson book.
- [128:04]
Tim Ferriss
How do you evolve? How do you explain that?
- [128:05]
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. Booktok 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. 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 Aero 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?
- [129:00]
Tim Ferriss
It's incredible. It's so incredible. So I have a question about the 4 times 25 people people, the test readers. 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. 25. When you have a new book of any type, do you use 25 to 100 test readers?
- [129:20]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah.
- [129:21]
Tim Ferriss
Okay. How do you absorb or evaluate that feedback? Because that is, I could foresee that being a lot of feedback.
- [129:30]
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.
- [131:06]
Tim Ferriss
Did you ask for particular types of feedback to focus it?
- [131:10]
Brandon Sanderson
So what I want is just. I don't want people to fix the book. I want people to give their descriptive responses to the book. If you were just reading this as a professionally published thing, where are the places you're bored? Where are the places you're confused? Where are the places that you're standing up and sharing? Where are the places that you know? Where are you engaged? Where are you not engaged? Just what are you enjoying? Don't tell me what's wrong. Don't tell me what to fix. Tell me what, where you're bored and tell me where you're confused. Tell me where you're excited and tell me where you're turning the pages so fast you have to come back and write your feedback because you don't want to stop to write your feedback. 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. 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 have.
- [132:26]
Tim Ferriss
You want people to respond to things because it helps you spot patterns. If someone's like, Yeah, I started dragging here. I didn't really understand why this character did this. And then you have some and be like, yeah, me too. Yeah, me too.
- [132:36]
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. Like, 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.
- [132:55]
Tim Ferriss
And that's in a spreadsheet.
- [132:55]
Brandon Sanderson
Or are you using a spreadsheet? We use Google Sheets and no, no, we started using an actual program. Peter, who's head of editorial, was like, we need an actual program that's a little bit secure and that can track. 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 is that.
- [133:18]
Tim Ferriss
Program an off the shelf program.
- [133:20]
Brandon Sanderson
One of my beta readers, which is what we call these people, worked for the company and pitched it to us. And the name of it's escaping me right now. I can find out what it is.
- [133:28]
Tim Ferriss
We can figure it out.
- [133:29]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah, we'll figure it out.
- [133:29]
Tim Ferriss
Maybe put it in the show notes if we can find it. So part of the reason I'm asking is that I started working on this book six, seven years ago.
- [133:36]
Brandon Sanderson
Is this your fantasy?
- [133:37]
Tim Ferriss
No, this is a different book. This is an entire book on saying no and basically finding clarity in a world of noise.
- [133:44]
Brandon Sanderson
It's a really good book to write.
- [133:46]
Tim Ferriss
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 I'd 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 got very exciting.
- [134:08]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah, it's really big now.
- [134:09]
Tim Ferriss
I've never done it. I've never done it. And that raises a whole lot of questions, which is one of the reasons I wanted to talk about Warbreaker and releasing early drafts for free on the website with Creative Commons and let's go.
- [134:21]
Brandon Sanderson
To that in just a second. Let me finish what I do with the beta reading.
- [134:24]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, yeah.
- [134:24]
Brandon Sanderson
I give all that to my team. I go read the end of part summaries and the end of book summaries. They take the rest. They distill it and then they actually put it into a copy of the book. The manuscript. Just interstitials. They said this at this point. They said this at this point. So I never even have to go to the document except to read like end of part one. What are people's general responses?
- [134:46]
Tim Ferriss
And these are comments in a word doc or something like that.
- [134:48]
Brandon Sanderson
Comments in a word doc. Just in track changes. So that I see here's a big discussion that happened here. And they only take 10 to 20% of it and put it in.
- [135:00]
Tim Ferriss
What are the criteria for selection? They're only taking 10 to 20%.
- [135:05]
Brandon Sanderson
It's Peter and Karen and they know me really well. These are people that I've worked with since college.
- [135:11]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, okay.
- [135:12]
Brandon Sanderson
And so it's over time. And I will star and say, this is a good comment. This is one that I. And they. 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.
- [135:36]
Tim Ferriss
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.
- [135:43]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah. So Warbreaker happened after I wrote the Mistborn trilogy and I was chatting with Cory Doctorow, kind of famous tech blogger and Creative Commons advocate. Every interaction with Corey has been really positive, like, super class act. I was once at the Hugo Awards, and this is 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. 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 kind of class act that Corey is. 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. 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. So 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 a book with the main goal being see how an audience online gives feedback different from my beta readers, but also to have a chance to bring my audience together into one place. And then when it was done, I released the book under the Creative Commons, partially as an experiment. How does this impact giving away the book for free? How does this impact the sales of the commercial edition? I wanted data on that, and the data says doesn't really impact. Sells just as well as Elantris does, even a little bit better. And Elantris wasn't released in the Creative Comet, so it doesn't sell as well as Stormlight or Mistborn. But those are my breakouts, you know, my standout successes. And I don't think, you know, that has anything to do with it.
- [137:56]
Tim Ferriss
Have you released any books after that with Creative Comics?
- [137:59]
Brandon Sanderson
No, I'm planning. 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.
- [138:07]
Tim Ferriss
How did you find the feedback online in the forums differed from beta testers?
- [138:12]
Brandon Sanderson
It was about the same.
- [138:13]
Tim Ferriss
It was.
- [138:14]
Brandon Sanderson
It really was. But remember, we've got an insular audience of superfans at that point. That's the only people paying attention to me in 2007. Now it'd probably be different, but I can get a little bit of that by watching. We do rerelease 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.
- [138:42]
Tim Ferriss
Amazing.
- [138:42]
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.
- [138:55]
Tim Ferriss
What do you mean by that?
- [138:56]
Brandon Sanderson
Epic fantasy. You walk this line. In epic fantasy, do you use okay or do you use all right. And I've been moving the Stormlight Archive toward modern language across the course of the novels as we're preparing to kind of go a little bit more what we call magepunk, a little more modern for the next phase.
- [139:14]
Tim Ferriss
Mage Punk. I've never heard that. It's great.
- [139:16]
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, they call.
- [139:31]
Tim Ferriss
That mage hextech and arcane.
- [139:32]
Brandon Sanderson
Hextech. Arcane is magepunk. That's the straight up subgenre of that. 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 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, you know, they're like, they would like me to pull back. They want me to call it courting instead of dating. Right. And just kind of stay a little bit more with that fantasy feel. That one took me by surprise. My beta readers didn't spot that everything else in those threads were things my beta readers spotted that I either, you know, that I left because I felt this was integral to the narrative. I'm telling if it's negative, it's all right for it to be negative. This is the piece of art, right? Some people don't like impressionists, but you can't make impressionism better by not being impressionist. Each piece of art is going to have things like that.
- [140:32]
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?
- [140:43]
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.
- [140:52]
Tim Ferriss
Where do you release those chapters?
- [140:54]
Brandon Sanderson
We released 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.
- [141:05]
Tim Ferriss
Why not release them on your own site or in some other way?
- [141:09]
Brandon Sanderson
So, yeah, good question. So there's arguments for that. The thing about it is, we've found over time, personal websites are important, but they're much less important than social media or aggregate websites in today's mind economy.
- [141:25]
Tim Ferriss
What do you mean by aggregate websites?
- [141:27]
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. Right. What we found is like, 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'll put it back up. We might even have a few that we're selling now. We sell in the tens of copies of my ebooks. People like their platform. They want to have a Kindle and buy the books on their Kindle, which makes perfect sense. They do not want to go somewhere else, buy an ebook and load it to the Kindle, even if it's cheaper somewhere else. Who? 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. Yeah, that's great.
- [142:31]
Tim Ferriss
No, it's like the tech world. It's like the hacker news.
- [142:34]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah. Stuff like. 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 have even double posted them on my website. I can't remember, but normally we just do them on tour. But you said something I want to ask you about.
- [142:49]
Tim Ferriss
Sure.
- [142:50]
Brandon Sanderson
Tell me if this is tread a. If we want to tread lightly or if this is. But you'd still take advances.
- [142:56]
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 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.
- [144:13]
Brandon Sanderson
There is that argument.
- [144:15]
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, those sort of facilities. I'm almost perfectly happy to farm that out with an appropriately specked 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, I know Hugh is so smart with this and as you noted before, like I used to have an audiobook club with Audible. This was back in the day with ACX. When you get up to like 75%.
- [145:08]
Brandon Sanderson
Royalties before they killed that.
- [145:09]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Which and I understand like as a business, as you have more and more, 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, 2535, 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.
- [146:06]
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.
- [146:28]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah.
- [146:30]
Brandon Sanderson
And so there is that.
- [146:32]
Tim Ferriss
This is on ebooks.
- [146:33]
Brandon Sanderson
On ebooks, on audio. So this can get technical and nerdy.
- [146:38]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, let's do it. I like technical and nerdy.
- [146:40]
Brandon Sanderson
So on ebooks, basically, the publisher is getting 70% of price. It's $10. They're getting seven bucks sent to them. As an indie author is doing it yourself, you will get seven bucks. But they will take out a tiny distribution fee at Amazon, which is super annoying. If you have a lot of artwork, it can get higher. Usually it's only like 10, 15 cents, but they will take that out where they don't for the New York publishers. So that's one of the big differences. The other thing is they'll let the New York publisher charge $14.99 for their book. You, they will only let charge 10. If you go over 10, they'll only give you a 20% instead of a 70% royalty. They really need to bend that.
- [147:17]
Tim Ferriss
They want to keep you between what is 299 and 999?
- [147:20]
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 COVID 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 are able to do some of these practices that we talked about. But beyond that, people sign up for a subscription fee. This is partially Apple's fault. Apple and Google, because if you buy an audiobook through Audible's app, Google and Apple want to take 30% of that and the publishers don't want to do that. 30% is egregious. It's insane. There's all sorts of lawsuits going on that you know them taking that much. But because of that, they do the subscription service. So you sign up for the subscription on their website. Google or Apple get none. You get a credit every month. You can spend a credit. None of that credit goes because it's by credit. But then that turns all the audience into subscribers to Audible. So if Audible stops carrying a book, people just stop buying it. Once again, he who controls the spice, he who controls the platform, controls everything. Which means that they get to say, well, it's a credit. What is a credit? Well, a credit is divided this way. And we give out this many free books as part of the promotions with credits. And so that plays into it. And some of the credits go for books like this. And so they have this huge spreadsheet that to their credit, 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 pushed 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 4 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% of that. 15 bucks is what should go to the author or certain percentage of that to the author, certain percent to the reader. Narrators don't get royalties, which is kind of a thing. And I just really wish we could pierce that and make it happen. But we haven't been able to.
- [150:30]
Tim Ferriss
But so it sounds like if I'm hearing you correctly, your advice would be to hold onto it to yourself.
- [150:35]
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% better than we used to do. As much as 50% better in some cases.
- [151:10]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, that's not trivial.
- [151:11]
Brandon Sanderson
It's not trivial. So I could actually get those actual 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 tress. 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 E book and audiobook. The ebook straight up is better. The audiobook, we make more. But we would make almost the same with the publisher.
- [151:40]
Tim Ferriss
And are you just interfacing directly with.
- [151:42]
Brandon Sanderson
Amazon platforms for the 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 is 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 tricksy. It's all so messy, right? 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. 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.
- [153:12]
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. 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?
- [153:36]
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 for 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 most of, for all of my childhood, Wheel of Time was the kind of flag bearer for epic fantasy, was the heir to Tolkien, so to speak, and selling millions of copies, doing really, really well. And he got sick. It 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. 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 considered 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 3pm in New York.
- [155:45]
Tim Ferriss
Now, is there something that happened before the voice memo or no?
- [155:49]
Brandon Sanderson
So there is, but I didn't know it. I get this voice memo from someone I'd never met, but I knew by reputation, says, and I know every word in inflection. All right, all right, let's do a hundred times. Hello, Brandon Sanderson? This is Harriet McDougall Rigney. I am Robert Jordan's widow, and I would like you to call me back. There's something I want to talk to you about. Just that by itself. So I get this voicemail and I'm like, Robert Jordan's widow, Harriet McDougal, the editor. 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 ours even weirder than mine when he. He's still around. But he was my editor. He's retired since then. But you know Moshe, great guy. 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 like freaking out and my wife sees me. And I am not a nervous person. I am not a person that emotions strike very powerfully. That's just my own weird neurodivergence. I don't generally feel strong emotions, but that day I'm 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 did she want? And I'm like, I don't know. So I finally call Tor. I reach an editor at Tor who's one of the managing editors, and he says, oh, that. Yeah, it's what you think it is. I'll get her to call you back. What do I think it is? Well, I knew that I'd written a little thing about Robert Jordan on my website a few days earlier, just kind of talking about how much he'd meant to me. It's very short, it's like three paragraphs. So I'm like, maybe she wants to talk about that. 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. Like, I can talk. I'm a talker. I could not talk. I turned into a sheep. I actually 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 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 bases wanted and what that has done, perhaps to reputations and things like that.
- [158:59]
Tim Ferriss
And just so we can place this in time, where in your career were you?
- [159:02]
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 2. We can talk about that moment before. That's the first one. Mistborn 2 is where the publisher knew. 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 had asked who should finish it.
- [159:41]
Tim Ferriss
Thanks, guys.
- [159:42]
Brandon Sanderson
Yep. 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 Mathison, 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.
- [160:18]
Tim Ferriss
Were there any lines that stuck out to her in particular?
- [160:20]
Brandon Sanderson
It was the last line I wrote something along the lines of, you go quietly, but you leave us trembling. Right. 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. 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 books, going on a side quest. 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 bowed like a sheep. And then I wrote her that email that night and said, you know, 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. At least I know I'm a fan. Like, I always use this Venn diagram, right? Venn diagram of pretty good sci fi fantasy writers and pretty big Robert Jordan fans. There are bigger Robert Jordan fans out there than me, hardcore. By far. There are better writers than me, right? Terry Pratchett, I always call the greatest writer of my generation, right. There are amazing writers. George is a fantastic writer. I would probably rank George as the greatest living sci fi fantasy writer. 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. And 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 2 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 because 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 like two weeks. And she calls me and says, I would like you to do it. 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, like, went to bat. He forced Me to let him go to bat on some foreign percentages just so agents have to flex their muscles. Right. But I just said yes. And then by December, I had the manuscript, and I got the call in September, October, and the manuscript, he'd written 50 pages of the final book. Wow.
- [163:49]
Tim Ferriss
Okay. So we could spend, I'm sure, another three hours talking about how you pieced everything together and worked on that. But. 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?
- [164:11]
Brandon Sanderson
So when you're 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. 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 authority. It's even better now. Back then, it was good. Now it's fantastic. And Tom Daugherty called me. He's like, well, we want a sequel 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 sub genres. 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.
- [165:36]
Tim Ferriss
MCU is all the Marvel. Yes, all the Marvel.
- [165:38]
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 and 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.
- [166:19]
Tim Ferriss
We were talking about this before we started recording that. That was also sort of after the four hour work week. It was like, well, then I can do the three hour work week and the two hour work week or the four hour work week for 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.
- [166:37]
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 launches came out, sold 10,000. Mistborn 1 comes out on hardcover and it sells fewer. The audience that Elantris liked Elantris, 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 Mistborn's a stronger book than Elantris by many fold. Elantris is my sixth book. Mistborn's 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 released the paperback and the paperback has a dreadful cover. I love the illustrator. He did the hardcovers of all of them. But once in a while a cover just doesn't click. And this cover was. It's 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 599 or a 4.99 version. I think it was 3.99. Then do a 4.99 version of Mistborn. Let's jumpstart 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 2 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 day.
- [168:30]
Tim Ferriss
Doesn't sound good.
- [168:32]
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?
- [168:40]
Tim Ferriss
5,000.
- [168:41]
Brandon Sanderson
5,000. It's called the Death Spiral. So they ordered like 5,000 copies.
- [168:45]
Tim Ferriss
And then it can become a self fulfilling prophecy, right? Self fulfilling because you don't have the exposure in the retail points that you.
- [168:52]
Brandon Sanderson
Need, then you don't have the space on the shelf. People can go to bookstores and not find the books if you're down to like that many copies and things like that. And so Death Spiral is what they call it. And we'd already gotten the. We got the orders for Mistborn 2 and they were bad, right? They were, you know, on the Death Spiral. But then the paperback, that paperback we got selling. And so what happened is Mistborn 2 came out instantly. Sold out.
- [169:16]
Tim Ferriss
All right, so hold on, I gotta pause this for a second. So what else contributed to the relaunch of that lower price paperback of Mistborn 1? Besides the COVID was there anything else?
- [169:31]
Brandon Sanderson
It was the lower price point and it was the COVID 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. When they had in their head, it was a new new edition.
- [169:49]
Tim Ferriss
It's got a different ISBN, guys. It's a whole new game.
- [169:52]
Brandon Sanderson
Whole new game. They were willing to put a new cover on it. So actually it was the 499 thing that worked. We were at our wit's end until I thought of that and pitched it. And they're like, oh yeah, a 499 edition, we do those. And then suddenly they're willing to repackage it and put a new cover on it. It has a big red banner, 499. It has the nice cover blurb from Robin Hobb, but the hardcover had that too. The COVID was a little more targeted at what was popular then. Photo realism was starting to be a thing for fantasy, partially because of Jim Butcher's books. We use the same Illustrator cover artist as Jim Butcher's books, and it has that sort of urban fantasy feel. Mistborn was really well primed to take off, partially because of Hunger Games, teenage girl protagonist in 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. That's fascinating. And we outsold Hunger Games there. Hunger Games became the Mistborn, and Mistborn became the Hunger Games in Taiwan because we beat it to market. We didn't hear and we didn't market it as ya. It was, you know, it's an adult. It's got two viewpoints, one a teenager, one adult. But it was really good for the market. Right. And so the fact that it was really good for the market, it felt dystopian, but it wasn't using all the dystopian tropes that eventually killed the dystopian sort of thing. No one had read a fantasy heist since about the same time Liza Luckmora came out, which is another one.
- [171:21]
Tim Ferriss
Scott Lynch.
- [171:22]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah, Scott Lynch. Fantastic book.
- [171:24]
Tim Ferriss
That is a really fun, really fun series.
- [171:27]
Brandon Sanderson
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 Kelsior's trying to overthrow the empire by robbing. And so all of those things meant that when Mistborn actually got covered. Right. It really started selling. It would have been better if there would have been books for people to buy. But instantly selling out week one made the publisher go, oh, wait a minute. And then they went to reprint. And then there was this clamor online. People emailing bookstores, emailing the publisher, where is our Mistborn 2? We have to have Mistborn. And that fueled Mistborn 2 eventually, with all the reprints going to like 12 to 15,000 in hardcover. And that primed Mistborn 3 to hit the bestseller list.
- [172:15]
Tim Ferriss
Wow, what a story. So I want to touch on something, because 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 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? Because people are going to think to themselves if they haven't heard this term. What the hell is a magic system?
- [172:56]
Brandon Sanderson
Let me talk about it in a way that for the audience, 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 world building, and that is I love in history, the time period of the scientific revolution. 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. Yeah.
- [173:49]
Tim Ferriss
And spending time was like third of his time. I mean, it was a lot.
- [173:51]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah, yeah. He tried so hard to be able to transmute lead into gold or whatever. And turns out we can do it. We just need 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 the eggs are being laid. Right. All 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. And the whole theme of it was, if we can help the ditch diggers, we help everyone. Right. Here's how they can labor more effectively so it isn't as hard on their joints so that they are more efficient, but also so that they're happier and they get tired less. Here's a whole article of science helping everyone. And that period of superstition becoming science. I love. It's so interesting. And that's why Mistborn's actually set a lot of epic fantasies set around in an analogous of, like the 12 to 1400s. Mistborn 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. And what I found I really like reading is fantasy worlds that take a little bit of science fiction world building 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 kind of a periodic table of the elements where they're discovering that they can use certain metals to do certain things that are magical. Doesn't exist in our world. The difference between fantasy and science fiction to me is science fiction says this thing could happen. 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. Right. 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. And 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 like three rules to the ring, and you can understand them. Making a hard magic doesn't mean that it's like. It makes sense. Right. Superheroes are generally hard magics, even though it's like, bonkers. Superman gets powers from sunlight. Makes no sense 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.
- [177:43]
Tim Ferriss
So rules that are internally Consistent?
- [177:44]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah. Rules that are internally consistent that the characters can figure out and use. That's a hard magic system. Roto 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, 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 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 like, you know, you can drop a coin and launch in the air. You can throw it and push it at someone. You throw it, you push it 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 use this metal against him. It's so engaging to write. It's so much fun. It makes every. Every fight scene just a fun little puzzle box to try to figure out. And so because I like that, I decided to use it as part of my branding. 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 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 of thumb for myself that I could follow. And I used those to kind of build the magics the way I do them. It's not the only way to do it. It's not the only good way to do it. But it was really helpful to have a thing that was mine. What are you 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 world building in 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 kind of my thing.
- [180:33]
Tim Ferriss
So let me, if you don't mind, I'll read these three and have some follow ups.
- [180:38]
Brandon Sanderson
Okay. All right.
- [180:39]
Tim Ferriss
Sanderson's Three Laws of Magic. So number one is an author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic. Number two, weaknesses, limits and costs are more interesting than powers. That's one that I kind of 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 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?
- [181:26]
Brandon Sanderson
Sure can. So number one, if you. And I've actually added a word to this and 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 pause at two sort of 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 has been able to fix. And at the ending, they realize that they solve that problem and boom, they have taken their wits, their intelligence, their progress. Right? 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.
- [183:02]
Tim Ferriss
A mother's love.
- [183:03]
Brandon Sanderson
A mother's love. And see, this is why I use the satisfying way. The mother's love. Protecting Harry is not actually a bad thing, because that wasn't supposed to be a plot element.
- [183:14]
Tim Ferriss
I'm poking fun a little bit, but.
- [183:15]
Brandon Sanderson
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 it and be like, can't believe any of the stakes because anything can happen.
- [183:53]
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, it's like the deus ex machina.
- [183:55]
Brandon Sanderson
Deus ex machina.
- [183:56]
Tim Ferriss
Playwright can't figure out the ending, so God descends from the rafters and voila.
- [184:03]
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 mocking to that. You can deus ex mocking to 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. 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 target. Computers are fallible. We're at the big moment, and then use the Force. Luke. Obi Wan is there. We've 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.
- [186:11]
Tim Ferriss
So that's an example of soft magic causing a problem.
- [186:15]
Brandon Sanderson
Exactly. And so, yes, Gandalf did save them from the Balrog, but the cost is bigger than. 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. 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.
- [187:01]
Tim Ferriss
Sort of an unpredictability that's exciting. Whereas solving problems, the audience is just like, ah, come on.
- [187:06]
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 are totally by that. Sam can do that because you know what the Ring can do. It solves a problem. It's actually. You're like, yay, Sam, good job. And that's a heroic moment. He gets Frodo back. Right. You know, 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.
- [187:51]
Tim Ferriss
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 told Tolkien and C.S. lewis used to grab drinks. And I always blank on the third.
- [188:16]
Brandon Sanderson
Yep, everybody does.
- [188:18]
Tim Ferriss
Or like, yeah, sorry, Belle. Or his dark materials. Right. And Phil Pullman. Phil Pullman 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 very, very intricate book.
- [188:51]
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. It's what the age group that that would be would be middle grade or chapter books. It was shelved in both sections. No one knows what to do with that. And that's an example of breaking the rules fantastically and it working out really well. I don't remember how old she is, but she's not young adult age. She might be 10, but 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 the young adult section. Why not? Maybe new people will find it. Skyward, which is my actual young adult series, is shelved as adult in the UK because they're like, well, we just 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. All marketing.
- [189:44]
Tim Ferriss
Tomato, tomato. The third law.
- [189:47]
Brandon Sanderson
Third law. All right, third law. Let me tell you the story of what went wrong in Mistborn.
- [189:51]
Tim Ferriss
It's actually a great first line for your next book.
- [189:53]
Brandon Sanderson
Yeah, let me tell you what went wrong in Mistborn. I came up with three separate magic systems for three books. They're all there. In the first one, there's Alamancio. There's a thing that Seza does which is mysterious. It's kind of in the first book, Seza'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 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 hemology. So each book I wanted to explore a different aspect of the magic. When it came to the Stormlight Archive, I had started to fall into a trap. And the trap is bigger, is better. And this is what killed the original Stormlight Archive. So you'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. And 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 aren't better than 3. 3 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 world building 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 is 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, 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 reexamine 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. 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 world building instead of always pretending bigger is better.
- [192:38]
Tim Ferriss
Got it. So the third law is to protect yourself, remind yourself.
- [192:42]
Brandon Sanderson
All of them are. The first one happened because I added something. You'll get there. I had an editor. My editor said, the ending of Mistborn 1 isn't quite as spectacular as we want. Can you do something? 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 were pointing at that and being like that felt like a little like a DSX 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 is the same direction. 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.
- [194:12]
Tim Ferriss
Brannet. 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 I never know.
- [194:30]
Brandon Sanderson
How to do anything haiku that you'd.
- [194:32]
Tim Ferriss
Like to wrap things up with? Land the plane with a little dance.
- [194:35]
Brandon Sanderson
I don't know there is a 0th law.
- [194:38]
Tim Ferriss
Oh, let's. Okay.
- [194:38]
Brandon Sanderson
Yes, 0th law. So Asimov added a 0th 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 Trusted the Emerald Sea, depending if they want something more heisty and actiony or something more whimsical. But Sanderson's zero flaw is always err on the side of what's awesome. And this came about because I realized 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 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.
- [195:44]
Tim Ferriss
Try it. Give yourself permission. Well, I, for one, I'm 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?
- [196:13]
Brandon Sanderson
Brandishanderson.com Easy, easy to find. Everything's on there. Sample chapters. Warbreaker, the free book. Book. It's on there now. Like I 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.
- [196:41]
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 Tuned Up Blog Podcast. Thank you Brandon for all the time 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. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between 1 and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short. A little tiny bite for of goodness before you head off for the weekend. Something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim Blog Friday. Type that into your browser. Tim Blog Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. I have been fascinated by the microbiome and probiotics as well as prebiotics for decades, but products never quite live up to the hype. I've tried so many, dozens and there are a host of problems. Now things are starting to change and that includes this episode's sponsor, Seeds DS01 Daily Symbiotic. 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