#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
The myth-busts, hot takes, explainers, and tools worth keeping.
✶Explainer· 3
✶Explainer03:30
Dragonsteel Is Designed to Take Everything Out of Brandon's Head
Ferriss opens at Dragonsteel HQ and asks about the building's purpose. Sanderson explains the whole company is organised around one principle: let Brandon cook, and take away from him anything he does not strictly need to think about. He compares it to a Ferriss-style system — his water bottle is refilled and iced without his involvement, so he picks it up and goes. The rationale is cognitive, not luxury: he is always constructing narrative, so anything he has to track competes with the story. Ferriss immediately tests it with signatures. Sanderson signs 50,000 to 100,000 times a year, which used to mean full books until volume passed 10,000; now the pages arrive in stacks and he signs while doing something else. He notes his own podcast exists mainly so he has something to occupy him while signing.
The company's organising principle is removing anything Brandon does not need to think about.
Justification is cognitive load, not comfort — he is always constructing narrative.
He signs 50,000 to 100,000 signatures a year, now on loose pages rather than bound books.
The signing task is deliberately paired with passive activities like podcasts.
He describes an unusual memory profile: stories persist, keys and names do not.
“everything in our company is built around let Brandon Cook and take away from Brandon anything that he doesn't have to think about”
“the more that I can keep out of my brain that I have to track the better because I am always constructing narrative”
Day One at BYU: Pretend You're Going Pro, Then Learn to Ignore Me
Sanderson opens his BYU class with two statements. First: for this class we pretend you want to earn a full-time living from writing within ten years. Most students do not want that, and he is explicit that writing purely for yourself is legitimate — he mocks society's reflex of asking when you will monetise a book while never asking a casual basketball player about the NBA. The pretence exists because every lesser goal fits underneath the highest bar. Second: you will have to learn when to ignore me. He names survivorship bias directly — he cannot determine what actually made him successful — so he teaches a toolbox containing self-contradictory tools. His example is Stephen King calling outlines destructive against Orson Scott Card calling them vital. Weight both equally and you get nowhere.
Frame the class around going professional so all lesser goals fit underneath.
Writing without commercial intent is legitimate and society treats it oddly.
Second instruction: learn when to ignore the authority at the front of the room.
Survivorship bias means he cannot know which of his own advice mattered.
The toolbox deliberately contains contradictory tools — King versus Card on outlining.
Gardeners discover, architects build structure, and most writers sit between.
“during this class we're going to pretend you want to be a professional writer earning a full-time living from your writing in the next 10…”
“the second thing I say is you're going to have to learn when to ignore me and that is really hard hard to do because…”
“survivorship bias says who knows what I actually say is going to be relevant some of it hopefully”
Who Controls the Platform Controls Everything: Ebook and Audio Economics
Sanderson gets specific about the numbers behind his independence. Readers buy print direct from him but will not buy ebooks direct — they want their Kindle, which is why his ebook store sold in the tens of copies. On ebooks both publishers and indies receive 70%, but Amazon deducts a distribution fee only from indies, and lets large publishers price above $10 while capping indies: exceed $9.99 and the royalty drops to 20%. Audio is worse. Almost everything on Audible sells by credit, partly to route around Apple and Google's 30% in-app cut, which converts the audience into subscribers. Of a $15 credit Sanderson says they receive about four dollars, and narrators receive no royalties at all.
Customers buy print direct but will not leave their Kindle for ebooks.
Amazon caps indie ebook pricing at $9.99 before slashing royalties from 70% to 20%.
Audible sells by credit, so cover price barely determines author earnings.
The subscription model exists partly to avoid Apple and Google's 30% cut.
Roughly four dollars of a $15 credit reaches Sanderson; narrators get no royalties.
Power now sits with creators and platform controllers rather than publishers.
“those who control the platform control the world”
“they get $15 and after all our work and things we get on average like four bucks out of that 15”
“the power is in two people's hands MH right now it's in the creators and the platform controllers it's not in New York's hand”
Sanderson changed his major to English after Korea and took workshops from professors he loved who knew nothing about publishing — they taught self-expression but not how to construct a sympathetic character, and how to reach an MFA programme but not a book deal, because none of them had. In his senior year a genuinely published writer, David Farland, was teaching a 200-level class. Taking it was a step backward fulfilling no credit requirements; he took it on the grounds that he was at college to learn, not to check boxes. Farland taught craft as a toolbox and passed his actual publishing contract around the room. It also unlocked a method: ask editors at conventions what excites them right now, then target five of fifty. Sanderson is candid that this route no longer works.
Creative writing faculty taught expression but not the mechanics of publishing.
He took a lower-level class for no credit because the teacher had actually published.
Farland's toolbox framing: no tool works for every writer, expect to use one or two.
Passing a real publishing contract around the room removed the mystery.
The magic convention question: what are you working on right now that you're really excited by.
Targeting five receptive editors beat querying fifty — and the method has since stopped working.
“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…”
“he really focused and it became my focus in teaching on here's a toolbox because because not every tool works for every”
#mentorship#publishing#networking#craft-education
❝Story31:30
Dragonsbane, Ms. Reader, and the Summer That Turned C's Into A's
Sanderson was not a reader as a child. In Lincoln, Nebraska the books handed to him were rural coming-of-age stories where the dog dies, and after three in a row he quit. In eighth grade his English teacher — improbably named Ms. Reader — caught him faking a book report from the back cover and the last chapter, and asked him to genuinely read one book from her rack. He picked Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly for its Michael Whelan cover. It was the wrong book by every rule of reluctant-reader matching: a middle-aged woman weighing whether to abandon her family to become a great wizard. At fourteen he suddenly understood his own mother, who had declined a CPA scholarship for young children. He went from C's to A's in a summer.
He was a reluctant reader put off by formulaic regional fiction.
A teacher caught him faking a book report and offered a genuine alternative.
Dragonsbane violated every rule for matching a reluctant teenage reader.
The book generated real empathy for his mother's abandoned career.
His response was analytical — he needed to know how the trick was performed.
A concrete purpose, not discipline, took him from C's to A's in one summer.
“I get done with this book and I understand my mom better and this book built empathy in me”
“I went from a c student to an a student over over summer C's in eighth”
“having a purpose having a reason to to do well changed my entire Outlook”
#origin-story#reading#purpose#empathy
❝Story51:30
How Two Unrelated Obsessions Collided Into Mistborn
Sanderson walks through the generation of Mistborn as a collision of separately banked ideas. The first came from reading Harry Potter during the boom and noticing dark lords never catch a break — a hobbit drops a ring in a hole, a mother's love protects a boy. His inversion: Frodo reaches Mount Doom, Sauron thanks him politely for the delivery, kills him, and rules the world. Too much of a downer alone, so he shelved it. The second was his love of heists — Sneakers, The Sting, Ocean's Eleven, Inception — plus the realisation he had never written one, which he calls gold. Combined, they produced a crew of magically-talented thieves robbing a victorious dark lord. Kelsier and Vin then each get a single seed hook.
Ideas are banked separately and stored until something collides with them.
Idea one: invert the genre and let the dark lord already have won.
Idea two: a heist crew where each member has a distinct magical talent.
Finding an untapped area of your own passion is the highest-value signal.
The plot only worked once both ideas were combined.
Each main character gets a single seed hook, not a full biography.
“what if the dark lord won what if froto got to the end of Lord of the Rings with the ring and saon was there”
“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…”
“I need to do a fantasy Heist what if I did a heist where every member of this Heist crew had a magical talent”
Around 2012 to 2014 Amazon disabled purchasing of all Macmillan titles during a pricing dispute, and since Tor is a Macmillan subsidiary, Sanderson's books simply vanished from sale. The dispute was about Amazon wanting cheap ebooks as a loss leader to sell Kindles, while publishers feared a market trained on dollar books would eventually be paid dollar-book royalties. For Sanderson the demonstration mattered more than the dispute. For all of publishing history the real customer was the bookstore — Tom Doherty's adage was ten copies on the shelf even if only one sells, because shelf presence is the advertisement. That world was over. An earlier scare, when Borders declined an Alcatraz title but Barnes & Noble carried it, had been survivable only because two channels existed.
Amazon turned off purchasing for every Macmillan book, including Sanderson's.
The dispute was about loss-leader ebook pricing and future royalty leverage.
Historically the publisher's customer was the bookstore, and shelf space was the battle.
Tom Doherty's ten-copies adage: shelf presence is itself the advertisement.
A single controlling channel converts a commercial dispute into an existential risk.
The earlier Borders incident was survivable only because a second chain existed.
“having one person be able to turn off my books”
“I want to have 10 books on the Shelf even if only one of themselves”
In 2007 Robert Jordan died with the Wheel of Time unfinished, having asked his wife and editor Harriet McDougal to find someone to complete it. Sanderson woke to a voicemail he still knows word for word: Harriet identifying herself as Robert Jordan's widow and asking him to call back. Unable to reach her, his editor or his agent, he paced and babbled — notable for someone who does not feel strong emotions. The mechanism was accidental. He had posted a three-paragraph tribute on his website; an assistant printed nice things people had written for Harriet's stack, and his last line made her ask Tom Doherty who this Sanderson was. His reasoning for accepting was a Venn diagram: better writers exist, bigger Jordan fans exist, few overlap.
Jordan died in 2007 having asked Harriet McDougal to find a finisher.
Sanderson had only three books out and had not yet broken through.
A short website tribute reached Harriet's reading stack via an assistant.
Tom Doherty favoured him partly because rival candidates were not his authors.
George R.R. Martin was the other name, ruled out by his own schedule.
The Venn diagram argument: good writer and genuine fan is a small intersection.
“hello Brandon Sanderson this is Harriet McDougall Ry I am Robert Jordan's Widow and I would like you to call me back”
“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…”
“it's ven diagram of pretty good sci-fi fantasy writers and pretty big Robert Jordan fans”
The Death Spiral and the $4.99 Relaunch That Saved Mistborn
Sanderson refused a sequel to Elantris because his goal was to build an audience for himself rather than a series, and to set up the Cosmere — an interconnected universe he started two years before the first MCU film. Tom Doherty called it a bad idea and was commercially right. Elantris sold about 10,000 hardcovers on new-author shine, Mistborn sold fewer, and the paperback with a poorly-received cover crashed. That triggers the death spiral: 10,000, then 7,000, then a 5,000-copy order, self-fulfilling because readers cannot find what is not on shelves. The fix was a $4.99 edition with a new photorealistic cover, which the publisher only accepted once framed as a new edition with a new ISBN. Mistborn 2 then sold out instantly.
He declined a sequel to build an audience for himself and set up the Cosmere.
Jumping series loses a percentage of readers plus the new-author shine.
The death spiral: falling print runs become self-fulfilling via lost shelf space.
The intervention was two changes only — a lower $4.99 price and a new cover.
The publisher only agreed once it was framed as a new edition with a new ISBN.
Mistborn 3 reached the New York Times list at roughly 2,000 copies in a week.
“I wanted to build an audience for me not for a given book series”
“there's this thing in publishing called the death spiral”
“it was the lower price point yeah and it was the cover those are the only things we changed”
#publishing#pricing#positioning#career-strategy
•tactic· 3
•tactic11:00
Constructed Languages: Write Rules, Not Dictionaries
Ferriss, an East Asian Studies major who once emailed the creator of Na'vi, asks how Sanderson approaches invented languages. Sanderson deliberately refuses the Tolkien path: Tolkien effectively wrote Lord of the Rings as somewhere to use languages he had spent decades designing, and Sanderson says he does not have twenty years and is fundamentally a narrative writer. Instead of building a language he devises a handful of interesting rules drawn from his linguistics knowledge, then generates words from those rules on demand. A finished book ends with about fifty words and a little grammatical structure. He names the failure mode — World Builder disease — as fun and sometimes worth indulging, but not a professional career. Worldbuilding serves the story, never the reverse.
Define a few generative rules rather than authoring a full language.
Generate each needed word from the rules at the moment of need.
A finished book ends with roughly fifty words and light grammar.
World Builder disease is the named failure mode of unbounded invention.
Worldbuilding serves the narrative, never the reverse.
Tolkien's inverse approach worked because the languages were the actual goal.
“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…”
“we call it World Builder disease which sometimes you want to give yourself it's fun but if you spend 20 years World building every book…”
Asked which assignments serve students best, Sanderson says he assigns habits rather than exercises, prescribing an exercise only when diagnosing a specific problem. Someone who cannot stop revising the same chapter drafts longhand and transfers it the next day; someone struggling with dialogue transcribes overheard conversations verbatim and compares them to a favourite screenwriter's. The default instruction is consistency: nine of ten writers he has met do better with regular output than the binge writer who disappears to a cabin for two months. The machinery is concrete — set a goal, keep a spreadsheet, hit word or hour counts, write in a dedicated place, use music reserved for writing, and stack the session onto an existing habit like the gym. The class target of 35,000 words annualises to one novel.
Teach habits by default; prescribe exercises only to diagnose a specific problem.
Nine of ten writers outperform on consistency rather than bingeing.
Track with a spreadsheet against word counts, or hour counts if words stall.
Use a dedicated place and dedicated music to trigger the writing state.
Stack the writing session onto an already-established habit.
35,000 words per third of a year annualises to a 100,000-word novel.
“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…”
“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…”
“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…”
#habits#consistency#word-count#productivity
•tactic1:39:30
Kickstarter Logistics and the Hug of Death
Ferriss asks what the first $7 million Way of Kings campaign taught them. Sanderson's answer is almost entirely operational. Shipping 50,000 books at once is a different discipline from shipping 50,000 across ten years, and this is exactly where successful campaigns implode under what Ferriss calls the hug of death. Books drop-ship direct from the printer; merchandise cannot, arriving on different boats from different countries, so the two streams must be reconciled into combined or separate packages. He goes further into physical reality most creators never consider: freight trucks offload in specific ways, some needing a high dock and some carrying a ramp. One delivery arrived without the expected ramp, forcing a team to unload by hand from inside the truck.
Concentrated shipping is a different operation from the same volume spread over years.
Fulfilment failure is why successful crowdfunding campaigns implode.
Books drop-ship from the printer; merchandise arrives separately from overseas.
Physical constraints matter — high docks versus truck ramps versus pallet jacks.
One delivery arrived without a ramp and had to be unloaded by hand.
Crowdfunding also fixed the pre-order problem of never knowing how many to print.
“a Kickstarter suddenly you have to figure out how to send 50,000 books and keep everyone updated on it”
“having your Logistics in place knowing how you're going to fulfill if you are successful is a very big deal”
#logistics#crowdfunding#fulfilment#operations
•debate· 2
•debate23:30
Gardeners, Architects, and Sanderson's 75% Outline
Sanderson lays out the two poles of process. Stephen King is a gardener: he puts two interesting characters in conflict and discovers the story as he writes, because an outline would mean the exploring is already done and no motivation remains. Architects build a structure and polish each piece in turn. Sanderson has practised both, writing the Alcatraz series with no outline using a Whose Line Is It Anyway method of forcing himself to use a pile of random ideas. These days he lands near a 75% outline: heavy on plot and setting, then writing his way into characters. Over-outlining produces wooden characters existing only to travel from point A to point B, so he rebuilds the outline once he knows who they are.
Gardeners discover the story while writing; architects build then polish.
Sanderson practises both deliberately, including a fully ungardened series.
His current default is roughly a 75% outline, heavy on plot and setting.
Over-outlining produces wooden characters serving the outline rather than motivation.
The fix is writing into character first, then rebuilding the plot around them.
Even committed outliners must garden between the points on the outline.
“he calls them gardeners Stephen King is a gardener for Stephen King exploring and discovering his story is the thing that makes him excited”
“I generally fall these days on a 75% outline sort of thing”
“one of the big dangers of outlining too much is characters that feel wooden or cardboard”
Because signed leatherbounds sell instantly and a signature carries roughly $250 of value, an hour of signing prices out at an unreal sum. Sanderson asks Ferriss whether putting a dollar figure on your time is madness. Ferriss did it for years and finds it useful in early and intermediate entrepreneurial stages, specifically to stop a perfectionist micromanaging — but past a point it makes you miserable, because a high enough hourly value turns every squandered minute into a pound of flesh. Sanderson's test case was speaking: he valued a writing day at $25,000, priced two days at $50,000, got ten inquiries immediately, and realised he did not want it. He withdrew the price, partly on self-assessment and mostly because he would rather write.
A signature is worth roughly $250, making an hour of signing absurdly valuable on paper.
Ferriss: hourly valuation is useful early to stop perfectionist micromanagement.
Past a point it makes every wasted minute feel like a pound of flesh taken.
Sanderson priced speaking at $50,000 for two days and got ten inquiries immediately.
He withdrew the offer rather than trade writing days for speaking days.
The metric survives as a directional tool for choosing between things you enjoy.
“do you ever try to put a dollar amount on your time and is that just Madness for you”
“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…”
“and I'm like I don't want to do that now what now what I just said you know what no we were wrong”