Brandon Sanderson — Building a Fiction Empire & Unbreakable Habits

Brandon Sanderson 0:00 I'm reading this book, and I'm like, "Ditch the kids.

Tim Ferriss 0:02 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 0:02 Go be a wizard. Wizarding is awesome. The kids'll get along. They'll figure it out." And I get done with this book.

Tim Ferriss 0:09 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 0:10 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.

Tim Ferriss 0:18 Mm.

Brandon Sanderson 0:19 And this book built empathy in me for someone that, you know, 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. You know? Something changed in me that day. I went from a C student to an A student over, over summer. Cs in eighth grade, As in ninth grade. Why that change? 'Cause I discovered stories about wizards. I discovered there was something I wanted to do, right?

Tim Ferriss 0:47 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 0:47 There was now a reason to get good grades. Like, I need to be a writer. I need a degree. I need to learn about this. Therefore, I'm gonna have to go to college. Therefore, I'm gonna have to learn to learn, because otherwise, I won't figure out how to do this. And having a purpose, having a reason to, to do well changed my entire outlook. [upbeat music]

Tim Ferriss 1:20 So Brandon, just when we were doing soundcheck-

Brandon Sanderson 1:22 Yes

Tim Ferriss 1:23 ... what did you do?

Brandon Sanderson 1:24 So when I was in kindergarten, I was taught the states song.

Tim Ferriss 1:29 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:30 Right? And I have a good friend, Mary Robinette. She worked in stage for a while, and we did a podcast together when podcasts were brand-new, and she would always sound check by doing the Jabberwocky poem, just this beautiful 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'd come to me, and I'd be like, I'm talking, I'm talking. You know, you've seen it.

Tim Ferriss 1:56 I've seen it.

Brandon Sanderson 1:56 The stuff that people do.

Tim Ferriss 1:57 I've seen it.

Brandon Sanderson 1:58 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 states 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.

Tim Ferriss 2:18 Yeah, you made it to New Mexico.

Brandon Sanderson 2:19 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 2:19 I'm not sure I could make it past California without making a mistake. [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:22 I still hear the song in my head. 50 Nifty United States.

Tim Ferriss 2:27 All right. Well, let's leap off of that.

Tim Ferriss 2:29 Do you have, would you say, in terms of superpowers, an unusual memory, or is there something just to the rhythm and musicality of that that made it stick?

Brandon Sanderson 2:39 No, I don't think I have an unusual memory. Now, well, I have an unusual one. I don't have an uncommonly good one. How about that?

Tim Ferriss 2:48 Oh. Uh-huh.

Brandon Sanderson 2:49 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 re-watch movies because I've seen it. I've read it. It, you know, 20 years or so I'll go back and re-watch 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?

Tim Ferriss 3:18 [laughs] Right.

Brandon Sanderson 3:18 And I will forget people's names, all of that stuff. I, I joke that I've just got so much RAM, and I've filled it all with story ideas, and so everything else kind of just gets squeezed out the ears.

Tim Ferriss 3:30 Well, it seems like where we're sitting, and we're sitting at HQ-

Brandon Sanderson 3:33 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 3:33 ... it seems like the design of Dragonsteel, maybe the intention behind it is to allow you to do that on some level.

Brandon Sanderson 3:43 Everything in our company is built around let Brandon cook-

Tim Ferriss 3:48 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 3:49 ... 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, 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-

Tim Ferriss 4:12 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 4:13 ... that I have to track, the better, because I am always constructing narrative. I'm always working on the story. And so yeah.

Tim Ferriss 4:21 Well, let's give another example of productivity that I, that I don't want to say I vetoed, but it was a, a conversation before-

Brandon Sanderson 4:26 Yes

Tim Ferriss 4:26 ... we started recording.

Brandon Sanderson 4:27 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 4:27 How many, how many books or book plates do you sign per year?

Brandon Sanderson 4:33 So we need between 50,000 and 100,000-

Tim Ferriss 4:36 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 4:37 ... times my signature signed.

Tim Ferriss 4:40 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 4:40 The s- story is usually I'm sitting here and signing pages while I'm doing anything, because if I have to sign my name 100,000 times, then, you know, I-

Tim Ferriss 4:49 You need to take up the empty space. [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 4:50 Yeah. And we actually used to, once upon a time, we would get the books, the full books, and I would sit and sign them, and that's just a massive undertaking. We couldn't do that anymore when it got over around 10,000. I'd actually listen to podcasts and go sit and sign books and sign books and sign books. Now we get the pages, like the front page.

Tim Ferriss 5:13 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 5:14 And we just give them to me in stacks. If anyone wants to see it, my podcast exists so that I can sign the pages.

Tim Ferriss 5:20 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 5:20 It's the reverse, right? I started it 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, so.

Tim Ferriss 5:31 I appreciate that,

Tim Ferriss 5:32 and I'm gonna have a lot of super fans of yours, I'm sure, wish and petition [laughs] me that I would have asked a different set of questions. But I'm actually gonna 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?

Brandon Sanderson 5:59 So I'm a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A lot of us go on two-year missions. It can be anywhere. It can be local. It can be overseas. I ended up going to Korea. You know, I, I got the, the letter saying, "Hey, this is where we'd like you," and I'm like, "Where's Korea?"

Tim Ferriss 6:16 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 6:17 But I, uh, loved my time there. It was really formative for me in multiple ways, one of which is kind of, you know, 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 kinda 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 gonna do this," right? "I'm gonna, I'm gonna be a writer." But living in another culture, living where you are a minority, granted a privileged minority still, but a, a minority, living and seeing that the way that people's language influences the way they think about the world, the way that their social mores impact their relationships with one another and all of these things was extremely formative for me in understanding how to approach writing a fantastical culture, just on a fundamental basis getting rid of some of these ideas that the way that I do things is the only way to do

Brandon Sanderson 7:29 things.

Tim Ferriss 7:30 The Korean language for people who haven't been exposed, particularly the writing system.

Brandon Sanderson 7:34 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 7:35 So Hangul, if people want to learn to read Korean, you won't be able to understand what you're reading, but if you wanna sound it out, you can learn it in a few hours.

Brandon Sanderson 7:43 Yeah, we learned it in a few hours. Do you know the story?

Tim Ferriss 7:46 Tell the story.

Brandon Sanderson 7:46 The story. You know the story.

Tim Ferriss 7:47 I do, but I think people will appreciate it.

Brandon Sanderson 7:49 Yes. 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 Washington, 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. And so because anyone can read it, it transcends language in a lot of ways.

Tim Ferriss 8:21 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 8:21 You can see the symbol for person and know it means person, whether you speak Mongolian or whether you speak Thai or whether you speak Japanese or Korean or Chinese. So it makes it a great kind of language for trade, but it also is extremely hard to learn because every concept must have essentially its own letter. And so to be fluent in reading it, you need to learn 2,000 to 3,000 letters.

Tim Ferriss 8:45 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 8:46 And so it was a really bad system for a common people to learn how to read, and King Sejong was like, "My people are illiterate. They can't learn Chinese. We must have our own writing system that you can sound out, that s- you sound out Korean."

Tim Ferriss 9:04 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 9:04 And he gathered his scholars, and the story is they together created this system that would have no deviations. It read like it sounded, and they designed it based on the movements of the mouth you make, and then King Sejong loved it so much he wrote it on little leaves and then spread it out, because the upper class did not want people to learn how to read, and they were very against it. They're like, "Oh, we don't want the commoners to read. That's, that's, that's for us." You know, passing the tests in Chinese was a big, you know-

Tim Ferriss 9:34 It's like Latin-

Brandon Sanderson 9:35 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 9:35 ... for the high priesthood. Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 9:37 And so Sejong wrote it on letters, and it blew through Korea, and the people picked it up, and it was so des- divinely inspired that they intrinsically knew how to read Korean, and it... He, he frustrated the attempts of the nobles from keeping people to read by, by giving it to people written on leaves. It's, it's so delightful.

Tim Ferriss 9:54 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, 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 gonna take you more than 15 minutes.

Brandon Sanderson 10:11 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 10:12 But in 60 minutes you could definitely get the basics and figure it out.

Brandon Sanderson 10:16 Definitely gives you a false sense of your own skill when you learn it. You're like, "Wow, I'm reading." And they're like, "All right, now the actual language, what these things mean."

Tim Ferriss 10:25 [laughs] Yeah. Good news, if you do learn some Korean, you can hop reasonably easily to Japanese and in some cases to, to Chinese as well. So you might have deng hua for telephone, then dian hua in Chine- in Mandarin, and then denwa in Japanese, right? So there's a lot of, of overlap or like, uh, if you wanted to say, "Tansansui kudasai," like, "Please give me sparkling water" in Japanese, it'd be, "Tansansui kudasai" in Korean.

Brandon Sanderson 10:52 Yep. Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 10:52 So anyway, if you get one, then it's a good branch off to other things. All right. I'm going to, I'm going to cut my linguistics nerding

Tim Ferriss 11:01 short.

Brandon Sanderson 11:01 You need to create a conlang. Have you ever done it?

Tim Ferriss 11:04 Oh, I have actually... So you should explain what that means, but I have actually spent some time on it, and I owe you a huge debt of gratitude because I listened to probably 40 episodes of Writing Excuses-

Brandon Sanderson 11:17 Oh, did you?

Tim Ferriss 11:18 ... when I was working on my first real attempt at fantasy worldbuilding a few years ago.

Brandon Sanderson 11:24 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 11:24 And I wanted to incorporate language as a core piece of it, and I spent a lot of time also looking at Tolkien's work with languages.

Brandon Sanderson 11:34 He's the master.

Tim Ferriss 11:35 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 11:35 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 11:35 Unbelievably complex, and I also at one point, this is actually for my third book, reached out to the gentleman who designed the Na'vi language-

Brandon Sanderson 11:45 Yep

Tim Ferriss 11:45 ... in Avatar, which in very partial measure stemmed from some of his exposure to some of these East Asian languages as well.

Brandon Sanderson 11:52 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 11:53 But okay, so how would you approach and how do you think about language construction?

Brandon Sanderson 11:59 Are you sure we're not getting too nerdy for your audience?

Tim Ferriss 12:01 Ah, you know what?

Brandon Sanderson 12:01 This is super nerdy.

Tim Ferriss 12:02 You know what? Yeah. Folks, look.

Brandon Sanderson 12:03 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 12:03 We're about to go really deep in the nerd pool.

Brandon Sanderson 12:05 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 12:05 So if you wanna skip ahead five minutes, that's fine, but I'd encourage you to stick around. All right.

Brandon Sanderson 12:09 So a conlang is a constructed language.

Tim Ferriss 12:12 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 12:13 Most people know of Klingon and Elvish, and George Martin has one, and the Na'vi you mentioned. These are just invented languages. There's only one that's in wide use, or wide, quote-unquote, Esperanto. You could almost say that Korean is a bit one, 'cause it was actively designed rather than growing organ- organically, but I think it's hovering in this in-between space. So how do I approach it? I look at what Tolkien did, and I say, "Wow, he basically wrote Lord of the Rings because he had these cool languages he was designing, and he wanted a place to use them," right?

Tim Ferriss 12:49 Including crazy scripts.

Brandon Sanderson 12:50 Yeah, and I said, "I don't have 20 years to do that like Grandpa Tolkien."

Tim Ferriss 12:55 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 12:55 I'm, I'm really a narrative guy. I really focus on what makes a narrative work. I'm gonna break it down. People think of me of the world- as the world-building guy, but I'm not. Certainly, we can talk about this. That's certainly the thing I've used as my branding and marketing. It's the way that I've used to make myself easily recommendable and distinctive, but what I spend most of my time on is narrative. 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 wanna 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.

Tim Ferriss 13:58 This I ran into, which is part of the reason why I was revisiting my, my email exchanges with the person who created Na'vi because I had something like eight greater houses in this fantasy-

Brandon Sanderson 14:08 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 14:08 ... world that I was creating for my own entertainment more than anything else. It's just a itch I really wanted to scratch.

Brandon Sanderson 14:14 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 14:14 And the extent to which I developed the languages was really just for a few exclamations, a few songs. Very short. Not Tolkien, like-

Brandon Sanderson 14:24 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 14:24 ... 20 minutes on audiobook. And I loved it, but I recognized how you could really trap yourself in quicksand-

Brandon Sanderson 14:32 We call it-

Tim Ferriss 14:32 ... if you tried to get too ambitious.

Brandon Sanderson 14:33 We call it worldbuilder’s disease.

Tim Ferriss 14:35 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 14:35 Which sometimes you wanna give yourself. It's fun. But if you spend 20 years worldbuilding every book, in today's market, you're probably not gonna 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, you know, and make it so you can live off of j- 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 worldbuilding. But everybody gets to do what they want. You, you scratch your itch how you wanna scratch

Brandon Sanderson 15:10 it.

Tim Ferriss 15:10 We're gonna 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-

Brandon Sanderson 15:22 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 15:22 ... the name correctly.

Brandon Sanderson 15:23 Uh-huh.

Tim Ferriss 15:23 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.

Brandon Sanderson 15:31 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 15:32 How did that affect you, and what lessons might you have sort of grabbed onto that have stuck with you in any way?

Brandon Sanderson 15:41 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 wanna 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, 'cause I thought that's what you had to do. Later found out Stephen King and others recommend you major in anything but English.

Tim Ferriss 16:04 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 16:05 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, right? The, 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, 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, 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, you know, how to get into a MFA program, but they won't tell you how to get a publishing deal, 'cause 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 in, 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.

Tim Ferriss 18:01 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 18:01 In fact, you're generally gonna gravitate toward one or two, and the rest you'll find useless. And he took that toolbox approach and he said, "Some writers do it this way, some writers do it that way. Here's how you try this. Here's something to do." And then he talked about publishing in this way that was mind-blowing because that was the big thing for me, was hearing someone say-

Tim Ferriss 18:22 The black box.

Brandon Sanderson 18:23 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-fi/fantasy was still very networking focused. It's actually moved away from that for various reasons, but back then, the best way to break in was to go to the conventions, get into the parties, meet the editors, and start chatting with them and start listening to what they were actually interested in.

Tim Ferriss 19:00 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 19:01 You know, 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 and then hearing from them directly what they were buying and why. Then you could go to these, you know, 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, you know, we hit it off. You mentioned that I could send you my work. Here it is." And that's what got me an agent and an editor, was doing that, just kind of the Dave Farland method of breaking in. I was the last generation that worked for. It really doesn't work anymore. Everyone jokes that in publishing it's like no one actually wants to publish any authors. No one wants to actually do any work. So any time someone sneaks in, they're like, "Oh, how did you get into publishing? Oh, really?" And then they close that door-

Tim Ferriss 20:01 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 20:01 ... 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-

Tim Ferriss 20:10 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 20:10 ... quickly enough that what works for one generation, by the time they've broken in, the industry's changed. It just doesn't

Brandon Sanderson 20:17 work.

Tim Ferriss 20:17 So I'm gonna come back to the agent and-

Brandon Sanderson 20:20 Yes

Tim Ferriss 20:20 ... I'll, I'll just plant the seed. I'm gonna ask how much writing you did before that happened.

Brandon Sanderson 20:24 Okay. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 20:25 But before we get to that, I want to ask, are you still teaching the creative writing class-

Brandon Sanderson 20:31 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 20:31 ... at, at BYU?

Brandon Sanderson 20:32 I am.

Tim Ferriss 20:32 Okay. Brigham Young University.

Brandon Sanderson 20:33 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 20:34 What is the first class?

Brandon Sanderson 20:36 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 gonna pretend you want to be a professional writer earning a full-time living from your writing in the next 10 years." That we're gonna pretend because most of you, that's probably not why they're there, right?

Tim Ferriss 21:02 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 21:02 Most of them, they, they're just curious. They may have a book in them, and we have this curious relationship with art in our society.

Tim Ferriss 21:10 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 21:11 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?

Tim Ferriss 21:20 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 21:20 Like you mentioned, you're writing a book just, or you wrote one just because it was an itch. You, you enjoyed it. I think writing is legitimately just good for people, in the same way that working out is good for people. Learning to write a narrative and get those thoughts out of your head on a page, page, it's just innately good.

Tim Ferriss 21:38 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 21:39 Most people when they go play basketball, particularly if they look like me, people aren't gonna be like-

Tim Ferriss 21:44 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 21:44 ... "So when are you going into the NBA?"

Tim Ferriss 21:46 Yeah, right. [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 21:47 But if you write a book, people will say, "So when are you going to publish it?" And I say to the students, "It's okay if that's not your goal. If you want to write just for you, if you want to be on the I spend 20 years and then produce one book route, totally fine. However, everything... 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."

Tim Ferriss 22:17 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 22:17 "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 gonna have to learn when to ignore me."

Tim Ferriss 22:26 Hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 22:27 And that is really hard to do because I'm an authority. I'm up there. Survivorship bias says who knows what I actually say is going to be relevant. Some of it, hopefully, but I can't really determine what really played a part in me being successful and what didn't.

Tim Ferriss 22:44 Sure. Of course.

Brandon Sanderson 22:45 And I want to approach it as a toolbox, giving people all of these various tools, some of which are contradictory.

Tim Ferriss 22:52 Hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 22:52 Right? Self-contradictory. I can give you examples of that-

Tim Ferriss 22:54 Yeah

Brandon Sanderson 22:54 ... if you want, but you can't use them all, so you're gonna 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.

Tim Ferriss 23:07 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 23:07 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 gonna pretend you want to be a professional writer," and then follow it up with, "But learn when to ignore me."

Tim Ferriss 23:20 What are some of the contradictory tools or approaches-

Brandon Sanderson 23:24 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 23:24 ... in the toolkit?

Brandon Sanderson 23:25 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 On 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, he's wonderful the way he speaks about fiction. If you're really interested, anything George says is golden. He calls them gardeners. Stephen King is a gardener. For Stephen King, exploring and discovering his story is the thing that makes him excited. He wants to take a seed. He'll often say, "I take two really interesting characters, and I put them in conflict and have something go wrong, and I see where the story goes, and I just write." And he says if he has an outline, he feels like he's already done that process in the outline, so when he sits down to write the book, he has no motivation.

Tim Ferriss 24:46 Mm.

Brandon Sanderson 24:46 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.

Tim Ferriss 25:07 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 25:07 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 gonna 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

Brandon Sanderson 25:35 for you.

Tim Ferriss 25:36 What are some of the assignments that have most resonated with students, or you think best served them even though [laughs] they might not recognize it?

Brandon Sanderson 25:46 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."

Tim Ferriss 26:20 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 26:20 And you start each day taking what you wrote before and putting it into the computer, and then leave it alone and write your next chapter longhand, and then use that process to kind of get yourself back into the writing, but then forcing yourself to do something new. That works for some people. If people are having trouble with dialogue, I say, "All right. Go do the exercise where you sit and listen to people on campus, and you just write down exactly what they say exactly as it's said, and then take it and try to write it under different styles of dialogue. If you're writing like, 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.

Tim Ferriss 27:14 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 27:15 For the class, I'm saying, "Your job, if you want to try to be a professional writer, you're gonna have to write consistently." Nine out of 10 writers that I've found do better with consistency. One out of 10 is a binge writer. I don't understand binge writers as well, but I can talk about that.

Tim Ferriss 27:34 Mm.

Brandon Sanderson 27:35 Those are the people who go rent a cabin, take two months, walk in without a book, come out with a book.

Tim Ferriss 27:40 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 27:41 And then they don't write for 10 months.

Tim Ferriss 27:42 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 27:43 Um, 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 you... There's something you already do every day. If you already have built a habit to go to the gym, then try to align your life so that you go to the gym and then have an hour to write. Think about where you're gonna 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.

Tim Ferriss 28:47 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 28:48 Class is around a third of the year. If you do that all year, you will end up with 100,000 words, which is your

Brandon Sanderson 28:55 average novel.

Tim Ferriss 28:56 Just for people listening-

Brandon Sanderson 28:57 Mm

Tim Ferriss 28:57 ... who aren't in the, the writing biz or the writing habit, 100,000 words in a typical trade paperback or-

Brandon Sanderson 29:05 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 29:05 ... could be a hardcover, how many pages is that?

Brandon Sanderson 29:07 300.

Tim Ferriss 29:08 300.

Brandon Sanderson 29:08 Yeah, 350.

Tim Ferriss 29:09 Okay.

Brandon Sanderson 29:10 The Way of Kings is 400,000 words.

Tim Ferriss 29:13 Mm.

Brandon Sanderson 29:13 And we kind of cram stuff in there, and we get to 1,000 pages on that. So you can kind of run that. It's a fourth of 1,000 pages, so it'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 wanna increase the pacing.

Tim Ferriss 29:33 Mm.

Brandon Sanderson 29:33 They wanna make it feel like you're just zipping through. It's a page-turner, right? So they're gonna want, you know, 50% fewer words on every page so that you feel... 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.

Tim Ferriss 29:49 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 29:50 I, I, 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 and it makes it feel dense and thick and meaty, which can be really enjoyable if you wanna dig into a new world-

Tim Ferriss 30:04 Mm

Brandon Sanderson 30:04 ... and things like that.

Tim Ferriss 30:05 All right. Let's hit some top-line habits-

Brandon Sanderson 30:09 Okay

Tim Ferriss 30:09 ... from Brandon. How many words Per year on average would you say you put down?

Brandon Sanderson 30:15 So my goal is 2,000 to 2,500 words a day.

Tim Ferriss 30:19 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 30:20 Right? So, you know, whatever, 10 pages to 20 pages-

Tim Ferriss 30:26 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 30:26 ... is what I'm looking at. Depends. I mean, I write in the old school manuscript format where everything's 12 point and in Courier, and it's a, a holdover from the days when certain type setting things were done that are too nerdy perhaps to talk about here.

Tim Ferriss 30:42 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 30:42 But I think in words, so I do 2,000 to 2,500.

Tim Ferriss 30:46 Those are new words.

Brandon Sanderson 30:47 Those are new words. Now, when I'm doing revisions-

Tim Ferriss 30:50 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 30:50 ... I'm not writing new words. And I would say around a third of my time is spent on revisions, depending on the year. And this is the thing. Some years I'll do a lot of words, some years I do a lot more revisions. And so it really depends. But if we're looking at 2,000 words a week times 50 weeks, like that can produce quite a lot of words, right? So 10,000 words a week is what that would turn into. That's 500,000 words a year, right, is what I could theoretically produce. Now, third of my time's done to revision, so-

Tim Ferriss 31:26 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 31:27 ... really I'm looking at around 300,000 words. A Stormlight Archive book is 18 months of work-

Tim Ferriss 31:34 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 31:34 ... for that reason and things like that.

Tim Ferriss 31:37 All right. We might come back-

Brandon Sanderson 31:39 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 31:39 ... to that in the revision process, but-

Brandon Sanderson 31:41 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 31:41 ... just as promised, to hop back and forth between past and present tense, why did you want to become a writer?

Brandon Sanderson 31:49 Hmm. 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'd be like, "Yeah, I published my first thing when I was two." Right? "I came out of the womb with a poem ready to go in my s- 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 liked to read in Nebraska, and they usually involved young people on farms.

Tim Ferriss 32:34 [laughs] Right.

Brandon Sanderson 32:36 Sometimes living in the wilderness on their own, sometimes on a ranch. They had pet dogs, and the pet dogs died.

Tim Ferriss 32:41 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 32:42 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."

Tim Ferriss 32:48 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 32:50 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.

Tim Ferriss 33:00 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 33:00 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.

Tim Ferriss 33:13 Right.

Brandon Sanderson 33:13 That's just Nebraska.

Tim Ferriss 33:14 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 33:14 Right? That's just how we roll.

Tim Ferriss 33:16 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 33:17 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. Uh-

Tim Ferriss 33:27 Ms. Reader?

Brandon Sanderson 33:28 Ms. Reader.

Tim Ferriss 33:28 How appropriate.

Brandon Sanderson 33:29 Yep, yep, Ms. Reader. She went on to be a professor at UC Irvine, so if anyone had a Professor Reader at UC Irvine, this was, this was the same person. But Ms. Reader, she was my eighth grade English teacher, and I probably shouldn't admit this, but I cheated on a book report with her.

Tim Ferriss 33:44 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 33:45 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's actually very good. She's like, "Something's not clicking with you with books." And I'm like, "No, they really aren't." And she's like, "So for your next book report I just want you to read one of these books on my rack here. These are my favorite books that I have for kids to read. I just want you to actually read it, and you can talk to me about it." And I'm like, "I just, I don't like books." She's like, "Well, just try something different." So I went to the rack and I always joke, it's like you can tell the paperbacks have been read by 100 students, right? They got spaghetti stains on them-

Tim Ferriss 34:35 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 34:35 ... and things like that. It's just... And I looked, leafed through, and I arrived on this book called Dragon Spain by Barbara Hamley. And it really was the cover. Cover illustrator's Michael Whelan. He's the illustrator who did The Way of Kings and The Stormlight Archive for me. I eventually got him. He just retired. He did, 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.

Tim Ferriss 34:59 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 34:59 He pulls a Miyazaki sometimes-

Tim Ferriss 35:01 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 35:01 ... and, and pops in and out. Or a Michael Jordan depending on your, y- the field you're talking about. But regardless, I picked up this book and, you know, it had cool dragon on the cover. It was all misty and kind of awesome looking. It had a cute girl on the cover. It's like-

Tim Ferriss 35:20 Yeah

Brandon Sanderson 35:20 ... "Hey, I'm 14."

Tim Ferriss 35:21 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 35:21 "This, maybe this will work."

Tim Ferriss 35:22 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 35:22 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 s- very similar to them, right? A reluctant reader, y- 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, 'cause 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, uh, his wife and he's like, "I guess I gotta go kill this dragon. We gotta 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 in with a sword. And her story is she has been told by her teacher she could be the greatest wizard ever. She's got a raw natural talent, but she has divided her time between studying and having a family. And it, her, her teacher's like, "You really should give up that family stuff. Just really focus on your magic." But, you know, it, this is her crisis. 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.

Tim Ferriss 37:17 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 37:17 Right? 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 she, the 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, you know, she would tell them. She wants us to know [laughs] that she-

Tim Ferriss 37:52 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 37:53 And I always thought, "Of course you did, Mom. Look at me."

Tim Ferriss 37:56 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 37:57 "I'm great."

Tim Ferriss 37:58 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 37:59 "This is what you, you should have done." I'm reading this book, and I'm like, "Ditch the kids."

Tim Ferriss 38:04 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 38:04 "Go be a wizard. Wizarding is awesome. The kids'll get along. They'll figure it out." And I get done with this book.

Tim Ferriss 38:11 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 38:13 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.

Tim Ferriss 38:20 Hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 38:22 And this book built empathy in me for someone that, you know, 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, you know, word lightly. As a storyteller, as a writer of fantasy, there was a magic to that author being able to convey a life experience of someone that just entered my brain and has never left. And I said, just like if you went and saw a magic trick, you're an analytical-type person. You probably wanna say, "How did they do it?"

Tim Ferriss 38:59 Hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 38:59 "How did, how did they vanish that thing? What type of mirrors did they use?" I saw, 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 'cause I'm old. I'm even older than you.

Tim Ferriss 39:12 Oh, I remember those card catalogs.

Brandon Sanderson 39:14 Yeah. And I went and got the next book in line, just alphabetical, 'cause it started with dragon, and I read everything that had dragons in it-

Tim Ferriss 39:20 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 39:20 ... in the school library, just to figure it out. And,

Brandon Sanderson 39:24 you know, something changed in me that day. I went from a C student to an A student over, over summer, Cs in eighth grade, As in ninth grade. Why that changed, 'cause I discovered stories about wizards, I discovered there was something I wanted to do, right?

Tim Ferriss 39:41 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 39:42 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 'cause it's a private school. You do have to have, you know, better grades than, than Cs generally to make it into some of these schools. And so suddenly I had a reason. Like, well, I wanna 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'm like, "I need to be a writer. I need a degree. I need to learn about this. Therefore, I'm gonna have to go to college. Therefore, I'm gonna have to learn to learn, because otherwise I won't figure out how to do this." And having a purpose, having a reason to, to do well changed

Brandon Sanderson 40:40 my entire outlook. I was not valedictorian. I was one grade off of it because I took a semester and moved to France, and that tanked my grades. It wasn't a full semester, about half a semester, but I never caught up on all the stuff that I needed to do, so I got a B+ in one class, but it was totally worth it. Go live in France for, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 40:59 How did you decide to go to France?

Brandon Sanderson 41:01 I took four years of French.

Tim Ferriss 41:02 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 41:02 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?

Tim Ferriss 41:14 Completely.

Brandon Sanderson 41:15 You know, I wouldn't have picked French as my favorite subject, but it was my favorite class.

Tim Ferriss 41:19 Hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 41:19 And so I had three years of that, and she said, "Hey, I'm taking a study abroad to Paris. You're gonna have to miss half a semester. You'll have to do makeup work, but we'll live in Paris and go visit all the sights 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 f- host family and then did day trips to just places around Paris. Went to, you know, Giverny and Versailles and saw everything, and museums every day, and bad grades in math.

Tim Ferriss 41:55 [laughs] Sounds like a good trade-

Brandon Sanderson 41:57 Yes, it was-

Tim Ferriss 41:57 ... in terms of the B

Brandon Sanderson 41:58 ... absolutely a good trade.

Tim Ferriss 41:59 And it's so parallel to what happened to me with Mr. Shimano in high school.

Brandon Sanderson 42:04 Uh-huh.

Tim Ferriss 42:04 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, so.

Brandon Sanderson 42:21 I love Japan. I've only been once, but it was just delightful. Just walking around Tokyo is such a surreal and interesting experience.

Tim Ferriss 42:32 Yeah, I tell people it's like 30% Blade Runner and 70% DMV.

Brandon Sanderson 42:37 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 42:37 Like if you, if you live in Japan-

Brandon Sanderson 42:38 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 42:38 ... it's just like, "I have to do another carbon copy? Like, and then we have to fax. What is this? Why?"

Brandon Sanderson 42:43 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 42:44 Yeah, it's [laughs] my- few of my friends have moved and have con- since confirmed that that is their experience. So

Tim Ferriss 42:51 I'm focusing on, had been focusing, I'm gonna 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, the key ingredients as you see them in your writing process. You mentioned narrative-

Brandon Sanderson 43:11 Yes

Tim Ferriss 43:12 ... and how from a positioning perspective, people think of you, and it's very helpful. It's also valid in some ways as a worldbuilder, but that first and foremost, it's like it's worldbuilding in service of a narrative, not the other way around.

Brandon Sanderson 43:25 Yep.

Tim Ferriss 43:26 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-

Brandon Sanderson 43:32 Right

Tim Ferriss 43:32 ... what are we talking about?

Brandon Sanderson 43:33 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.

Tim Ferriss 43:45 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 43:45 'Cause I, I do my class as one giant lecture each week, followed by a workshop.

Tim Ferriss 43:50 Are these available anywhere for people?

Brandon Sanderson 43:51 Yeah, they're on YouTube.

Tim Ferriss 43:52 Amazing. All right.

Brandon Sanderson 43:53 Yep. 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, 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. The story starts with 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.

Tim Ferriss 45:16 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 45:16 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.

Tim Ferriss 45:33 What does that mean?

Brandon Sanderson 45:34 Braided roses?

Tim Ferriss 45:35 Yeah. Oh, I see.

Brandon Sanderson 45:35 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 45:35 So it's sort of us against the world.

Brandon Sanderson 45:37 Us against the world. If you take two roses and you don't braid them, you stick them together, they poke each other.

Tim Ferriss 45:41 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 45:41 But if you braid them really well, then all the thorns point outward, and these two roses suddenly become stronger together than they were apart.

Tim Ferriss 45:51 That's a very cool imagery. Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 45:53 Yeah. Again, stole that one from Dave.

Tim Ferriss 45:54 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 45:55 And so the idea for a character plot is you are braiding the roses, and s- over time you're seeing that those points, number one, you see how dangerous they are poking into each other.

Tim Ferriss 46:05 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 46:05 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, you know, either hook up or become partners, again, same s- 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 gonna get together. Buddy cop movie, here's this cop. He's a loner. He works alone, but he has, you know, there's, there's a problem. There's something that's hurting. And here's this other cop. He's gonna retire soon, but, you know, he, 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-

Tim Ferriss 47:10 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 47:10 ... comes to fruition as, you know, they hook up or, in certain stories, they don't, right? 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.

Tim Ferriss 47:27 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 47:27 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. Like, 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, 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, 'cause 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 comedy is written. It's called 'yes, but/no, and.'" All of these different tools I try to talk about and say, and there's a ton more. There's nine-point story structure, there's seven-point story structure, whatever. But the idea is here's some things to try, but keep in mind promise, progress, payoff, and I feel like that gives sort of an overview of how to build

Brandon Sanderson 48:47 narrative.

Tim Ferriss 48:48 In addition to your classes, of course, and we'll link-

Brandon Sanderson 48:50 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 48:50 ... 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-

Brandon Sanderson 49:09 Yep. Yeah

Tim Ferriss 49:09 ... that examines different genres within screenwriting.

Brandon Sanderson 49:12 So that's not the original Save the Cat!.

Tim Ferriss 49:14 No, it's not.

Brandon Sanderson 49:14 That's the, the new one. So I do recommend Save the Cat!, but Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies, I haven't read that. That sounds good.

Tim Ferriss 49:20 It's fun. Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 49:21 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 49:21 The first one's also excellent.

Brandon Sanderson 49:22 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 49:22 I mean, I enjoyed it.

Brandon Sanderson 49:23 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 49:23 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 49:23 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, the kind of, yeah, 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 gonna have to learn to, to garden.

Tim Ferriss 50:01 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 50:01 Because, yeah, you'll have these points in the outline, but then when you sit down to write them, you're a gardener getting between these two points in the outline. And so both skills are really important, but Scott Meredith, I did read that and like it quite a bit.

Tim Ferriss 50:14 So where do you fall in general or now between the gardening or gardener and architect?

Brandon Sanderson 50:23 I've tried all the tools. I have a middle grade series called Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians, which are pure garden.

Tim Ferriss 50:28 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 50:29 I actually use a method a little like, you know the old show Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Tim Ferriss 50:33 Sure.

Brandon Sanderson 50:34 I pull a bunch of ideas, I brainstorm a bunch of random ideas, and then I say, "I've gotta use all of these. Go." And I write a story without an outline. That's to practice the tool, and I generally fall these days on a 75% outline sort of thing. I do a lot of building on my plot, and I do a lot of building on my setting,

Brandon Sanderson 50:57 and then I write my way into characters. I feel like that, one of the big dangers of outlining too much is characters that feel wooden or cardboard because they're there merely to get you between point A and point B, and then, you know, 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 characters' motivations, you're just going according to the outline, and I find that if I let myself write my way into character and then rebuild my outline-

Tim Ferriss 51:29 Now, writing your way into character-

Brandon Sanderson 51:31 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 51:31 ... by that you mean you're creating the setting, the environment-

Brandon Sanderson 51:35 And the, the plot

Tim Ferriss 51:36 ... and the plot.

Brandon Sanderson 51:37 But then I rewrite the plot once I know the character.

Tim Ferriss 51:39 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 51:39 So here's my process. I start usually with a couple of really good ideas, right? I usually wanna have multiple interesting ideas for my setting, at least one hook for each character, if not more.

Tim Ferriss 51:52 Could you, could you give an-

Brandon Sanderson 51:52 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 51:52 ... an example of the starting point?

Brandon Sanderson 51:54 Yeah. So I'll build it from one of my books, Mistborn, right?

Tim Ferriss 51:57 Right.

Brandon Sanderson 51:58 So Mistborn had a series of ideas. The first idea came, I was reading Harry Potter back in the Harry Potter boom, and I thought, "Man, these Dark Lords never get a break."

Tim Ferriss 52:08 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 52:08 Right? Um, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Wheel of Time, there's this Dark Lord, and what happens is, like, some furry-footed British kid throws their ring in a hole-

Tim Ferriss 52:19 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 52:19 ... and their entire empire collapses. Or, you know-

Tim Ferriss 52:21 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 52:22 ... there's a kid you're gonna 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, "Ah, 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."

Tim Ferriss 52:53 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 52:54 I don't know that I wanna 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.

Tim Ferriss 53:05 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 53:06 You know, Sneakers is one of my favorite films of all time. Oldie but goodie. The Sting, all the way up to kind of, you know, the, the Ocean's 11s-

Tim Ferriss 53:13 Ocean's 11

Brandon Sanderson 53:14 ... and The Italian Job, both the old one and the new one, just-

Tim Ferriss 53:17 Yeah

Brandon Sanderson 53:17 ... Inception. 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, you've covered everything, and then you realize there's some area of passion and love that you haven't tapped at all. And I'm like, "I need to do a fantasy heist. What if I did a heist where every member of this heist crew had a magical talent, and they all combined together?" I'm like, "Nobody's done this." It was really kind of a big deal to me when I realized no one had done this because as a writer, you're always looking for the things that no one has done, and 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.

Tim Ferriss 54:13 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 54:13 That's like, that's my inception. Meanwhile, I want a good idea for each character, and so Mistborn's about two characters. One is about Kelsier, who is, my, my concept for him for myself was the gentleman thief. Who'd lived his life, you know, 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, you know, what happens is his wife is killed, his heist goes wrong, and he decides he wants revenge, and he's gonna 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, and kind of, I'm looking for a conflict, right?

Tim Ferriss 55:17 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 55:18 For her, her conflict is she's managed to remain a good person, but she's lost her belief that anyone else is, is good.

Tim Ferriss 55:25 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 55:26 She gets betrayed in some ways. It 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, this deep and abiding optimism.

Tim Ferriss 55:37 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 55:38 That he's like, "I'm gonna 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.

Tim Ferriss 55:53 Can I ask a question?

Brandon Sanderson 55:54 Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 55:54 Not to interrupt, but did you have all of this before you put pen to paper, metaphorically speaking-

Brandon Sanderson 56:02 Yes

Tim Ferriss 56:02 ... to write?

Brandon Sanderson 56:03 This much I had.

Tim Ferriss 56:04 In what form does that exist?

Brandon Sanderson 56:06 So it exists for me generally in, I do a new document that says, that's setting at the top, then character, then plot.

Tim Ferriss 56:14 Mm.

Brandon Sanderson 56:14 And the setting will have, and I'll, you know, some of the Dark Lord one, that's setting stuff, right? What does a world look like where the Dark Lord has won and ruled for 1,000 years? In my books, I like to have an interesting use of magic. We can talk about that at some point.

Tim Ferriss 56:28 Oh, yeah. We will.

Brandon Sanderson 56:28 But what is the interesting use of magic?

Tim Ferriss 56:30 That's how I got into writing excuses.

Brandon Sanderson 56:31 Yeah. Is it?

Tim Ferriss 56:32 [laughs] Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 56:32 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?

Tim Ferriss 56:41 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 56:42 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.

Tim Ferriss 56:53 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 56:54 I don't know yet how their interaction's gonna go and how they're gonna be. And in fact, I wrote three chapters with Vin first, three different first chapters trying different personalities. I started her with an artful dodger type, really confident, moving in the underworld, ripping people off, and it just did not work. And then I tried another one. I can't even remember what that one was. But then I tried a third one, which is the personality she ended up with. Kelsier I kinda had right from the get-go.

Tim Ferriss 57:20 All right. It's my job to interrupt-

Brandon Sanderson 57:21 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 57:21 ... so I'll do it again. How did you know those first two didn't work?

Brandon Sanderson 57:25 This is where it's an art.

Tim Ferriss 57:26 Is it just like a water feel-

Brandon Sanderson 57:27 Yep

Tim Ferriss 57:27 ... kind of thing that you've acquired over time?

Brandon Sanderson 57:29 This is art and not science.

Tim Ferriss 57:31 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 57:31 It just... And sometimes it doesn't work, and you don't figure it out till late. Like, my most famous series, they're probably Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive are about-

Tim Ferriss 57:40 Mm

Brandon Sanderson 57:40 ... 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.

Tim Ferriss 57:58 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 57:59 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 n- that, all that narrative structure I've come up with.

Tim Ferriss 58:13 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 58:13 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, you know, promise, progress, payoff, which I couldn't have named for you back in 2004 when I was writing Mistborn, but I, I kind of understood intrinsically, I could tweak to the character personalities as I went-

Tim Ferriss 58:39 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 58:39 ... so that I was making sure that these things were threading the needle, so to speak, where you've got this character, and you need them to go through this plot, but you need to make sure they feel like they're a real person, so you can't hold them to any one point. But you can make it come together, hopefully.

Tim Ferriss 58:56 So I wanna come back to Stormlight for a second because this-

Brandon Sanderson 58:58 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 58:58 ... it struck me that you have the ability to put things on the back burner or scrap and effectively start from scratch, restart something-

Brandon Sanderson 59:12 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 59:12 ... that you've put a lot of some cost into.

Brandon Sanderson 59:15 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 59:16 And that is hard for most people.

Brandon Sanderson 59:19 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 59:20 So I'm wondering, say, in the case of, 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-

Brandon Sanderson 59:35 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 59:36 ... 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-

Brandon Sanderson 59:44 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 59:44 ... when you have external pressures, maybe you've applied pressure to yourself.

Brandon Sanderson 59:47 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 59:47 Maybe you have deadlines in mind. How do you, how do you get to that point? Like, what is your internal process for that?

Brandon Sanderson 59:54 You know, it's happened to me three major times-

Tim Ferriss 59:57 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 59:57 ... 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 as 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:00:29 Mm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:00:30 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 gonna 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, 'cause you've practiced long enough to know you should throw it away-

Tim Ferriss 1:01:13 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:01:14 ... but you don't want to, 'cause you did the work, but your, your instincts won't let you continue doing it wrong-

Tim Ferriss 1:01:21 Mm

Brandon Sanderson 1:01:22 ... and you're not willing to, to toss it and try over. So there is that. What happens with a whole book, you get done with the whole book, and one of a couple of things happen. With two of the three of these books, I get done, and I'm like, "That just doesn't give me the shine, the feel, the feel of excitement that I want this 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, I went into this book wanting to write a giant epic while reading The Wheel of Time, which was one of my favorite book series at the time. It was before I had taken it over. This was five years before I would get that call.

Tim Ferriss 1:02:12 Which is a wild story.

Brandon Sanderson 1:02:13 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:02:13 Yeah. [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:02:14 It is a wild story. Game of Thrones was huge at the time, and I'd been studying Game of Thrones, and I'm like, "I wanna write something like this." And so I started with a huge cast upfront, 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, and 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 are, they are thinking something completely opposite from what I wanted them to. The parts that I wanted them to enjoy, they're bored by.

Tim Ferriss 1:03:15 Hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:03:15 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 wanna release it till 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:03:58 Hmm. 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, your current-

Brandon Sanderson 1:04:11 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:04:11 ... schedule tends to look like?

Brandon Sanderson 1:04:12 So I find that for what I do and where my personal psychology is, an eight-hour block is not sustainable for writing. This means I can do it for a week or two at eight hours, but it's gonna brain drain me. It's gonna 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 1:00.

Tim Ferriss 1:04:48 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:04:49 And I will go to the gym, which is, you know, 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 gonna write. Then I go, and I work from 2:00 until 6:00 these days is usually what I do, 1:00 until 5:00, something like that, and then I'm done. I go, I shower. 6:30, I'm ready to hang with my family, and I'll be with family from 6:00 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:05:47 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:05:47 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, y- you, you've interviewed a lot of highly productive, highly successful people. I think a lot of them are gonna talk about the same thing, that it's very hard to be there with people when you're there with people-

Tim Ferriss 1:06:27 Mm-hmm. Sure. Comes up a lot

Brandon Sanderson 1:06:28 ... because your brain is always working on the next big thing. Um-

Tim Ferriss 1:06:32 Yeah, this is particularly true with people who work on big creative projects.

Brandon Sanderson 1:06:35 Yeah, and that gave me this permission. It actually came at 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 school teacher for many years, still kind of keeps a school teacher's hours, and she is wonderful for getting up with the kids. I don't have to do that, and never have. And I go back to work at about 11:00. I write from 11:00 to 3:00. And then 3:00 to 4:00 or 5:00 is just whatever I wanna do. That's the real goof-off time. That's the go play with my Magic cards time.

Tim Ferriss 1:07:27 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:07:28 That's the play a video game, pop out the Steam Deck time. And this schedule, you'll notice I don't have to worry about commuting, which gives me an advantage here, has been really sustainable for me.

Tim Ferriss 1:07:43 So that's a home office predominantly?

Brandon Sanderson 1:07:45 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:07:45 Where you're writing.

Brandon Sanderson 1:07:46 I write from my home office. I do like to move around. I go in the gazebo. Lately, I've gone in the gazebo when it's really cold, and I hire one of my kids to come put logs on a fire for me, and I sit by the fireplace. Sometimes I like to be on the beach. Sometimes I like, when I'm around here, I like to be in different places. I can set up a hammock here or there, sit with my laptop. I do not work at a desk. That's really sustainable. It's worked for me for the last 20 years.

Tim Ferriss 1:08:11 That's incredible. I got all my best writing done really late at night when I was... I mean, I still am writing. I'm working on a new book, but when I was working on my first few books especially, it was always when everyone else was asleep. So let's talk about the non-home environment. We're sitting in a, in a quite a large building, or at least a building with a lot of large rooms.

Brandon Sanderson 1:08:33 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 1:08:35 Why do you have this company? Why have, why have you and your wife built this company? Because there are a lot of writers out there who just wanna focus on writing. They go the traditional publishing route, which I'm not saying it's, it's a mutually exclusive choice, but why do you have all this?

Brandon Sanderson 1:08:53 How long do you wanna go?

Tim Ferriss 1:08:54 Yeah, I w-

Brandon Sanderson 1:08:54 This, this is the big one

Tim Ferriss 1:08:55 ... this is, this is a long form podcast.

Brandon Sanderson 1:08:57 Yep.

Tim Ferriss 1:08:57 So we have all the time we want.

Brandon Sanderson 1:08:58 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:09:12 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:09:13 Most writers you f- read about or see in film are the big ones. They're doing really well, and so they're off in a cabin telling their story, or they're, they're the ones that have to be pried away from their easy chair to get them to even do any publicity whatsoever, right?

Tim Ferriss 1:09:27 Hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:09:28 They wanna 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:09:37 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:09:39 And particularly my mother, that accountant, she instilled into me some, 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:09:57 What were the aspirations?

Brandon Sanderson 1:09:59 The aspirations, well, they started small. They started with, "You know what? I wanna 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 gonna apply this all to writing, and I'm gonna, I'm just gonna start writing books." And I heard your first five books are generally terrible. I said, "Well, I, that's good. I don't have to be good yet." It took a lot of pressure off me. I said, "I'm gonna write six, and the first five I'm not gonna send out to any publishers."

Tim Ferriss 1:11:02 Wow.

Brandon Sanderson 1:11:04 Right?

Tim Ferriss 1:11:04 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:11:05 And that's bad advice-

Tim Ferriss 1:11:06 Can't imagine doing that

Brandon Sanderson 1:11:06 ... for some people, right?

Tim Ferriss 1:11:07 Yeah. Wow. You didn't even send them out?

Brandon Sanderson 1:11:09 I didn't send them out.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:10 It was just weight training in the gym for your mind for the number six.

Brandon Sanderson 1:11:14 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:32 You didn't even have test readers?

Brandon Sanderson 1:11:35 I didn't have test readers.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:36 Wow.

Brandon Sanderson 1:11:36 I just wrote the books. And again, this is why the advice can be bad. There's some people out there that would be bad advice for. Pat Rothfuss published his first book, and it's brilliant.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:46 Name of the Wind?

Brandon Sanderson 1:11:46 Name of the Wind, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:47 That is a spectacular book.

Brandon Sanderson 1:11:49 First novel. Now, he did a ton of revisions on that. He spent-

Tim Ferriss 1:11:51 I'm sure

Brandon Sanderson 1:11:51 ... 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-

Tim Ferriss 1:12:03 This was before you had an agent?

Brandon Sanderson 1:12:04 Before I had an agent, before I had anything, before I even knew what an agent was.

Tim Ferriss 1:12:07 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:12:08 Before I'd taken Dave's class.

Tim Ferriss 1:12:09 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 1:12:09 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 Elantris." 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

Brandon Sanderson 1:12:41 I wanna do?"

Tim Ferriss 1:12:42 What characterizes an epic fantasy?

Brandon Sanderson 1:12:44 So epic fantasy, fantasy, in short, follows three main Lines of, of descent. One line comes from, uh, 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-

Tim Ferriss 1:13:10 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 1:13:10 ... and experience it. 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-

Tim Ferriss 1:13:18 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 1:13:18 ... 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 fantasy's lines kind of really starts with the Greek epics and Beowulf, but in modern terms, you would recognize Conan as the progenitor. It is heroic men fighting against the monsters of the world and taming them and, you know, just kinda 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, you kind of look f- at Joe Abercrombie-

Tim Ferriss 1:13:51 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 1:13:52 ... as kinda the modern version of that.

Tim Ferriss 1:13:54 So The Blade Itself would be-

Brandon Sanderson 1:13:55 The Blade Itself. Fantastic book.

Tim Ferriss 1:13:57 Oh, so fun.

Brandon Sanderson 1:13:57 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:13:57 Also

Tim Ferriss 1:13:58 one of the best voice actors I've-

Brandon Sanderson 1:14:01 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:14:01 ... ever heard.

Brandon Sanderson 1:14:02 Joe is amazing. He's delightful. Tangent, you want my Joe Abercrombie story?

Tim Ferriss 1:14:05 Yes, please.

Brandon Sanderson 1:14:06 Okay, tangent. I am flying to Spain, right? And Joe is gonna meet me there 'cause we're both doing a con together.

Tim Ferriss 1:14:14 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:14:14 It's called Celsius. I'm actually going back this year. So I'm passing through Amsterdam, and I did a thing back then, maybe we'll talk about it now, I signed my books in airports.

Tim Ferriss 1:14:23 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:14:24 I would see a book of mine in an airport bookstore-

Tim Ferriss 1:14:26 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:14:26 ... I would sign it, and I would post on Twitter.

Tim Ferriss 1:14:28 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 1:14:29 And I'd say, "I signed my book. First one gets there gets to get the book," right? 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:14:44 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:14:45 Yeah. And I did this thing in the airport. I left my book, I took, 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 to yours and you didn't sign it."

Tim Ferriss 1:15:02 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:15:03 And I tweet back, I'm like, "Well, it's not my book." He's like, "Sign my book, Sanderson," in all caps, exclamation, exclamation point.

Tim Ferriss 1:15:11 Ah.

Brandon Sanderson 1:15:11 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-

Tim Ferriss 1:15:23 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:15:23 ... missed my flight signing Joe's book.

Tim Ferriss 1:15:24 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:15:25 So someone out there went and bought Joe's book signed by me.

Tim Ferriss 1:15:28 [laughs] How long had you known each other at that point?

Brandon Sanderson 1:15:32 We had met at conventions and been on panels together, and Joe is a riot.

Tim Ferriss 1:15:38 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 1:15:38 Like, if you get a chance, if he's anywhere that you can go see him-

Tim Ferriss 1:15:42 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 1:15:43 ... Joe has this magic to turn any panel into an enjoyable panel, no matter who's on it with him. And so, like, I won't say that I'm best buds with Joe. I don't know Joe really well, but we're professional colleagues, and I love being on a panel with him. He makes me look intelligent and, and funny-

Tim Ferriss 1:15:59 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:15:59 ... which I love. But anyway, so we've got portal fantasy.

Tim Ferriss 1:16:03 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:16:03 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 are 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, you know, 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 movement of worlds. The world is at stake. Secondary world is what we call it. It's, it's very removed from our planet. All new rules, all new world, all new magic, and it's this idea of they're, they're the big thick ones.

Tim Ferriss 1:16:54 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:16:54 They're kinda like historical epics-

Tim Ferriss 1:16:56 Mm

Brandon Sanderson 1:16:56 ... but in a different world. So that's their similarity. Game of Thrones is this, though Game of Thrones borrows a little from heroic. That's kind of his secret sauce, is he, 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. But epic is me and Robert Jordan and things like that. That's epic fantasy. It's just stakes of the world.

Tim Ferriss 1:17:20 Got it. And I took us off track a little bit-

Brandon Sanderson 1:17:21 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:17:21 ... because the question was why are we sitting in this huge office, and then you're like, "Well, let's backtrack," right?

Brandon Sanderson 1:17:27 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:17:27 Artist raised by an accountant. A- and then we came through, and you're like, "Number six."

Brandon Sanderson 1:17:32 Number six.

Tim Ferriss 1:17:32 That was go time.

Brandon Sanderson 1:17:33 That was go time. Riot of Hellantras. At that point, my goal was only, I'm gonna 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. I s- actually, it took me a few more years. I wrote 13 novels before I sold one.

Tim Ferriss 1:17:53 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:17:54 I sold number six after I'd finished number 13, which was Way of Kings Prime. And 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? [laughs] 12 books and no one's buying them? Maybe I'm, maybe I'm really bad at this." But anyway.

Tim Ferriss 1:18:08 You started trying to sell them at which book?

Brandon Sanderson 1:18:11 About book six.

Tim Ferriss 1:18:12 About book six.

Brandon Sanderson 1:18:13 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 kinda hearing from their mouths what they want, what they're buying, what they're interested in, and trying to target my books at them.

Tim Ferriss 1:18:41 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:18:41 By that point that I was doing that, I had eight or nine, and six, seven, and eight were pretty good books.

Tim Ferriss 1:18:47 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:18:48 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, 'cause I sold my book for a grand total of $10,000-

Tim Ferriss 1:19:05 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:19:06 ... 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, um-

Tim Ferriss 1:19:13 It's a meager sum

Brandon Sanderson 1:19:14 ... 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, as a public school teacher. But she supported me while I was doing that and breaking in with those books. We did meet after I'd at least sold one, so I at least had something to say, "Look, it's real. Uh, it made us $5,000 this year." But 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 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:19:58 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 1:19:58 Second book is, like, do or die time, and it was pretty big do or die for me. But then it stabilized,

Brandon Sanderson 1:20:06 then things started to work. I hit the bestseller list, and then Wheel of Time happened.

Tim Ferriss 1:20:10 That was with the first or the second book?

Brandon Sanderson 1:20:12 Oh, it was my fourth that hit the bestseller.

Tim Ferriss 1:20:13 Fourth that hit the bestseller.

Brandon Sanderson 1:20:14 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:20:14 Okay.

Brandon Sanderson 1:20:14 It was Mistborn 3 was my first one. Very low on. It was either Mistborn 3, it might've even been Warbreaker. But it's four or five, hit like, the Times list went to 35 then, and I hit, like, number 35.

Tim Ferriss 1:20:25 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 1:20:25 Right?

Tim Ferriss 1:20:26 Okay. Still counts.

Brandon Sanderson 1:20:26 Uh, still counts. Still counts. It was for 2,000 copies in a week.

Tim Ferriss 1:20:30 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 1:20:30 Doesn't sound like very much to be a bestseller, but I hit that bestseller list, then The Wheel of Time happened, and my entire life changed, and I'm sure we'll get to that.

Tim Ferriss 1:20:37 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 1:20:38 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:20:53 Hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:20:53 Tor, my publisher, is a subsidiary of Macmillan. This was because of their contract disputes. Amazon wanted to price e-books cheaper to sell Kindles. They wanted the loss 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, you know, if Amazon sells them for a dollar... You know, 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 get, you still make your $8." And the publisher's like, "Yeah, but people are gonna expect books to be a dollar, and when you control the market, you're gonna say, 'Well, we're not paying you $8 on these books anymore. We're gonna pay you the 70 cents-

Tim Ferriss 1:21:34 Yeah

Brandon Sanderson 1:21:34 ... 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:21:47 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:21:48 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, 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 wanna have 10 books on the shelf, even if only one of them sells, 'cause eventually nine of them are gonna sell 10 of a copy because everyone will go in and say, 'This must be an important book. They have 10 copies of it here.'" The best advertisement for a book is having as many on the shelf. And so your fight was to get the bookstores to carry your book.

Tim Ferriss 1:22:36 Yeah, it was real estate.

Brandon Sanderson 1:22:37 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, the market. They controlled e-books, and they were s- coming to control print books, right? And having one person be able to turn off my books was a big deal to me. It happened previously with the Alcatraz books, where Borders decided not to carry one of them. But Barnes & Noble did, and so 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

Brandon Sanderson 1:23:19 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, bless their hearts, they're still trapped in a lot of ways in the 1900s, maybe the 1800s. They do not change very quickly. And I looked at other markets and I said, "What is music doing? What is movies doing? What were 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, you know, buying the, the book online that is free but you wanna have a copy to show off, all the way down to the really cheap product. And in a lot of ways, if you have the really expensive thing, that subsidizes the really cheap product so that everybody can get the books. Everybody, everyone's served better by a variety of offerings.

Tim Ferriss 1:24:46 Different pricing tiers.

Brandon Sanderson 1:24:47 Different pricing tiers, letting people buy in to what they want. And I realized 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, to merchandise. Lord of the Rings released these cool DVDs that came with bookends, Gollum bookends, right? Said we should be doing things like that for big books. We should be bundling e-book and audiobook with a hardcover. We should be selling leather bounds, really high-end nice ones, but we shouldn't be charging what you're charging. They were charging 250 for the leather bounds. I'm like, "That's a too high a price point. We should be doing $100 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. 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 wanna carry something that expensive that they weren't sure if they were gonna 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, you know, the voice of my mother whispered, "Well, Brandon, I trained you better than that. Do it yourself." Right? And I said, "I just have to." And so I got my team together, and I said, "We are going to try to Amazon-proof ourselves. That means we are going to direct sale. We are going to start building our own direct to our consumer." And I started with the leather bounds. My decision was this was something the market want. I kept hearing from fans they wanted them. I heard from the publisher they can't sell them. So I went to the publisher and 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?

Tim Ferriss 1:26:57 I'm guessing in retrospect [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:26:59 In retrospect, they maybe-

Tim Ferriss 1:27:00 But they couldn't have done it

Brandon Sanderson 1:27:01 ... They couldn't have done it 'cause it had to be direct to consumer. Part of the reason is, like, the fans running out to buy the special edition from the bookstore, it's just that it is a bad methodology.

Tim Ferriss 1:27:12 Mm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:27:13 So I said to my team, "We're gonna build these. We're gonna do leather bounds. They sold 250 copies. I wanna sell 10,000." Right? Well, we started five. "I wanna sell 5,000." We ended up selling 50,000.

Tim Ferriss 1:27:25 Oh, my God. [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:27:25 Right?

Tim Ferriss 1:27:26 Now, is that of multiple books? Was that of-

Brandon Sanderson 1:27:28 That's the first one.

Tim Ferriss 1:27:29 Wow.

Brandon Sanderson 1:27:30 Right?

Tim Ferriss 1:27:31 50,000 hardbound.

Brandon Sanderson 1:27:32 Nowadays... Yeah. Leather bound.

Tim Ferriss 1:27:33 Leather bound. Excuse me.

Brandon Sanderson 1:27:34 Leather bounds at 100 to

Brandon Sanderson 1:27:36 250. 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 signed ones go instantly.

Tim Ferriss 1:28:05 Quality problem to have. [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:28:06 Yeah, it is a, it is a quality problem to have. It means that my, my time suddenly got a very strange monetary constraint on it-

Tim Ferriss 1:28:15 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 1:28:16 ... which is something that I try to pay attention to, but not too much. I don't know if you've had this, but do you ever try to put a dollar amount on your time? And is that just madness for you?

Tim Ferriss 1:28:27 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-

Brandon Sanderson 1:28:36 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:28:36 ... so that you don't find yourself, if you are like me, a perfectionist, micromanaging or doing too much yourself.

Brandon Sanderson 1:28:43 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:28:44 However, there is a point where I think it just makes you miserable-

Brandon Sanderson 1:28:47 It does

Tim Ferriss 1:28:47 ... because you end up placing so high a per hour value on your time that every squandered minute is like having a pound of flesh taken, and you can drive yourself insane.

Brandon Sanderson 1:29:00 I went in that because if I sign my name, that's $250-

Tim Ferriss 1:29:05 Mm. [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:29:05 ... 'cause of, 'cause the leather bound. But I don't wanna spend my life signing my name.

Tim Ferriss 1:29:09 Right.

Brandon Sanderson 1:29:09 I wanna write the books.

Tim Ferriss 1:29:10 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:29:11 But the most money I can earn per hour, I can sign 1,000 of those in an hour, and that's 250 each.

Tim Ferriss 1:29:17 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:29:18 Which is just an unreal... If you think about that, that's like-

Tim Ferriss 1:29:21 Yeah, it's bananas

Brandon Sanderson 1:29:22 ... that's, that is bananas. My normal writing time, I can put a different dollar amount. Depends on what I'm writing. It's-

Tim Ferriss 1:29:27 Did you ever get pulled, because it happened, it's happened to me with speaking engagements, different thing.

Brandon Sanderson 1:29:33 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:29:33 But did you get pulled away from the creative work or the actual wordsmithing at any point, or were you able to hold the line?

Brandon Sanderson 1:29:41 So I was able to hold the line, but barely. At one point, I started to get popular enough that people wanted me on the speaking tour, right? And so we put a dollar amount on it. I'm like, "Well, at that point, a day of writing," and it'd take me two days, "a day of writing's 25 grand."

Tim Ferriss 1:29:56 Mm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:29:57 So two days, 50 grand, and we put it up there. Instantly, like 10 inquiries, and I'm like, "I don't wanna do that."

Tim Ferriss 1:30:06 Now what?

Brandon Sanderson 1:30:07 Now what? I just said-

Tim Ferriss 1:30:08 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:30:08 ... "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.

Tim Ferriss 1:30:15 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:30:16 Right? Like, 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:30:32 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:30:32 And if I'm gonna spend two days writing, I wanna spend it writing. And nowadays, like, it would be ridiculous. For me to go do one of these things, it would cost, like, 400 grand.

Tim Ferriss 1:30:43 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:30:43 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 decided on, you can, you can do that. So anyway,

Brandon Sanderson 1:30:59 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 because it's really a lot better. We did pre-orders on the initial ones. We moved to crowdfunding. My team all through the teens was maybe 10 people, probably didn't even quite get there.

Tim Ferriss 1:31:27 Who were those people?

Brandon Sanderson 1:31:28 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:31:28 What was the kinda org chart at the time?

Brandon Sanderson 1:31:30 Yep. So me and Emily. So Emily runs the business, and I run the creative, right?

Tim Ferriss 1:31:36 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:31:37 So she does HR, she does accounting, she does operations is what we call it, and all of that stuff.

Tim Ferriss 1:31:44 And is operations sort of the logistics of, of manufacturing and shipping-

Brandon Sanderson 1:31:49 Yes

Tim Ferriss 1:31:49 ... everything?

Brandon Sanderson 1:31:50 It's manufacturing, shipping, it's HR, it's facilities. Basically she's over that. So if, 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 p- person. Creative development and publicity are kind of under me.

Tim Ferriss 1:32:09 And what did creative development do at that point?

Brandon Sanderson 1:32:10 That's our art team.

Tim Ferriss 1:32:12 Okay, got it.

Brandon Sanderson 1:32:12 It's our art team.

Tim Ferriss 1:32:13 So that was, that was art.

Brandon Sanderson 1:32:13 Yeah, art. So art and then editorial and publicity were me, and then merchandising, events, and facilities were her, right? 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 hire Becky to do shipping. So actually, our first employee is shipping. You're gonna love this. My second book, they have remainders. You know what remainders are.

Tim Ferriss 1:32:53 I do.

Brandon Sanderson 1:32:53 That-

Tim Ferriss 1:32:53 You should explain for the people listening, though.

Brandon Sanderson 1:32:55 Yeah. Boy, we're on a tangent to a tangent. I love this.

Tim Ferriss 1:32:57 I'm impressed with your ability to reel it in, though.

Brandon Sanderson 1:32:59 [laughs] So-

Tim Ferriss 1:32:59 Like, [laughs] what you haven't done, which happens to me all the time, is someone will say, "What were we talking about? What was your question again?" You're very good at-

Brandon Sanderson 1:33:06 Well, you're good at reminding me

Tim Ferriss 1:33:07 ... at doing the callbacks. Yeah. [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:33:08 You've been reminding me. So publishing, like Tom Doherty said, he wants 10 books on the shelf, and you really wanna sell sev- seven of those, seven to eight. If you sell every one, that means you didn't put enough on the shelf.

Tim Ferriss 1:33:20 Mm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:33:20 Someone walked into that store and couldn't buy a book, right? 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 wanna have remainders somewhere around. Remainders are leftover at the end of a print run. You wanna 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?

Tim Ferriss 1:33:53 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:33:53 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 over-printed 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?

Tim Ferriss 1:34:18 Mm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:34:18 You're making $2,500 a year. You need to supplement that somehow. So I bought them all.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:23 This is going back early days.

Brandon Sanderson 1:34:24 This is way back early.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:25 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:34:25 Bought them all, put them in our garage, couldn't park our car anymore.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:28 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 1:34:29 Then we hired Becky, who's my sister-in-law, to take the orders. We put them up on my website signed, and you know, it's a trickle, 10 a week or-

Tim Ferriss 1:34:37 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 1:34:37 ... even, 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, we hire a merchandising person.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:50 What is the merch?

Brandon Sanderson 1:34:51 So the merch at that point was looking at doing T-shirts-

Tim Ferriss 1:34:55 Mm

Brandon Sanderson 1:34:55 ... and stickers, and to take over the shipping from Becky-

Tim Ferriss 1:35:00 Mm

Brandon Sanderson 1:35:00 ... to have, like, 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, she'll come back into the story. But then we have, like, 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 f- 20 hours each a week as one 40-hour employee. He was an artist. He'd done all my art for Mistborn. She's the person we had been offloading our merchandise to so far, that had started doing... We're like, "We're bringing this in-house." So posters, art prints, all of that stuff. So we hire them. Then our next employee is right around the same time, is publicity and marketing altogether. That's Adam, whom you've met. So then we have our, our structure all set, right? We have, for me, I have an editorial person, I have a creative development, which art person, and I have a publicity person. And then Emily has a, 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:36:29 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:36:29 And that's when we said, "All right. It's time to level up." And I said, "Everyone's gonna build a department. I want a full team for each one because we're, we're gonna go somewhere with this now that I have this team."

Tim Ferriss 1:36:40 Yeah, and just to give people a visual.

Brandon Sanderson 1:36:42 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:36:42 So when, uh, [laughs] 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."

Brandon Sanderson 1:36:52 Dude.

Tim Ferriss 1:36:52 This is a gigantic space-

Brandon Sanderson 1:36:54 Warehouses are big

Tim Ferriss 1:36:55 ... with levels upon levels upon levels and [laughs] pallets upon pallets upon pallets. It, it is, it is really jaw-dropping to walk into that space. Now, you mentioned, you mentioned Kickstarter. I know we're gonna be-

Brandon Sanderson 1:37:07 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:37:07 ... jumping ahead a little bit.

Brandon Sanderson 1:37:08 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 1:37:09 And I'm gonna wanna come back to Warbreaker and all sorts of-

Brandon Sanderson 1:37:12 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:37:12 ... other things. But since you already mentioned Kickstarter. I recall very distinctly when your launch video was sent to me-

Brandon Sanderson 1:37:21 Mm. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:37:23 Uh, by a number of friends

Brandon Sanderson 1:37:24 Had you ever heard of me before?

Tim Ferriss 1:37:24 Yeah, I had-

Brandon Sanderson 1:37:25 You'd listened to Writing Excuses though.

Tim Ferriss 1:37:26 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 1:37:26 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:37:26 [laughs] 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.

Brandon Sanderson 1:37:36 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 1:37:36 The big one. Yeah, how do you wanna set that up?

Brandon Sanderson 1:37:38 All right.

Tim Ferriss 1:37:38 Because it's just, it's so mind-boggling, I don't even know which angle to take on it.

Brandon Sanderson 1:37:43 I have a couple of big level up moments in my life.

Tim Ferriss 1:37:46 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 1:37:47 The first one is when I pitched Mistborn, going from Elantris to Mistborn, where I said, "I'm not doing a sequel to Elantris. I'm doing this whole new thing, and I've got big aspirations." The next one's when The Wheel of Time hit me.

Tim Ferriss 1:37:58 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:37:59 The next one's when we started doing our leather bounds, and the most recent one is our Kickstarter. Now, I say our Kickstarter, 'cause it's the famous one. We'd actually done one before that hit 7 million. That was for The Way of Kings leather bound, when we moved our leather bounds from. So we did Elantris and the Mistborn books and Warbreaker just as pre-orders during the 20-teens. And then coming to the 2020s, we said, "All right. We're moving to Kickstarter." This happened actually because of my friend Howard Taylor. He was one of my models where he's the guy who did a web comic, comic book, that he sold the print editions in order to sub- subsidize the free thing online. And he came to me and he said, "Brandon, you should be doing crowdfunding." I'm like, "We have a nice pre-order system." He's like, "No, crowdfunding hits publicity in a different way." And I realized he's right. I should've been doing these. One of the problems with the pre-orders is we never knew how many to order.

Tim Ferriss 1:38:52 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:38:53 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 Cara, 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. And it just makes it so much easier." And then there's the publicity side, where you can start adding all of these add-ons and things. And so we tried one out with The Way of Kings leather bound. It was successful, $7 million, which is pretty good. And then COVID hit.

Tim Ferriss 1:39:31 Okay, so before we get to dun, dun, dun, dun-

Brandon Sanderson 1:39:33 Yeah. Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:39:34 ... COVID hits, now before we get to that, what did you guys learn? What were the key lessons learned with that first prototype run, let's just say?

Brandon Sanderson 1:39:44 Yeah, first prototype run. So there's a couple things. Number one, there's a whole lot of organization that goes into shipping out 50,000 books at once instead of 50,000 books across 10 years.

Tim Ferriss 1:39:55 Yeah, yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 1:39:56 Right?

Tim Ferriss 1:39:56 Because a lot of folks who do Kickstarter, if they're successful, get the hug of death-

Brandon Sanderson 1:40:01 Exactly

Tim Ferriss 1:40:01 ... and they implode.

Brandon Sanderson 1:40:02 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, you know, every, 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, 'cause 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-

Tim Ferriss 1:40:40 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 1:40:40 ... 'cause 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 gonna 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, the sheer fact of these big trucks coming in can only go to certain places.

Tim Ferriss 1:41:14 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:41:14 And they can only offload in certain ways, and some of them need a high dock, and some of them will have a ramp, and you have to find out, 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 gonna arrive and be like, "All right. Move these." And you're like, "What do we do?" Uh, we actually had one of those where they'd all had ramps before, and then one r- arrived without, and they're like, "All right. How do you, how are you getting this out?"

Tim Ferriss 1:41:42 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:41:42 And we had to have, like, a bunch of people go into the back of the book and move them o- off of the pallets by box.

Tim Ferriss 1:41:49 Oh, my God.

Brandon Sanderson 1:41:49 These are all lessons learned, so there's all these logistical things. The second thing we learned was that a, it was true, a crowdfunding campaign where you bring all of the might of your fan base together for one event-

Tim Ferriss 1:42:03 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 1:42:03 ... cuts through the noise.

Brandon Sanderson 1:42:06 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, you know, to achieve that escape velocity, to go off and to make a, to make a splash, any idea to not just c- cl- 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, 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 velocity and you blast out. And then the rest of the planets pay attention to it, not just the one that is your 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 m- 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, there's so many things vying for it that we like put up this barrier and we don't wanna, we don't wanna look up. And it's very natural. And so having a Kickstarter gets that, that momentum behind you, starts to make noise.

Tim Ferriss 1:43:53 Executed properly.

Brandon Sanderson 1:43:54 Executed properly. A lot of them flop, but 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 fo- wanna 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 feed automatically.

Tim Ferriss 1:44:47 Yeah, no longer the case.

Brandon Sanderson 1:44:48 And that stopped in the 20-teens, and so it depended on how many people liked a thing. So if you even wanna 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 and be 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?

Tim Ferriss 1:45:12 [laughs] That's insane.

Brandon Sanderson 1:45:14 That's only 10%, and that's all that effort to get-

Tim Ferriss 1:45:17 Yeah

Brandon Sanderson 1:45:17 ... 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. It taught me about escape velocity of attention, how to break through, get into the sky, and start getting everyone's attention maybe a little bit, or at least get high enough that e- your whole planet that follows you, more of them can see it.

Tim Ferriss 1:45:40 I wanna give people just a, a bit of a carrot dangling on the end of a stick here.

Brandon Sanderson 1:45:44 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:45:44 And then we're gonna go back to-

Brandon Sanderson 1:45:46 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:45:46 ... COVID hitting. With the big campaign that we keep referring to, what did that end up totaling?

Brandon Sanderson 1:45:53 So it was 41 point something million official. 45 when you do all the people, like y- you have people that can add on extra stuff. The behind-the-scenes was another four and a half or so. We ended right at 45 million. So if you go look at it right now, it's 41 point something. Do you have it there? What is it, 41 point-

Tim Ferriss 1:46:14 I don't have actually the points.

Brandon Sanderson 1:46:15 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:46:15 I just have roughly 41.

Brandon Sanderson 1:46:17 Roughly 41 million, and the previous highest Kickstarter had been 21.

Tim Ferriss 1:46:22 That's-

Brandon Sanderson 1:46:22 And we still have the record

Tim Ferriss 1:46:23 ... so wild.

Brandon Sanderson 1:46:24 Here's what's wild. It's for books.

Tim Ferriss 1:46:26 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 1:46:26 Right? Every, if you go look at that top 10, everything else is some cool tech innovation.

Tim Ferriss 1:46:31 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 1:46:32 And we have it for novels.

Tim Ferriss 1:46:34 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:46:35 So

Brandon Sanderson 1:46:36 COVID hits, right?

Tim Ferriss 1:46:37 Mm-hmm, yep.

Brandon Sanderson 1:46:38 COVID hits. I have gone through cycles in my life multiple times where I say yes to too many things.

Tim Ferriss 1:46:44 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:46:44 And then I'm traveling too much. And 2019 was one of those years. As an author, you know this, people want you in person, and traveling is fun. I enjoy seeing the world. So you say yes to a bunch of things, and then you end up, as I did in 2019, with three different trips to Europe, and Europe can be kind of exhausting. Three tours in Europe, multiple tours around here, and I calculated I've been on the road one-third of my days. COVID hits, and I had, 2020 was set for the same thing.

Tim Ferriss 1:47:15 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:47:15 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 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 Kay is very good at them.

Tim Ferriss 1:48:00 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:48:01 The Lions of Al-Rassan or Tigana are two highly recommended. They're '90s fantasy. They're a little slower than modern fantasy. Really just single volume, really digging into one world, but doesn't overstay its welcome. And I-

Tim Ferriss 1:48:13 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:48:14 ... hadn't been able to do that in a while. I was, 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 gonna 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, of Game of Thrones have found. You know, George was always a little on the slower side, and then he hit, you know, retirement age, and he slowed down. And a lot of authors that happened to. And I started to calculate out, and I'm like, "I don't have room for any of these cool ideas." That makes me sad. Makes me sad that I can't just sit down and write something that isn't, uh, s- yeah. 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, um-

Tim Ferriss 1:49:17 It's amazing

Brandon Sanderson 1:49:17 ... yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:49:18 Amazing.

Brandon Sanderson 1:49:19 Just the-

Tim Ferriss 1:49:19 Amazing everything, William Goldman

Brandon Sanderson 1:49:20 ... uh, yeah. It's wonderful, wonderful book, wonderful, written by William Goldman, who's a great screenwriter. He's written a lot of classics. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was one of his, 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-

Tim Ferriss 1:49:55 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:49:56 ... in the movie The Princess Bride? She tries to hit a rat once, and she misses."

Tim Ferriss 1:49:59 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:50:00 Right? Like, that's the most she accomplishes.

Tim Ferriss 1:50:02 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 1:50:03 That and marrying the bad guy-

Tim Ferriss 1:50:04 Yeah

Brandon Sanderson 1:50:04 ... almost.

Tim Ferriss 1:50:05 Yeah, yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 1:50:06 And she's like, "Wouldn't it be nice if she did something?"

Tim Ferriss 1:50:08 Marriage.

Brandon Sanderson 1:50:09 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 1:50:09 Oh, marriage. [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:50:10 So that stuck in my brain, and 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 gonna 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?

Tim Ferriss 1:50:25 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:50:26 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 gonna 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 fairy tale-ish. It's still in my Cosmere 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:50:56 I'm just gonna sidebar because we might not get to it.

Brandon Sanderson 1:50:58 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:50:58 You have someone within this company whose sole job, as I understand it, is continuity.

Brandon Sanderson 1:51:03 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 1:51:03 Right? And you have an internal wiki-

Brandon Sanderson 1:51:05 Yep

Tim Ferriss 1:51:05 ... to keep track of everything in this universe so that it-

Brandon Sanderson 1:51:08 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:51:08 ... interconnects and coheres.

Brandon Sanderson 1:51:10 As good as I am with narrative, I need all of this stuff still.

Tim Ferriss 1:51:13 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 1:51:13 So we have someone. So from his voice, this is the first time I'd done this, right? All my other books are in my voice, and I said, "What if a character told a story to someone else about this, this young woman?" And it became this 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-

Tim Ferriss 1:51:37 Mm

Brandon Sanderson 1:51:37 ... as I was writing it, and it was liberating, uh, with no deadlines, no contracts. It 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, like, f- 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-

Tim Ferriss 1:52:03 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:52:04 ... that were just squeezed between. And I say, you know, these are each 100,000 words.

Tim Ferriss 1:52:09 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 1:52:09 Right? 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:52:26 Mm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:52:27 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've realized I wanted one that felt more like my classic novels so that fans who like Mistborn and Stormlight would get something because number one and number three of that were told from my storyteller voice, and then number two was something completely different. It's a science fiction novel unrelated to every, my other stuff. And so I wrote one kind of for the fans. And then I sprung them on my, on my company and said, "There's four books out of nowhere. Tell me what you think." And I watched their reaction to finding four unexpected books and the excitement that just moved through the company. And I said, "All right. I've got something." I did it again with test audience, some of my s- you know, sworn to secrecy early readers.

Tim Ferriss 1:53:33 Do you use the same early readers typically?

Brandon Sanderson 1:53:35 Um, I have a pool of about 100 of them, and we don't use them all for every book. We just kind of, kind of randomly decide.

Tim Ferriss 1:53:41 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:53:42 And I said, "Brandon has an extra book," and we actually split, like, the 100 into groups of 25 and sent them all four different books. And they all talk on, like, Discords and things, and we sent them each a different book.

Tim Ferriss 1:53:53 Mm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:53:53 And then I watched the Discord as they all realized I had written four books in secret.

Tim Ferriss 1:53:57 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:53:58 And I spun this into the video that you watched.

Tim Ferriss 1:54:02 Mm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:54:02 I went to my team, and I said, "I wanna do something." And they were a little resistant because sometimes some of these big ideas that I have, I, I'm the big idea person, and they, they can be really daunting, such as the we're gonna, we're gonna do our own leather bounds. We're gonna, you know, start doing Kickstarters. We always talk, Emily and I, my job is to look and pull people toward that star in the 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?"

Brandon Sanderson 1:54:33 And I went to them, and I said, "I wanna do a video where I pretend that I'm coming out with some big scandal, and I'm retiring from writing-

Tim Ferriss 1:54:40 Mm

Brandon Sanderson 1:54:41 ... because I've secretly, you know, done something just horrible," because that had happened. That happens periodically.

Tim Ferriss 1:54:48 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 1:54:48 And it's probably, it may not be something really fun to make fun of, but, you know, you have a lot of writers like, "You know, I have to admit that I plagiarized," or, "I have to admit that," anyway, th- all those apology videos that people, and I said, "I'm gonna make a fake apology video," and the reason being is everyone's gonna get gotten by it, and they're gonna share it with their friends who will get gotten by it. They'll just say, "Hey, watch this," and then you'll be, "Oh, no, Sanderson, what's up with him?" And we'll tap into that sort of horror mentality that watch a train wreck, their car wreck. People, you know, wanna slow down if they think Brandon's gonna 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, 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 s- video with a story.

Tim Ferriss 1:55:51 Sure. Totally.

Brandon Sanderson 1:55:52 Right? Like, I live for the reveal. If people read my books, you will tell I r- live for that ending where I've been distracting with something, and then I pull out that surprise. I love the, 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 escape velocity of attention, right?

Tim Ferriss 1:56:29 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:56:30 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:56:53 Yeah, which we'll come back to.

Brandon Sanderson 1:56:54 I did appear on Colbert Report.

Tim Ferriss 1:56:56 That's a big one.

Brandon Sanderson 1:56:57 Well, my face appeared.

Tim Ferriss 1:56:59 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:57:01 Does that count?

Tim Ferriss 1:57:02 I think that counts.

Brandon Sanderson 1:57:03 So Stephen Colbert had a piece on zeppelins, 'cause he was in character, this is Colbert Report-

Tim Ferriss 1:57:09 Yeah

Brandon Sanderson 1:57:09 ... 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:57:18 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:57:20 'Cause Doofus Takes Over Wheel of Time is, like, the bottom story on the page below the fold.

Tim Ferriss 1:57:23 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:57:24 And there's this giant zeppelin story, and he holds it up, and he points at zeppelins, and then there's me. My face was on The Colbert Report.

Tim Ferriss 1:57:31 Oh, yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 1:57:31 It's pixelated. You can barely tell.

Tim Ferriss 1:57:33 But you appeared.

Brandon Sanderson 1:57:34 But I appeared.

Tim Ferriss 1:57:34 Yeah. [laughs] As seen on...

Brandon Sanderson 1:57:36 As seen on Stephen Colbert.

Tim Ferriss 1:57:38 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 1:57:38 Brandon Sanderson, my claim to fame. My fan- fans all tweeted me. This was way back in, like, 2009. It was 2007. It was right when The Wheel

Brandon Sanderson 1:57:46 of Time happened, so.

Tim Ferriss 1:57:46 So when you look at this-

Brandon Sanderson 1:57:48 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:57:48 ... this record-breaking success-

Brandon Sanderson 1:57:52 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 1:57:52 ... this Kickstarter, were there aspects of it or packages that just outperformed all expectations? Right?

Brandon Sanderson 1:58:02 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 e-book and audiobook bundle that you got together, and you know, I think it was $15 each for those. And so-

Tim Ferriss 1:58:22 So each book in the audio, e-book-

Brandon Sanderson 1:58:25 Bundle

Tim Ferriss 1:58:25 ... combo was 15.

Brandon Sanderson 1:58:26 $15.

Tim Ferriss 1:58:27 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 1:58:27 Yep, which is about the price of an Audible credit, plus-

Tim Ferriss 1:58:31 Sure

Brandon Sanderson 1:58:31 ... you get the e-book. So for 60 bucks, you got all four books-

Tim Ferriss 1:58:34 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 1:58:34 ... 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 box every month of Brandon Sanderson swag, of just magical swag.

Tim Ferriss 1:58:52 For how long?

Brandon Sanderson 1:58:52 For a year.

Tim Ferriss 1:58:53 For a year.

Brandon Sanderson 1:58:54 Yeah, I like the idea of subscription boxes, but I have a problem with them in that they... There was the big subscription box craze of the late teens.

Tim Ferriss 1:59:02 Sure.

Brandon Sanderson 1:59:03 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. Everyone-

Tim Ferriss 1:59:48 And what was the price point for that?

Brandon Sanderson 1:59:50 So those were 40 bucks each, I think, also. So the idea is it's $40 a month. Four of those months you get a book, and then eight of those months you get a $40 box-

Tim Ferriss 1:59:59 Got it. Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 2:00:00 ... that has other cool stuff in it. And $40 was a high enough price point we could make some really quality, cool things.

Tim Ferriss 2:00:05 Just under 500 bucks-

Brandon Sanderson 2:00:07 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 2:00:07 ... for that.

Brandon Sanderson 2:00:07 And that tier was, I believe, our biggest tier. If it wasn't that one, it was the tier of just all the books, those editions. Those two were the ones that just went gangbusters. Almost nobody bought the lower tiers.

Tim Ferriss 2:00:19 Did that surprise you?

Brandon Sanderson 2:00:20 Yeah, that surprised me. But again, everyone's happy. They all get to self-select and get what they want.

Tim Ferriss 2:00:25 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 s- 30 to 40% newbies-

Brandon Sanderson 2:00:34 Yeah, I-

Tim Ferriss 2:00:34 ... going for the gold? I mean, that just strikes me as so unexpected.

Brandon Sanderson 2:00:38 I think part of it is, I would guess the majority of that 30 to 40% were people who had heard of me-

Tim Ferriss 2:00:43 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 2:00:43 ... and had not tried me yet.

Tim Ferriss 2:00:45 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:00:46 Right? I wasn't grabbing people who'd never, you know, that didn't ever read. But it was people who'd, friends that say, "Hey, Brandon Sanderson," and these four books were all starter books. 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 wanna hear weird stuff.

Tim Ferriss 2:01:05 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 2:01:05 Another tangent.

Tim Ferriss 2:01:06 Love weird stuff.

Brandon Sanderson 2:01:06 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 best-selling book through an edition by, from the publisher After Mistborn and Stormlight Archive

Tim Ferriss 2:01:31 Hmm

Brandon Sanderson 2:01:31 ... after the first books of those, not even the sequels. Like, after Mistborn 1 and S- and Stormlight 1, Tress of the Emerald Sea, that i- that book sells as much... It's really comparable. There are weeks where it kind of beats, where it beats them. So this book that you would think we'd sold to everybody, the publisher releases an edition expecting, "Well, there's not much, but we'll have it on, on the shelves", becomes their third-best-selling Sanderson book of all time.

Tim Ferriss 2:01:56 How do you explain that?

Brandon Sanderson 2:01:57 It's because it's that escape velocity of attention. People hear about you, they wanna 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.

Tim Ferriss 2:02:12 Hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:02:13 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 BookTok, so they buy it even though... So it, it's really interesting. The starter books do sell the best.

Tim Ferriss 2:02:27 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 2:02:27 Anyway, we're going back to we released this thing, and those are the ones, like, people want. They, they've heard of me. They say, "Well, I'll try this thing," and be- they become part of something, right? And so they all buy in, and then there's that thing, we call it The Year of Sanderson, and we started shipping these boxes out, and people got their boxes and their books, and it was, it was wonderful. It was [laughs] the best year of my life, right?

Tim Ferriss 2:02:53 That's incredible.

Brandon Sanderson 2:02:54 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 2:02:54 That is so incredible. So I have a question about the 4 times 25 people, the test readers.

Brandon Sanderson 2:02:59 Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 2:02:59 And this actually ties into some of the questions I wanted to ask about Warbreaker, but let's focus on the test readers, the 4 groups of 25.

Brandon Sanderson 2:03:06 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 2:03:07 When you have a, a new book of any type, do you use 25 to 100 test readers?

Brandon Sanderson 2:03:15 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 2:03:15 Okay. How do you absorb or evaluate that feedback? 'Cause that is... I could foresee that being a lot of feedback.

Brandon Sanderson 2:03:25 I pay my team-

Tim Ferriss 2:03:27 Hmm

Brandon Sanderson 2:03:28 ... 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 gonna say about a book before I release it. Sometimes it'll change what I write. Often it will. Sometimes it won't. I just wanna know. I wanna understand how it's gonna perform, what people are gonna 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 n- 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, I'm reversed. 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, 'cause 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 com- 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 to my friends, and they would all take a different color, and you'd have these conversations in the margins about what people thought of certain scenes, and I saw that and I'm like, "This is really handy."

Tim Ferriss 2:05:04 Did you ask for particular types of feedback-

Brandon Sanderson 2:05:07 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 2:05:07 ... to focus it?

Brandon Sanderson 2:05:08 So what I want is just, I don't want people to fix the book. I want people to give their descriptive responses to the book. If you were just reading this as a professionally published thing, where are the places you're bored, where are the places you're confused, where are the places that you're standing up and cheering? Where are 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.

Tim Ferriss 2:05:39 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:05:40 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 'cause you don't wanna 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-

Tim Ferriss 2:06:06 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 2:06:06 ... and go look and respond to what people are saying. If, you know, 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-

Tim Ferriss 2:06:22 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 2:06:22 ... the book and having a discussion.

Tim Ferriss 2:06:23 And you want people to respond to things 'cause it helps you spot patterns.

Brandon Sanderson 2:06:26 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 2:06:26 Like, if someone's like, "Yeah, yeah, it would start dragging here. I didn't really-

Brandon Sanderson 2:06:29 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 2:06:29 ... understand why this character did this," and then you have somebody-

Brandon Sanderson 2:06:31 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 2:06:31 ... be like, "Yeah, me too. Yeah, me too."

Brandon Sanderson 2:06:32 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 you, let people do is they just add a check mark next to it if they agree with it.

Tim Ferriss 2:06:49 Right.

Brandon Sanderson 2:06:50 And if they disagree, have them write out why.

Tim Ferriss 2:06:51 And that's in a spreadsheet or you're using something else?

Brandon Sanderson 2:06:53 So it's sp- spreadsheet. We use Google Sheets.

Tim Ferriss 2:06:54 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 2:06:54 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, that's secure and that can track..." Like, people will write a line number-

Tim Ferriss 2:07:07 Hmm

Brandon Sanderson 2:07:07 ... where they have their comment now and stuff. So we actually use a program, but sometimes we still use Google Sheets for kind of what we call-

Tim Ferriss 2:07:15 Is that program an off-the-shelf program?

Brandon Sanderson 2:07:16 One of my beta readers, which is what we call these people, worked for the company and pitched it to us.

Tim Ferriss 2:07:21 Okay, got it.

Brandon Sanderson 2:07:22 And the name of it's escaping me right now.

Tim Ferriss 2:07:24 That's okay.

Brandon Sanderson 2:07:24 I can find out what it is.

Tim Ferriss 2:07:25 We'll, we can figure it out and-

Brandon Sanderson 2:07:26 Yeah, we'll figure it out

Tim Ferriss 2:07:26 ... 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.

Brandon Sanderson 2:07:31 Is this your fantasy?

Tim Ferriss 2:07:33 No.

Brandon Sanderson 2:07:33 Okay.

Tim Ferriss 2:07:33 No, this is a different book. This is an entire book on saying no, and Basically finding-

Brandon Sanderson 2:07:38 Yeah, that's a-

Tim Ferriss 2:07:38 ... clarity in a world of noise.

Brandon Sanderson 2:07:40 It's a really good-

Tim Ferriss 2:07:40 Yeah

Brandon Sanderson 2:07:41 ... book to write.

Tim Ferriss 2:07:42 And I started working on it. It's the first book I ever shelved.

Brandon Sanderson 2:07:45 Hm.

Tim Ferriss 2:07:45 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.

Brandon Sanderson 2:07:59 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 2:08:00 The idea of serial release-

Brandon Sanderson 2:08:02 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 2:08:02 ... got very exciting-

Brandon Sanderson 2:08:03 That's really big nowadays

Tim Ferriss 2:08:03 ... 'cause I've never done it.

Brandon Sanderson 2:08:04 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 2:08:05 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-

Brandon Sanderson 2:08:11 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 2:08:11 ... and releasing early drafts for free on the website with Creative Commons and-

Brandon Sanderson 2:08:15 Let's go to that in just a second. Let me finish what I do with the beta reading.

Tim Ferriss 2:08:18 Yeah, yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 2:08:19 I give all that to my team.

Tim Ferriss 2:08:20 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:08:21 I go read the end of part summaries and the end of book summaries.

Tim Ferriss 2:08:25 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:08:25 They take the rest, they distill it, and then they actually put it into a copy of the book, the manuscript-

Tim Ferriss 2:08:30 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 2:08:31 ... just interstitials. They said this at this point, they said this at this point.

Tim Ferriss 2:08:34 Ah.

Brandon Sanderson 2:08:34 So I never even have to go to the document except to read, like, end of part one, what are people's general responses?

Tim Ferriss 2:08:40 And these are comments in-

Brandon Sanderson 2:08:42 Yes

Tim Ferriss 2:08:42 ... a Word doc or something like that?

Brandon Sanderson 2:08:43 Comments in a Word doc just in track changes-

Tim Ferriss 2:08:46 Yeah

Brandon Sanderson 2:08:46 ... so that I see here's a big discussion that happened here. They only take, like, 10 to 20% of it and put it in.

Tim Ferriss 2:08:51 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:08:52 So.

Tim Ferriss 2:08:52 What are the criteria for selection if they're only taking 10, 20%?

Brandon Sanderson 2:08:57 It's Peter and Karen, and they know me really well.

Tim Ferriss 2:09:00 Yeah. Got it.

Brandon Sanderson 2:09:00 These are people that I've worked with since college.

Tim Ferriss 2:09:03 Yeah, okay. [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:09:03 And so it's over time, and I will star and say, "This is a good comment. This is one that I..." You know, they handle editorial.

Tim Ferriss 2:09:10 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:09:10 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.

Tim Ferriss 2:09:25 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:09:25 But they, they figured

Brandon Sanderson 2:09:26 it out.

Tim Ferriss 2:09:26 And then looking at Warbreaker, why did you release it in the way that you released it? Maybe you could-

Brandon Sanderson 2:09:30 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 2:09:31 ... just describe how you went about doing it.

Brandon Sanderson 2:09:32 Yeah, so Warbreaker happened after I'd wrote the Mistborn trilogy and I was chatting with Cory Doctorow, kind of famous tech blogger and Creative Commons advocate. Every interaction with Cory has been really positive. Super class act. I was once at the Hugo Awards, and this is, you know, like the Academy Awards in sci-fi/fantasy.

Tim Ferriss 2:09:55 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:09:57 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 pa- basket. I didn't know it was there. He saw I didn't have mine. I'm like, "Oh, I don't have my pin," and he took off 'cause he, he had several. You wear any that you, any nominations you've had during that night.

Tim Ferriss 2:10:12 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:10:13 And so he took off one of his, and he just pinned it on me. You know, that's the kind of class act-

Tim Ferriss 2:10:17 Classy

Brandon Sanderson 2:10:17 ... Cory is. So I was talking to him, and he really believes and believed that attention is people's most valuable commodity.

Tim Ferriss 2:10:27 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:10:28 Not their money, their attention. If you can get their attention, you will eventually be able to, in some ways, get money from that audience to support yourself, but he says start with the 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. I'm working on Warbreaker. I'm just getting ready to, to start writing it, I believe, or the f- no, it was way back when. It's 2007. So I wrote a lot of the book, but there are parts I hadn't written. So the idea was I started releasing the chapters just on forums-

Tim Ferriss 2:11:06 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 2:11:06 ... 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-

Tim Ferriss 2:11:16 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 2:11:17 ... but also to have a chance to kind of bring my audience together into one place.

Tim Ferriss 2:11:21 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:11:22 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?

Tim Ferriss 2:11:32 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:11:32 I wanted data on that.

Tim Ferriss 2:11:34 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 2:11:34 And the data says doesn't really impact it. It sells just as well as Elantris does, even a little bit better, and Elantris wasn't released in the Creative Commons.

Tim Ferriss 2:11:42 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:11:42 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.

Tim Ferriss 2:11:53 Have you released any books after that with Creative Commons?

Brandon Sanderson 2:11:55 No. I keep wanting to do another one, and I haven't found the right one to do.

Tim Ferriss 2:12:00 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:12:01 But I, I am planning to do that at some point.

Tim Ferriss 2:12:03 How did you find the feedback online in the forums differed from beta testers?

Brandon Sanderson 2:12:08 It was about the same.

Tim Ferriss 2:12:09 It was?

Brandon Sanderson 2:12:10 It really was. But remember, we've got an insular audience of super fans at that point. That's the only people paying attention to me in 2007. Now it would probably be different. But I can get a little bit of that by watching. We do re-release one chapter a week or two chapters a week of new books leading up to launch to about a third of the book, and I can go read the threads on Reddit-

Tim Ferriss 2:12:33 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 2:12:33 ... about that, and they s- they actually mirror the beta readers really closely.

Tim Ferriss 2:12:38 Amazing.

Brandon Sanderson 2:12:38 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 for-

Tim Ferriss 2:12:51 What do you mean by that?

Brandon Sanderson 2:12:52 You walk this line in epic fantasy. Do you use "okay" or do you use "all right"?

Tim Ferriss 2:12:56 Oh, I see what you're saying.

Brandon Sanderson 2:12:57 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 books.

Tim Ferriss 2:13:10 Magepunk. [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:13:10 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 2:13:10 That's, I've never heard that. That's great.

Brandon Sanderson 2:13:11 Yeah. It's not my term.

Tim Ferriss 2:13:12 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:13:12 It's just what people kind of call when s- fantasy magic becomes technology.

Tim Ferriss 2:13:17 Uh-huh.

Brandon Sanderson 2:13:18 So if you watch any sort of film or thing where, you know, you have ships powered by a magical technology, they will call that magepunk.

Tim Ferriss 2:13:26 It's like hextech in Arcane.

Brandon Sanderson 2:13:27 Yeah, hextech. Arcane is magepunk.

Tim Ferriss 2:13:29 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:13:29 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-

Tim Ferriss 2:13:41 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 2:13:41 ... in their media nowadays. I think they're tired of media being cynical.

Tim Ferriss 2:13:46 Sure.

Brandon Sanderson 2:13:46 And this is a sign maybe... I, I don't think it went cynical, but this is like a danger sign of that. 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'd 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?

Tim Ferriss 2:14:15 Yeah, yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 2:14:15 Like, some people don't like impressionist.

Tim Ferriss 2:14:18 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 2:14:18 But you can't make impressionism better by not being impressionist.

Tim Ferriss 2:14:21 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:14:21 Each piece of art is gonna have things like that.

Tim Ferriss 2:14:23 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:14:24 So, yeah.

Tim Ferriss 2:14:24 Quick question. When, when you're releasing, say, chapter by chapter-

Brandon Sanderson 2:14:28 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 2:14:28 ... up to a third of a new book-

Brandon Sanderson 2:14:31 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 2:14:31 ... what is your cadence of releasing those chapters? Is it once per week?

Brandon Sanderson 2:14:35 Once per week is what-

Tim Ferriss 2:14:36 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 2:14:36 ... we've been doing. I could see value in twice a week, but once a week everyone gets together. The threads on Reddit are really cool.

Tim Ferriss 2:14:44 Where do you release those chapters?

Brandon Sanderson 2:14:46 We release them on Tor's website, Tor's publishing website.

Tim Ferriss 2:14:49 Ah, I see.

Brandon Sanderson 2:14:49 But right now it's called Reactor. It used to be tor.com.

Tim Ferriss 2:14:52 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:14:52 That's a good place for them.

Tim Ferriss 2:14:53 Why not release them on your own site or in some other way?

Brandon Sanderson 2:14:58 So there's arguments for that. The thing about it is we've found over time personal websites are important, but they're much less important than social media or aggregate websites in today's mind economy.

Tim Ferriss 2:15:12 What do you mean by aggregate websites?

Brandon Sanderson 2:15:14 Tor's website is a website that just has posts every day, things like, you know, shared blogs or places you go to that find a whole bunch of articles.

Tim Ferriss 2:15:25 Right, right, right.

Brandon Sanderson 2:15:25 Right? What we've found is, like, for instance, people will come to me to buy their print books. They will not come to me to buy their e-books. We had an e-book store. Maybe we'll put it back up. Um, we might even have a few that we're selling now. We sell in the tens of copies-

Tim Ferriss 2:15:39 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 2:15:39 ... of my e-books. People like their platform. They wanna have a Kindle and buy the books on their Kindle, which makes perfect sense. They do not wanna go somewhere else, buy an e-book, and load it to the Kindle, even if it's cheaper somewhere else.

Tim Ferriss 2:15:50 Yep.

Brandon Sanderson 2:15:51 Those who control the platform control the world. He who controls the spice, you know, controls-

Tim Ferriss 2:15:55 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:15:56 Well, here it's you control the platform. That's why Amazon did what it did. That's why Amazon-

Tim Ferriss 2:16:00 Sure

Brandon Sanderson 2:16:00 ... 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 mindshare of going to Kindle. I don't mind Tor trying to turn their website into that. It helps other authors. Fans get used to going there.

Tim Ferriss 2:16:17 Yeah, that's great.

Brandon Sanderson 2:16:18 Um, so yeah.

Tim Ferriss 2:16:18 No, it's like in the tech world, it's like the Hacker News.

Brandon Sanderson 2:16:21 Yeah, yeah, stuff like that, and we link to it on my website.

Tim Ferriss 2:16:23 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 2:16:24 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 Tor.

Tim Ferriss 2:16:32 Yeah, that makes sense.

Brandon Sanderson 2:16:33 But you said something I wanna ask you about.

Tim Ferriss 2:16:34 Sure.

Brandon Sanderson 2:16:35 Tell me if we wanna tread lightly, but you still take advances.

Tim Ferriss 2:16:38 Well, so I took advances on my past books.

Brandon Sanderson 2:16:42 Uh-huh.

Tim Ferriss 2:16:42 I considered, I considered profit share agreements.

Brandon Sanderson 2:16:46 Uh-huh.

Tim Ferriss 2:16:47 And actually, when I was beginning to consider rebooting, you know, dusting off and rebooting that book that I'd had-

Brandon Sanderson 2:16:55 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 2:16:55 ... on the, on the back shelf, I spoke with a number of larger publishers who, as humans, I-

Brandon Sanderson 2:17:01 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 2:17:01 ... liked-

Brandon Sanderson 2:17:02 Yes

Tim Ferriss 2:17:02 ... 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-

Brandon Sanderson 2:17:14 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 2:17:14 ... 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 gonna do very much promotion, and maybe that's for two to four weeks if they do any, but then they're gonna 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-

Brandon Sanderson 2:17:55 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 2:17:55 ... with loss aversion.

Brandon Sanderson 2:17:56 There is that argument. That is the big argument.

Tim Ferriss 2:17:57 But, but at this point-

Brandon Sanderson 2:17:59 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 2:17:59 ... 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. You know, I've thought about keeping audio and e-book, although I'll come back to that. I'd love your perspective on this, and then maybe doing a print-only deal because I do not have, as you do, the sort of facilities. I'm, I'm-

Brandon Sanderson 2:18:21 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 2:18:21 ... I'm almost perfectly happy to farm that out with, with an appropriately specced agreement. The deal terms need to make sense. But then there are even arguments for me to say license with a reversion of rights. A friend of mine, Hugh Howey-

Brandon Sanderson 2:18:38 Yep, I know Hugh

Tim Ferriss 2:18:39 ... is so smart with this.

Brandon Sanderson 2:18:41 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 2:18:42 But as you noted before, like, I used to have an audiobook club with Audible. This was back in the day with ACX when you could-

Brandon Sanderson 2:18:49 Yep

Tim Ferriss 2:18:49 ... get up to, like, 75% royalties.

Brandon Sanderson 2:18:51 Before they killed that.

Tim Ferriss 2:18:52 Yeah, and I understand, like, as a business, as you amass more and more critical mass in terms of control of a market, you can then change your compensation scheme with royalties.

Brandon Sanderson 2:19:07 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 2:19:07 Um, but as soon as it got to the point where it's like, okay, I'm gonna max out at whatever it is, 25, 35, this is no longer worth the time that I would put into it, so I stopped doing it.

Brandon Sanderson 2:19:16 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 2:19:16 So I've thought about keeping audio and e-book. I'm still considering it, but the fact of the matter is it seems like larger publishers have negotiated superior deal terms. 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 gonna 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-

Brandon Sanderson 2:19:44 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 2:19:44 ... in my life.

Brandon Sanderson 2:19:46 So what they're saying on audiobooks has some, some truth.

Tim Ferriss 2:19:50 Yep.

Brandon Sanderson 2:19:51 Not true on e-books.

Tim Ferriss 2:19:52 Yep.

Brandon Sanderson 2:19:52 So I'll just say you there. Though, there is one thing that the New York publishers get away with in e-books that you can't get on your own. Even I have not been able to fight them down on this.

Tim Ferriss 2:20:04 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 2:20:04 They will let the New York publishers charge more than $10.

Tim Ferriss 2:20:08 Ah, yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 2:20:09 And so there is that.

Tim Ferriss 2:20:12 This is on e-books?

Brandon Sanderson 2:20:13 On e-books.

Tim Ferriss 2:20:13 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 2:20:14 On audio, so this can get technical and nerdy, right?

Tim Ferriss 2:20:18 Yeah, let's do it. I like technical and nerdy.

Brandon Sanderson 2:20:20 So on e-books, basically the publisher's getting 70%-

Tim Ferriss 2:20:25 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 2:20:25 ... of price. It's $10, they're getting 7 bucks sent.

Tim Ferriss 2:20:28 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:20:29 As an indie author, as doing it yourself, you will get 7 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 or break that.

Tim Ferriss 2:20:57 They wanna keep you between, what is it-

Brandon Sanderson 2:20:58 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 2:20:58 ... 2.99 and 9.99?

Brandon Sanderson 2:21:00 Yep.

Tim Ferriss 2:21:00 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 2:21:00 If your book is priced at 9.99, as an e-book, there is almost no incentive to go to New York. Audiobooks, New York has negotiated all of their payments from Audible based on cover price of the book. So they can change the cover price of the book and get different things going on. But almost everything on Audible sells by credit, and getting out of the publishers how much they get off of a credit is like pulling teeth.

Tim Ferriss 2:21:28 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:21:29 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 Audible, that you are the customer of Audible, not the customer of the authors.

Tim Ferriss 2:21:44 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:21:44 And Audible's a great company, don't get me wrong. They made huge advances in audiobook distribution, readability. They've improved that market quite a bit.

Tim Ferriss 2:21:54 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:21:54 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.

Tim Ferriss 2:22:06 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:22:07 This is partially Apple's fault, Apple and Google. Because if you buy an audiobook through Audible's app, Google and Apple wanna take 30% of that.

Tim Ferriss 2:22:18 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:22:19 And the publishers n- don't wanna do that. 30% is egregious. It's insane.

Tim Ferriss 2:22:24 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:22:25 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, 'cause it's by credit. But then that turns all the audience into subscribers to Audible.

Tim Ferriss 2:22:44 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:22:44 So if Audible stops carrying a book, people just stop buying it. Once again, he who controls

Brandon Sanderson 2:22:50 the spice, he who controls the platform controls everything. Which means that they get to say, "Well, it's sp- 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 cre- credit, I'm saying credit too much.

Tim Ferriss 2:23:11 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:23:11 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, 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.

Tim Ferriss 2:23:30 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 2:23:30 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.

Tim Ferriss 2:23:41 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:23:42 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, a certain percentage to the reader. Narrators don't get royalties-

Tim Ferriss 2:24:04 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 2:24:04 ... which is kind of a thing. And I just really wish we could pierce that and make it happen, but-

Tim Ferriss 2:24:08 Yeah

Brandon Sanderson 2:24:09 ... we haven't been able to.

Tim Ferriss 2:24:10 So it sounds like, if I'm hearing you correctly, your advice would be to hold onto it to yourself?

Brandon Sanderson 2:24:14 So it depends. E-book, 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-

Tim Ferriss 2:24:28 [laughs] Yeah

Brandon Sanderson 2:24:28 ... and eventually got it to a place where it was good.

Tim Ferriss 2:24:31 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:24:32 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-

Tim Ferriss 2:24:45 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 2:24:45 ... than we used to do. As much as 50% better in some cases.

Tim Ferriss 2:24:49 Yeah, that's not trivial.

Brandon Sanderson 2:24:50 That's not trivial. I could actually get those actual numbers. I should get 'em 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 e-book and audiobook, and I have a profit share on the print with them, and then the e-book and audiobook. The e-book, straight up, is better. The audiobook, we make more, but we would make almost the same with the, with the publisher.

Tim Ferriss 2:25:18 And are you just interfacing directly with Amazon platforms for the-

Brandon Sanderson 2:25:21 Yep.

Tim Ferriss 2:25:22 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 2:25:22 Amazon and everyone else.

Tim Ferriss 2:25:23 Yep.

Brandon Sanderson 2:25:24 Doing my best. Like, Amazon would pay us better if we put 'em only on Amazon, but I refuse.

Tim Ferriss 2:25:28 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:25:29 And that's one, one of the reasons the publishers deal is a little better. Amazon gives them the deal that they give if you're exclusive to Amazon.

Tim Ferriss 2:25:37 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:25:38 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.

Tim Ferriss 2:25:43 Hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:25:44 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 2:25:44 Tricksy.

Brandon Sanderson 2:25:45 It's all so messy, right?

Tim Ferriss 2:25:46 It is messy.

Brandon Sanderson 2:25:47 This is all in the weeds.

Tim Ferriss 2:25:48 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:25:49 But here's the, the takeaway.

Tim Ferriss 2:25:51 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:25:52 The power is in two people's hands-

Tim Ferriss 2:25:54 Mm-hmm

Brandon Sanderson 2:25:55 ... right now. It's in the creators and the platform controllers.

Tim Ferriss 2:25:58 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:25:59 It's not in New York's hand anymore.

Tim Ferriss 2:26:01 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 2:26:01 And that's in some ways bad, 'cause those are good people. I think most creatives in, like, the audio industry hate their, [laughs] their business. Most authors are pretty... Like you said, the people are good.

Tim Ferriss 2:26:16 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:26:16 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.

Tim Ferriss 2:26:31 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:26:32 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, you can have the, the best world you can. So that, that's where we live right now.

Tim Ferriss 2:26:51 Let's go back to the list of your inflection-

Brandon Sanderson 2:26:54 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 2:26:54 ... points for a second.

Brandon Sanderson 2:26:54 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 2:26:55 Because I've, I've made promises I wanna keep with my listeners. Namely, so we have, we have Mistborn, Wheel of Time, Leatherbound, and then the COVID Kickstarter.

Brandon Sanderson 2:27:06 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 2:27:06 We have not covered The Wheel of Time. So for people-

Brandon Sanderson 2:27:09 Yes

Tim Ferriss 2:27:09 ... who don't even recognize the name, what is this?

Brandon Sanderson 2:27:13 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 2:27:13 And then how did you end up becoming involved?

Brandon Sanderson 2:27:15 So I talked about the three kinda genres of fantasy. For the '90s and early 2000s, the flag bearer of the best-selling epic fantasy was The Wheel of Time.

Tim Ferriss 2:27:26 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:27:27 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, was the top. Beyond that, Robert Jordan got sick in the early 2000s with a rare blood disease, and because of this, his book releases slowed down quite a bit, and that's when Game of Thrones was taking off. But for all of my childhood, Wheel of Time was the kind of flag bearer for epic fantasy. Was the heir to Tolkien, so to speak, and selling millions of copies, doing really, really well. And he got sick. He was really positive, but then in 2007 he passed away, having left his series unfinished. And I was a fan of this series. I had grown up reading it. It was one of my favorites. And I did not know him or his wife. His wife was his editor. It's actually really fun. She was his editor before his, she was his wife, and so-

Tim Ferriss 2:28:31 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:28:32 ... I always joke that that's a good way to make sure your editorial direction gets taken, you marry your author.

Tim Ferriss 2:28:36 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:28:37 But she had discovered him in Charleston, where she'd moved away from the big city. She was TOR's editorial director. She kinda helped Tom Doherty build TOR. She's the editor, if you guys know your sci-fi fantasy, she was the editor of The Book of Swords by Fred Saberhagen. She's the editor of the book Ender's Game.

Tim Ferriss 2:28:52 Great book.

Brandon Sanderson 2:28:53 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, and 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? Like, by the time I get up, it's 3:00 PM in New York, so.

Tim Ferriss 2:29:28 Now, is there something that happened before the voice memo, or no?

Brandon Sanderson 2:29:31 So there is, but I didn't know it. I get this voice memo from someone I'd never met-

Tim Ferriss 2:29:36 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:29:36 ... but I knew by reputation. Says, I know every word and inflection in this-

Tim Ferriss 2:29:40 All right. All right. Let's hear it

Brandon Sanderson 2:29:40 ... I've listened to it 100 times. "Hello, Brandon Sanderson. This is Harriet McDougal Rigney. I am Robert Jordan's widow, and I would like you to call me back. There's something I want to talk to you about." Just that by itself. So I get this voicemail, and I'm like, "Robert Jordan's widow? Harriet McDougal, the editor? Uh, okay." So I call her back, and I don't get a response. She's out getting a massage I later find.

Tim Ferriss 2:30:09 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:30:09 So I call my editor. He doesn't respond. He never responded. Moshe, he, he kept hours even weirder than mine when he-

Tim Ferriss 2:30:17 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:30:17 He's still around, but he was my e- editor. He's retired since then, but, you know, Moshe, great guy. I know this is something that you've talked about. Bipolar.

Tim Ferriss 2:30:25 Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson 2:30:26 So there are huge swaths of time where you just couldn't get ahold of him.

Tim Ferriss 2:30:28 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:30:28 He self-medicated with the History Channel, and so-

Tim Ferriss 2:30:30 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:30:31 ... sometimes you'd have to find out how to get ahold 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 I, 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, like, walking in a circle, like, babbling.

Tim Ferriss 2:31:01 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:31:01 And she's like, "What's going on?" Like, "I've never seen Brandon like this." And I'm like, "Robert Jordan's wife just called me." And she's like, "What? What'd she want?" And I'm like, "I don't know." So I finally call TOR. I reach an editor at TOR who's one of the managing editors, and he says, "Oh, that. Yeah, it's, it's what you think it is. I'll get her to call you back." I'm like, "It's what I... What do I think it is?"

Tim Ferriss 2:31:26 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:31:27 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," you know? Like, why would the widow call you to talk about your piece? But you're not wanting to assume anything. Like, 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-

Tim Ferriss 2:32:01 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:32:03 I, I can talk.

Tim Ferriss 2:32:04 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:32:04 I'm a talker. I could not talk

Tim Ferriss 2:32:06 Turned into a sheep.

Brandon Sanderson 2:32:07 I turned into a sheep. I actually, I wrote her an email-

Tim Ferriss 2:32:09 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:32:09 ... that night after not sleeping all night that said, "Dear Harriet, I promise I'm not an idiot." That was the first lines. I'm like, "I couldn't speak because this is so unexpected." And I spent that night thinking, I'm like, "Man, if I say yes to this and I screw it up, like..." We have seen how major media properties have had someone take over for them and then maybe not do as quite as good a job as the fan base has wanted, and what that has done perhaps to reputations and things like that.

Tim Ferriss 2:32:40 And just so we can place this in time-

Brandon Sanderson 2:32:42 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 2:32:42 ... where in your career were you?

Brandon Sanderson 2:32:43 This is 2007. I only have three books out. I have Elantris and Mistborn and then the first of my kids series, the ones I discovery wrote.

Tim Ferriss 2:32:51 Mm-hmm.

Brandon Sanderson 2:32:52 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 I... So they didn't know yet. They still thought I was maybe going to be a failure as a writer.

Tim Ferriss 2:33:11 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:33:12 We'll get to that. So the publisher had not brought my name up to her. When she'd asked who'd, who should finish it-

Tim Ferriss 2:33:19 Thanks, guys

Brandon Sanderson 2:33:19 ... yep, nobody mentioned me-

Tim Ferriss 2:33:21 [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson 2:33:22 ... 'cause 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 Matheson, 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 I, he'd influenced my writing, and she's like, "Well, this is really eloquent. He wrote this really well. He's a writer." So she called Tom Doherty.

Tim Ferriss 2:33:54 Were there any lines that stuck out to her in particular?

Brandon Sanderson 2:33:56 It was the last line. I believe I wrote something along the lines of, "You go quietly, but you leave us trembling." Right? 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, let me send you one of his books." 'Cause he was super excited it was one of his authors