0:00:15 Hi boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job every episode to deconstruct world class performers to figure out how they do what they do, what you can use, what you can emulate.
0:00:24 And this episode ended up being a master class. I had so much fun with it. My guest who I have wanted to interview for years is Brandon Sanderson.
0:00:39 He is the number one New York Times bestselling author of the Stormlight Archive series and the Mistborn Saga, the middle grade series Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians, and the Young Adult novels, the Rhythmetist, the Reckoners trilogy, and the Skyward series.
0:00:56 He has sold more than 40 million books in 35 languages. He has architected 40 million plus dollar Kickstarter campaigns, and he is a four time nominee for the Hugo Awards, winning in 2013 for his novella, The Emperor’s Soul.
0:01:12 That same year, he was chosen to complete Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series, which is a big, big deal culminating in a memory of light. Brandon co-hosts with fellow author Dan Wells, the popular intentionally blank podcast and teaches creative writing at Brangham Young University.
0:01:32 We did this one in person, which made all the difference in Brandon’s massive cavernous offices right next to his warehouse. It was a hell of a ride and we covered a lot of ground and a lot of really nitty gritty tactical advice related to fiction, business,
0:01:47 publishing, innovating across the board, how he architected his record breaking Kickstarter campaign, and much, much more. You can find him at brandonsanderson.com. That’s B-R-A-N-D-O-N Sanderson.com.
0:02:00 And you can find him on X Instagram and YouTube at brandsanderson. That’s B-R-A-N-D Sanderson. And I definitely recommend checking out all of those. So we’re going to hop right into it, get into the meat and potatoes.
0:02:08 A lot of varied terrain with Brandon Sanderson. First, just a few words from the people who make this podcast possible.
0:02:20 Listeners have heard me talk about making before you manage for years. All that means to me is that when I wake up, I block out three to four hours to do the most important things that are generative, creative, podcasting, writing, etc.
0:02:41 Before I get to the email and the admin stuff and the reactive stuff and everyone else’s agenda for my time, for me, let’s just say I’m a writer and entrepreneur, I need to focus on the making to be happy. If I get sucked into all the little bits and pieces that are constantly churning, I end up feeling stressed out.
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0:04:08 And disclosure, I am a client of Cresit. There are no material conflicts other than this paid testimonial. And of course, all investing involves risk, including loss of principle. So do your due diligence.
0:04:22 I’ve been fascinated by the microbiome and probiotics as well as prebiotics for decades, but products never quite live up to the hype. I’ve tried so many dozens and there are a host of problems.
0:04:37 Now things are starting to change and that includes this episode’s sponsor, SEEDS DS01 Daily Symbiotic. Now it turns out that this product, SEEDS DS01, was recommended to me many months ago by a PhD microbiologist.
0:04:50 So I started using it well before their team ever reached out to me about sponsorship, which is kind of ideal because I used it unbidden, so to speak, came in fresh. Since then it has become a daily staple and one of the few supplements I travel with.
0:05:05 I have it in a suitcase literally about 10 feet from me right now. It goes with me. I’ve always been very skeptical of most probiotics due to the lack of science behind them and the fact that many do not survive digestion to begin with.
0:05:18 Many of them are shipped dead, DOA. But after incorporating two capsules of SEEDS DS01 into my morning routine, I have noticed improved digestion and improved overall health seem to be a bunch of different cascading effects.
0:05:27 Based on some reports, I’m hoping it will also have an effect on my lipid profile, but that is definitely TBD. So why is SEEDS DS01 so effective? What makes it different?
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0:06:52 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
0:06:54 Can I answer your personal question?
0:06:56 No, I would have seeded it for a lifetime.
0:07:01 I’m a cybernetic organism living this year over a metal endoskeleton.
0:07:13 So, Brandon, just when we were doing soundcheck.
0:07:14 Yes.
0:07:15 What did you do?
0:07:25 So, when I was in kindergarten, I was taught the state song. And I have a good friend, Mary Robinette. She worked in stage for a while.
0:07:33 We did a podcast together when podcasts were brand new and she would always soundcheck by doing the Jabberwock poem, just this beautiful poetry.
0:07:41 She had learned to memorize a poem so that they could get a soundcheck because people generally don’t talk enough for a soundcheck.
0:07:45 And so, then they come to me and I’d be like, “I’m talking. I’m talking. You’ve seen it, the stuff that people do.”
0:07:48 And they’re like, “Is that enough? Is that enough?” They’re like, “Still some more.”
0:07:53 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.”
0:07:58 But I do know what Ms. Succup taught me in kindergarten, which is the state song.
0:08:03 And so, I just started listing off the states in alphabetical order, and it became a thing.
0:08:06 So, now they soundcheck me off of the list of states.
0:08:10 Yeah, you made it to New Mexico. I’m not sure I could make it past California without making a mistake.
0:08:15 I still hear the song in my head, “Fifty Nifty, United States.”
0:08:21 All right, well, let’s leap off of that. Do you have, would you say, in terms of superpowers, an unusual memory?
0:08:26 Or is there something just to the rhythm and musicality of that that made it stick?
0:08:33 No, I don’t think I have an unusual memory. I have an unusual one. I don’t have an uncommonly good one. How about that?
0:08:40 My wife always jokes. I don’t forget a story, and that I don’t. I don’t tend to re-read books.
0:08:44 I don’t tend to re-watch movies because I’ve seen it. I’ve read it.
0:08:50 Twenty years or so, I’ll go back and re-watch something, but stories just stick with me.
0:09:00 I can tell you about stories that I read when I was still a teenager, but I will forget where my keys are, right?
0:09:04 And I will forget people’s names, and I will, all of that stuff.
0:09:13 I joke that I’ve just got so much RAM, and I’ve filled it all with story ideas, and so everything else kind of just squeezed out the ears.
0:09:21 Well, it seems like where we’re sitting, where we’re sitting at HQ, it seems like the design of Dragonsteel,
0:09:25 maybe the intention behind it is to allow you to do that on some level.
0:09:35 Yeah, yeah. I mean, everything in our company is built around let Brandon cook and take away from Brandon
0:09:39 anything that he doesn’t have to think about, or, you know, doesn’t strictly need to.
0:09:45 I actually think this is kind of a Tim Ferriss thing, right? Like my water bottle.
0:09:48 I don’t have to worry about refilling it and having ice in the morning.
0:09:53 I’ve set up a system where somebody does that, and I just pick it up and go.
0:10:01 The more that I can keep out of my brain that I have to track the better because I am always constructing narrative.
0:10:03 I’m always working on the story.
0:10:09 Let’s give another example of productivity that I don’t want to say I vetoed, but it was a conversation before we started recording.
0:10:14 How many books or book plates do you sign per year?
0:10:21 So we need between 50,000 and 100,000 times my signature signed.
0:10:26 The story is usually I’m sitting here and signing pages while I’m doing anything
0:10:32 because if I have to sign my name 100,000 times, then, you know, I take up the empty space.
0:10:40 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.
0:10:42 And that’s just a massive undertaking.
0:10:46 We couldn’t do that anymore when it got over around 10,000.
0:10:50 I’d actually listen to podcasts and go sit and sign books and sign books and sign books.
0:10:55 Now we get the pages like the front page and we just give them to me in stacks.
0:10:59 If anyone wants to see it, my podcast exists so that I can sign the pages.
0:11:01 It’s the reverse, right?
0:11:07 I started up because I need to sign these things and I’ll just sit and zip through them normally while I’m doing anything else.
0:11:09 But today I wanted to give you my undivided attention.
0:11:10 I appreciate that.
0:11:13 And I’m going to have a lot of super fans of yours.
0:11:23 I’m sure, wish and petition me that I would have asked a different set of questions, but I’m actually going to start with Seoul, Korea.
0:11:34 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 mainly China also.
0:11:37 Where does Seoul, Korea fit into your life?
0:11:40 So I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ, Latter-day Saints.
0:11:43 A lot of us go on two-year missions.
0:11:44 It can be anywhere.
0:11:45 It can be local.
0:11:46 It can be overseas.
0:11:48 I ended up going to Korea.
0:11:51 I got the letter saying, “Hey, this is where we’d like you.”
0:11:53 And I’m like, “Where’s Korea?”
0:11:56 But I loved my time there.
0:11:59 It was really formative for me in multiple ways.
0:12:03 One of which is kind of more amusing.
0:12:09 I was at the time a chemistry major in college and I was so happy to be on another continent from chemistry.
0:12:15 I had those two years away to really kind of reassess my life and kind of grow up.
0:12:22 And most people, when they grow up, they go away from the artistic pursuits because they don’t make a lot of sense.
0:12:26 I grew up and came back and said, “I’m going to do this.
0:12:28 I’m going to be a writer.”
0:12:34 But living in another culture, living where you are a minority.
0:12:38 Granted, a privileged minority still, but a minority living.
0:12:43 And saying that the way that people’s language influences the way they think about the world,
0:12:48 the way that their social mores impact their relationships with one another,
0:12:55 and all of these things was extremely formative for me in understanding how to approach writing a fantastical culture.
0:13:03 Just on a fundamental basis, getting rid of some of these ideas that the way that I do things is the only way to do things.
0:13:08 The Korean language for people who haven’t been exposed, particularly the writing system.
0:13:09 Yes.
0:13:14 So if people want to learn to read Korean, you won’t be able to understand what you’re reading.
0:13:17 But if you want to sound it out, you can learn it in a few hours.
0:13:19 Yeah, we learned it in a few hours.
0:13:20 Do you know the story?
0:13:21 Tell the story.
0:13:22 The story. You know the story.
0:13:24 I do, but I think people will appreciate it.
0:13:27 This is obviously mythologized, right?
0:13:33 But King Sejong, so King Sejong, he’s the guy on the essentially the $10 bill in Korea.
0:13:35 He is there, George Washington.
0:13:37 And Sejong, the great.
0:13:42 And what happens, Chinese is a really fascinating writing system, right?
0:13:47 Because it’s logographic, which means that anyone can read a Chinese character.
0:13:49 It’s more of a hieroglyph than it is.
0:13:51 You can’t sound it out, right?
0:13:56 Because anyone can read it, it transcends language in a lot of ways.
0:13:59 You can see the symbol for person and know it means person.
0:14:05 Whether you speak Mongolian or whether you speak Thai or whether you speak Japanese or Korean or Chinese.
0:14:08 So it makes it a great kind of language for trade.
0:14:13 But it also is extremely hard to learn because every concept must have essentially its own letter.
0:14:20 And so to be fluent in reading it, you need to learn 2000 to 3000 letters.
0:14:26 And so it was a really bad system for a common people to learn how to read.
0:14:30 And King Sejong was like, my people are illiterate.
0:14:32 They can’t learn Chinese.
0:14:35 We must have our own writing system that you can sound out.
0:14:45 You sound out Korean and he gathered his scholars and the story as they together created the system that would be have no deviations.
0:14:50 It read like it sounded and they designed it based on the movements of the mouth you make.
0:14:56 And then King Sejong loved it so much he wrote it on little leaves and then spread it out.
0:15:01 Because the upper class did not want people to learn how to read and they were very against it.
0:15:03 They’re like, oh, we don’t want the commoners to read.
0:15:04 That’s for us.
0:15:09 They, you know, passing the tests and Chinese was a big, you know, Latin for the high priesthood.
0:15:18 And so Sejong wrote it on a letter and it blew through Korea and the people picked it up and it was so divinely inspired that they intrinsically knew how to read Korean.
0:15:25 And he frustrated the attempts of the nobles from keeping people to read by giving it to people written on leaves.
0:15:26 It’s so delightful.
0:15:28 It is an amazing, amazing mythology story.
0:15:32 And the Korean people are very proud of this writing system for good reason.
0:15:35 I encourage everybody to just take a few hours.
0:15:41 I think there’s even a comic book called How to Learn to Read Korean in 15 Minutes or something like that.
0:15:42 Slight exaggeration.
0:15:43 It’s going to take you more than 15 minutes.
0:15:44 Yeah.
0:15:47 But in 60 minutes, you could definitely get the basics and figure it out.
0:15:52 Definitely gives you a false sense of your own skill when you learn it.
0:15:53 You’re like, wow, I’m reading.
0:15:56 And they’re like, all right, now the actual language, what these things mean.
0:16:07 And good news, if you do learn some Korean, you can hop reasonably easily to Japanese and in some cases to Chinese as well.
0:16:13 So you might have Jeong Hwang for telephone, then Dian Hwang in Chinese Mandarin, and then Daewang in Japanese.
0:16:15 So there’s a lot of overlap.
0:16:23 Or like if you want to say, “Tan-san-su juseyo” in Korean.
0:16:27 So anyway, if you get one, then it’s a good branch off to other things.
0:16:32 All right, I’m going to cut my linguistics nerding short.
0:16:33 You need to create a conlang.
0:16:34 Have you ever done it?
0:16:36 Oh, I have actually.
0:16:38 So you should explain what that means.
0:16:42 But I have actually spent some time on it.
0:16:48 And I owe you a huge debt of gratitude because I listened to probably 40 episodes of writing excuses.
0:16:49 Oh, did you?
0:16:55 And then I was working on my first real attempt at fantasy world building a few years ago.
0:16:59 And I wanted to incorporate language as a core piece of it.
0:17:04 And I spent a lot of time also looking at Tolkien’s work with languages.
0:17:05 He’s the master.
0:17:07 Yeah, unbelievably complex.
0:17:23 And I also, at one point, this is actually from my third book, reached out to the gentleman who designed the Navi language in Avatar, which in very partial measure stemmed from some of his exposure to some of these East Asian languages as well.
0:17:30 But okay, so how would you approach and how do you think about language construction?
0:17:32 Are you sure we’re not getting too nerdy for your audience?
0:17:33 This is super nerdy.
0:17:36 Yeah, folks, look, we’re about to go really deep in the nerd pool.
0:17:41 So if you want to skip ahead five minutes, that’s fine, but I’d encourage you to stick around.
0:17:44 A con leg is a constructed language.
0:17:50 Most people know of Klingon and Elvish and George Martin has one and the Navi you mentioned.
0:17:52 These are just invented languages.
0:17:57 There’s only one that’s in wide use or wide quote unquote Esperanto.
0:18:05 You could almost say that Korean is a bit one because it was actively designed rather than growing organically.
0:18:08 But I think it’s hovering in this in between space.
0:18:09 So how do I approach it?
0:18:18 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.
0:18:20 He wanted a place to use them, right?
0:18:21 Including crazy scripts.
0:18:22 Yeah.
0:18:26 And I said, I don’t have 20 years to do that like Grandpa Tolkien.
0:18:28 I’m really a narrative guy.
0:18:31 I really focus on what makes a narrative work.
0:18:32 I’m going to break it down.
0:18:36 People think of me as the world building guy, but I’m not.
0:18:39 That’s certainly the thing I’ve used as my branding and marketing.
0:18:43 It’s the way that I’ve used to make myself easily recommendable and distinctive.
0:18:46 But what I spend most of my time on is narrative.
0:18:56 And so when I look at the language, I’m like, I want to have something that is relevant, that works, but I don’t want to spend 20 years.
0:19:03 And so I usually come up with a few interesting rules that I’ve come up with through my knowledge of linguistics.
0:19:05 And I say, follow these rules.
0:19:08 Whenever you need a word, go back to these rules and build it.
0:19:09 Don’t write out the whole language.
0:19:12 Don’t come out with how you would say every sentence.
0:19:18 Each time you need something, go to the rules, build it up from the fundamentals, and it will all eventually then work.
0:19:26 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.
0:19:32 This I ran into, which is part of the reason why I was revisiting my email changes with the person who created Navi,
0:19:40 because I had something like eight greater houses in this fancy world that I was creating for my own entertainment more than anything else.
0:19:42 It’s just an itch, I really want to scratch.
0:19:53 And the extent to which I developed languages was really just for a few exclamations, a few songs, very short, not Tolkien, like 20 minutes on audiobook.
0:20:00 And I loved it, but I recognized how you could really trap yourself in quicksand if you tried to get too ambitious.
0:20:05 We call it world builders disease, which sometimes you want to give yourself, it’s fun.
0:20:15 But if you spend 20 years world building every book in today’s market, you’re probably not going to have a career as a professional writer.
0:20:22 You might, you might get lucky and write that one book that’ll sell millions of copies and make it so you can live off of just that income.
0:20:24 Most of us, it takes a lot more effort.
0:20:32 And we learn to world build in service of story rather than write stories in service of world building, but everybody gets to do what they want.
0:20:34 You scratch your itch, how you want to scratch it.
0:20:40 We’re going to talk about putting in the effort and No Man’s Land perhaps is one way that we could put it.
0:20:47 But I want to ask first about David Farland, if I’m pronouncing your name correctly.
0:20:55 So as an undergrad, at least based on research I did, you took a creative writing class with David Farland or a writing class.
0:21:03 How did that affect you and what lessons might you have grabbed onto that have stuck with you in any way?
0:21:09 Yeah, so I came back from Korea sophomore year of college and I’m like, I’m young, I’m stupid.
0:21:12 Now is the time to try to be a writer, right?
0:21:14 This is what I really want to do.
0:21:18 And I suspect we’ll get into later why I really want to do that and things like that.
0:21:22 But it changed my major to English because I thought that’s what you had to do.
0:21:26 Later found out Stephen King and others recommend you major in anything but English.
0:21:35 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.
0:21:37 I do recommend that.
0:21:42 The cheat code is if you major in English, you can use your writing as your homework.
0:21:45 The assignments you can double use your time.
0:21:48 A lot of times you can be practicing your writing but also turn it in.
0:21:51 And so it’s a little easier in some ways.
0:21:57 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.
0:21:59 I love them.
0:22:04 Most of them have retired by now or passed on but they knew nothing about publishing.
0:22:06 This is just very common in the arts, right?
0:22:15 They’ll talk about how to express yourself as a writer but they won’t talk about how do you construct a sympathetic character.
0:22:17 Never heard those terms.
0:22:26 They’ll tell you about how to get into a MFA program but they won’t tell you how to get a publishing deal because none of them have done it.
0:22:36 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.
0:22:43 I heard that there was a writer coming in who actually had published something and he was teaching the low level, 200 level class.
0:22:47 And then I was in taking the graduate courses even though I wasn’t a graduate yet.
0:22:51 And I’m like, “I should probably take this class even though it’s kind of a step backward.
0:22:58 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.”
0:23:01 And so I took his class and it was revolutionary to me.
0:23:04 He sat down like the first few days.
0:23:07 He’s like, “All right, here’s how you actually construct a narrative.
0:23:08 Here’s what works.
0:23:09 Here’s what doesn’t work.
0:23:10 Here are tools.”
0:23:17 I was kind of focused and it became my focus in teaching on here’s a toolbox because not every tool works for every writer.
0:23:22 In fact, you’re generally going to gravitate toward one or two and the rest you’ll find useless.
0:23:27 And he took that toolbox approach and he said, “Some writers do it this way, some writers do it that way.
0:23:28 Try this.
0:23:29 Here’s something to do.”
0:23:35 And then he talked about publishing in this way that was mind blowing because that was the big thing for me.
0:23:36 Was hearing someone say–
0:23:37 Kind of the black box.
0:23:38 Yeah.
0:23:39 Here’s my publishing contract.
0:23:41 He said, “He passed it around.
0:23:42 Here’s my latest contract.
0:23:43 Have a look at it.
0:23:44 Ask questions.”
0:23:47 And here’s how you go about getting one of these.
0:23:52 And I took his advice back in the early 2000s.
0:23:55 Publishing in sci-fi fantasy was still very networking focused.
0:23:59 It’s actually moved away from that for various reasons.
0:24:12 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.
0:24:17 The magic question was, what are you working on right now that you’re really excited by?
0:24:21 Because this lets you learn the personalities of the various editors.
0:24:30 It’s not networking in that none of them knew who I was, but it’s networking in that hearing from them directly what they were buying and why.
0:24:37 Then you could go to these 50 editors and say, “All right, these five really seem like they would like my work.”
0:24:41 Instead of sending to all 50, I target those five.
0:24:42 I met them at a party.
0:24:43 I say, “Hey, I met you.
0:24:45 Sound like we hit it off.
0:24:47 You mentioned that I could send you my work.
0:24:48 Here it is.”
0:24:54 That’s what got me an agent and an editor was doing that, just kind of the Dave Farland method of breaking in.
0:24:56 I was the last generation that worked for.
0:24:58 It really doesn’t work anymore.
0:25:02 Everyone jokes that in publishing, no one actually wants to publish in the authors.
0:25:04 No one wants to actually do any work.
0:25:09 So anytime someone sneaks in, they’re like, “Oh, how did you get into publishing?
0:25:10 Oh, really?”
0:25:13 And then they close that door so that no one else can get in.
0:25:19 We all joke about things like that. It’s not actually true. Everyone actually wants to find great authors and great work.
0:25:26 But the industry changes quickly enough that what works for one generation by the time they’ve broken in, the industry’s changed.
0:25:27 It just doesn’t work.
0:25:32 So I’m going to come back to the agent and I’ll just plant the seed.
0:25:35 I’m going to ask how much writing you did before that happened.
0:25:41 But before we get to that, I want to ask, are you still teaching the creative writing class at BYU?
0:25:42 I am.
0:25:43 Bring me on university.
0:25:45 What is the first class?
0:25:46 First class.
0:25:49 So first class is some things I just told you.
0:25:54 I get up and I say to them, actually the very first thing is I say to them,
0:25:59 “During this class, we’re going to pretend you want to be a professional writing writer,
0:26:04 earning a full-time living from your writing in the next 10 years.”
0:26:10 That we’re going to pretend because most of you, that’s probably not whether there, right?
0:26:12 Most of them, they’re just curious.
0:26:14 They may have a book of them.
0:26:19 And we have this curious relationship with art in our society.
0:26:24 It is, as soon as you say, “I’m going to write something,” people are like, “Oh, when will you monetize it?
0:26:26 When will you earn money from it?”
0:26:29 And that can be kind of destructive, right?
0:26:33 Like you mentioned, you’re writing a book or you wrote one just because it was an itch.
0:26:34 You enjoyed it.
0:26:37 I think writing is legitimately just good for people.
0:26:42 And the same way that working out is good for people, learning to write a narrative
0:26:46 and get those thoughts out of your head and page, just innately good.
0:26:51 Most people, when they go play basketball, pretty if they look like me,
0:26:54 people aren’t going to be like, “So when are you going into the NBA?”
0:26:55 Yeah, right.
0:26:58 But if you write a book, people will say, “So when are you going to publish it?”
0:27:02 And I say to the students, “It’s okay if that’s not your goal.
0:27:06 If you want to write just for you, if you want to be on the I spent 20 years
0:27:09 and then produce one book, route, totally fine.
0:27:14 However, I want you to know everything you would need to shoot for the highest level,
0:27:17 which is earning a full-time living as a writer.
0:27:19 And everything else falls underneath that.
0:27:23 So during the class, we pretend that that’s your goal.
0:27:26 Once you walk out of it, you can make your own goals, whatever they are.
0:27:29 But while we’re there, we pretend that.
0:27:33 And then the second thing I say is, you’re going to have to learn when to ignore me.
0:27:37 And that is really hard to do because I’m an authority.
0:27:38 I’m up there.
0:27:43 Survivorship bias says, “Who knows what I actually say is going to be relevant?”
0:27:49 Some of it, hopefully, but I can’t really determine what really played a part in me
0:27:50 being successful and what didn’t.
0:27:51 Sure, of course.
0:27:55 And I want to approach it as a toolbox, giving people all of these various tools.
0:27:58 Some of them are, sure, contradictory, self-contradictory.
0:28:02 I can give you examples of that if you want, but you can’t use them all.
0:28:07 So you’re going to have to ignore some of the advice of major authors.
0:28:09 Some of the things that Stephen King tells you will be wrong.
0:28:14 Some of the things for you, some of the things that I tell you will be wrong for you.
0:28:16 You have to find your own way.
0:28:19 And so I kind of start off with, I’m going to pretend you want to be a professional writer
0:28:23 and then follow it up with, but learn when to ignore me.
0:28:28 What are some of the contradictory tools or approaches in the toolkit?
0:28:34 The one I generally use as my prime example is when I was studying this before I broke in,
0:28:37 two authors that I admired, I read their books.
0:28:42 I read Odd Writing by Stephen King and How to Write Syphine Fantasy by Orson Scott Card.
0:28:48 And I read these books, and I honestly can’t tell you 100% if it was in those exact books
0:28:50 or other writings of theirs on their websites and things.
0:28:55 But Stephen King at one point said, “Do not make an outline.
0:28:57 Do not use a writing group.
0:28:59 These will destroy your writing.”
0:29:02 And Scott Card is like, “I need an outline.
0:29:07 It is fundamentally vital for me in order to build my book.”
0:29:13 Now, Stephen King is what we generally call, these are George R. R. Martin’s terms.
0:29:16 He’s wonderful the way he speaks about fiction.
0:29:19 If you’re really interested, anything George says is golden.
0:29:20 He calls them gardeners.
0:29:22 Stephen King is a gardener.
0:29:28 For Stephen King, exploring and discovering his story is the thing that makes him excited.
0:29:29 He wants to take a seed.
0:29:34 He’ll often say, “I take two really interesting characters and I put them in conflict
0:29:38 and have something go wrong and I see where the story goes and I just write.”
0:29:43 And he says that if he has an outline, he feels like he’s already done that process in the outline.
0:29:46 So when he sits down to write the book, he has no motivation.
0:29:49 He’s not exploring and discovering anymore.
0:29:51 The other group we call architects.
0:29:57 Architects like to build a structure and then kind of go and take this little piece
0:30:00 and then polish that little piece and see where it goes
0:30:03 and then take the next piece that they’ve already built as part of their structure
0:30:05 and build a story around that.
0:30:08 And most people are somewhere in between these two extremes,
0:30:12 but those were two extremes where I realized I can’t do both of these.
0:30:15 I can’t both not have an outline and have an outline.
0:30:22 I can have a hybrid approach, but if you try to take both of their advice equally weighted,
0:30:24 then you’re going to get nowhere.
0:30:26 You can try both methods in different ways.
0:30:30 You can try some hybrids, but a lot of things you’ll learn in writing.
0:30:34 You kind of have to choose one or the other and try it out and see how it works for you.
0:30:40 What are some of the assignments that have most resonated with students
0:30:45 or you think best served them even though they might not recognize it?
0:30:51 What I generally do is I follow a focus on habits approach.
0:30:55 Instead of giving them specific writing exercises,
0:30:58 if someone comes up to me and says, “I’m having trouble with X,”
0:31:00 I’ll give them a writing exercise to work with that.
0:31:04 If someone comes up to me and says, “I am having a lot of trouble
0:31:08 going back and revising my chapters over and over again,” instead of writing the next one,
0:31:11 I’ll say, “Okay, try writing longhand.”
0:31:13 This works for some people.
0:31:16 You go, you take a page of paper, you write it longhand and you tell yourself,
0:31:19 “It doesn’t have to be perfect until I put it into the computer,”
0:31:25 and you start each day taking what you wrote before and putting it into the computer
0:31:28 and then leave it alone and write your next chapter longhand
0:31:32 and then use that process to kind of get yourself back into the writing,
0:31:34 but then forcing yourself to do something new.
0:31:36 That works for some people.
0:31:38 If people are having trouble with dialogue,
0:31:43 I say, “All right, go do the exercise where you sit and listen to people on campus,”
0:31:48 and you just write down exactly what they say, exactly as it’s said,
0:31:53 and then take it and try to write it under different styles of dialogue.
0:31:56 If you’re writing like Soderbergh, how would you do it?
0:31:58 Pick some of your favorite people.
0:32:03 Go watch their movies, write down the dialogue and compare that to the real life
0:32:07 and just kind of figure out what kind of dialogue you like to do.
0:32:12 Those are exercises, but in general, I’m only doing that when I’m diagnosing a problem.
0:32:18 For the class, I’m saying your job, if you want to, try to be a professional writer.
0:32:21 You’re going to have to write consistently.
0:32:26 Nine out of 10 writers that I’ve found do better with consistency.
0:32:28 One out of 10 is a binge writer.
0:32:32 I don’t understand binge writers as well, but I can talk about that.
0:32:36 Those are the people who go rent a cabin, take two months,
0:32:41 walk in without a book, come out with a book, and then they don’t write for 10 months.
0:32:47 Most people are better served by writing a certain amount every day really consistently,
0:32:54 or at least two or three times a week, and building a novel out of good habits.
0:32:55 I focus on that.
0:33:01 I’m like, break it down, set a goal, have a spreadsheet, and try to hit your word counts,
0:33:03 or at least your hour counts.
0:33:07 If you’re having trouble doing this, go to a specific place every day that you do this
0:33:08 that you don’t do a lot of other things.
0:33:09 Go to the coffee shop.
0:33:11 Go to a certain room in the house.
0:33:13 Turn on certain music that you only turn on when you’re writing.
0:33:17 Build that habit so that you are very consistent.
0:33:19 Batch your writing time.
0:33:23 If there’s something you already do every day, if you already have built a habit to go to the gym,
0:33:29 then try to align your life so that you go to the gym and then have an hour to write.
0:33:31 Think about where you’re going to write at the gym.
0:33:36 Sit and write for an hour so that you are adding on to a habit that you’ve already built.
0:33:39 And that’s my focus in the class is really be consistent.
0:33:40 See if you can write.
0:33:43 The goal is in the class to write 35,000 words.
0:33:46 Class is around a third of the year.
0:33:51 If you do that all year, you will end up with 100,000 words, which is your average novel.
0:33:57 How many just for people listening who aren’t in the writing biz or the writing habit,
0:34:02 100,000 words in a typical trade paper bag or it could be a hardcover.
0:34:04 How many pages is that 300?
0:34:06 Yeah, 350.
0:34:14 Like the way of Kings is 400,000 words and we kind of cram stuff in there and we get to a thousand pages on that.
0:34:16 So you can kind of run that.
0:34:17 It’s a fourth of a thousand pages.
0:34:18 So it’d be 250.
0:34:20 But here’s the thing.
0:34:22 We use dirty tricks in publishing.
0:34:25 If you’re reading a thriller or a young adult book,
0:34:30 what they’ll do is they’ll put a lot fewer words on a page because they want to increase the pacing.
0:34:32 They want to make it feel like you’re just zipping through.
0:34:33 It’s a page turner, right?
0:34:38 So they’re going to want, you know, 50% fewer words on every page.
0:34:42 So that kid picking up that book that’s a reluctant reader is like, wow, this one’s really fast.
0:34:45 I don’t have space for that in my big fantasies.
0:34:47 I push the limits of what can be bound.
0:34:51 And beyond that, we’re not expecting you to read this book in one sitting.
0:34:56 So we can put more on a page that makes it feel dense and thick and meaty,
0:35:00 which can be really enjoyable if you want to dig into a new world and things like that.
0:35:08 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:36:24 The APY is subject to change.
0:36:26 For more information, see the episode description.
0:36:34 Let’s hit some top-line habits from Brandon.
0:36:39 How many words per year on average would you say you put down?
0:36:43 My goal is 2,000 to 2,500 words a day.
0:36:51 So, you know, whatever, 10 pages to 20 pages is what I’m looking at.
0:36:52 Depends.
0:36:58 I mean, I write in the old-school manuscript format where everything’s 12-pointed and courier.
0:37:05 And it’s a holdover from the days when certain typesetting things are done that are too nerdy perhaps to talk about here.
0:37:09 But I think in words, so I do 2,500.
0:37:10 Those are new words.
0:37:11 Those are new words.
0:37:15 Now, when I’m doing revisions, I’m not writing new words.
0:37:20 And I would say around a third of my time is spent on revisions depending on the year.
0:37:21 And this is the thing.
0:37:23 Some years, I’ll do a lot of words.
0:37:25 Some years, I do a lot more revisions.
0:37:26 It really depends.
0:37:34 But if we’re looking at 2,000 words a week times 50 weeks, like that can produce quite a lot of words, right?
0:37:38 20, so 10,000 words a week is what that would turn into.
0:37:41 That’s 500,000 words a year, right?
0:37:44 Is what I could theoretically produce.
0:37:47 Now, third of my time is done to revisions.
0:37:51 So, really, I’m looking at around 300,000 words.
0:37:57 A Stormlight Archive book is 18 months of work for that reason and things like that.
0:37:58 All right.
0:38:01 We might come back to that and the revision process.
0:38:08 But just as promised to hop back and forth between past and present tense, why did you want to become a writer?
0:38:10 So, this is a fun story.
0:38:20 I was not a writer or a reader when I was young, which is I found pretty odd for people who are published novelists.
0:38:25 A lot of my friends, I’ll talk to them and be like, yeah, I published my first thing when I was two, right?
0:38:32 I came out of the womb with a poem ready to go in my student newspaper and things like that.
0:38:39 Me, I did read when I was very young and about fourth or fifth grade, I fell out of it.
0:38:49 And this is the era where I lived in Nebraska and there were certain books that people just really like to read in Nebraska.
0:38:56 And they usually involved young people on farms, sometimes living in the wilderness on their own, sometimes on a ranch.
0:38:59 They had pet dogs and the pet dogs died.
0:39:06 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.
0:39:09 I know what it’s like to be a kid.
0:39:13 Like I don’t live on a farm, but my grandparents were all farmers, right?
0:39:16 And I live behind a farm.
0:39:27 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.
0:39:30 But there’s a cornfield in your backyard. That’s just Nebraska, right?
0:39:32 That’s just how we roll.
0:39:34 And so I knew all of that.
0:39:36 I was not interested in it.
0:39:38 And so I fell out of reading.
0:39:39 Eighth grade rolls around.
0:39:40 I have a teacher, Ms. Reader.
0:39:41 She doesn’t remember me.
0:39:42 Ms. Reader.
0:39:43 Ms. Reader.
0:39:44 How appropriate.
0:39:45 Yeah, Ms. Reader.
0:39:47 She wanted to be a professor at UC Irvine.
0:39:55 So if anyone had a professor reader at UC Irvine, this was the same person, but Ms. Reader, she was my eighth grade English teacher.
0:40:00 And I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I cheated on a book report with her.
0:40:06 If you’re a smart kid, you realized that the back of the book, even before the internet, basically tells you the entire plot.
0:40:10 And then you can read the last chapter and you’ll know the whole plot of the book.
0:40:13 So it’s like book report, write a summary and why you liked it.
0:40:16 And I read the back of the book, the last chapter and turned it in.
0:40:19 And I made some mistakes and she picked me out.
0:40:21 She sat me down and she was actually very good.
0:40:24 She’s like, something’s not clicking with you with books.
0:40:26 And I’m like, no, they really aren’t.
0:40:32 She’s like, so for your next book report, I just want you to read one of these books on my rack here.
0:40:35 These are my favorite books that I have for kids to read.
0:40:38 I just want you to actually read it and you can talk to me about it.
0:40:40 And I kind of, I don’t like books.
0:40:42 She’s like, well, just try something different.
0:40:48 So I went to the rack and I always joke it’s like, you can tell the paperbacks have been read by a hundred students, right?
0:40:51 They got spaghetti stains on them and things like that.
0:40:57 It’s just, and I looked leaf through and I arrived on this book called “Dragon Spain” by Barbara Hamley.
0:41:00 And it really was the cover, cover illustrator is Michael Whalen.
0:41:05 I would eventually, he’s the illustrator who did the “Away of Kings” in the Stormlight Archive for me.
0:41:06 I eventually got him.
0:41:08 He just retired.
0:41:09 He did.
0:41:13 The last cover was the fifth book of the Stormlight Archive and he’s retired, but he’s done that before.
0:41:14 So he might be back.
0:41:22 He pulls a Miyazaki sometimes and pops in and out or a Michael Jordan, depending on the field you’re talking about.
0:41:29 But regardless, I picked up this book and, you know, it had cool dragon on the cover.
0:41:31 It was all misty and kind of awesome looking.
0:41:33 It had a cute girl on the cover.
0:41:36 It’s like, “Hey, I’m 14. Maybe this will work.”
0:41:37 And I take this book.
0:41:40 Now, this book should not have worked.
0:41:42 This book absolutely should not have.
0:41:44 Like, what do you want to give a reluctant reader?
0:41:50 You usually want to give them a book about someone their age, usually very similar to them.
0:41:54 A reluctant reader, if it’s a young man, you hand him Harry Potter, right?
0:41:58 This is a book about a middle-aged woman going through a midlife crisis.
0:42:04 The story is that there’s a dragon who’s come to, you know, destroy the kingdom.
0:42:08 The last living person who’s killed a dragon is this guy and they go hunting him.
0:42:12 And he lives up in the north because he’s now middle-aged with a family.
0:42:15 And he’s like, “I killed a dragon when I was in my 20s.
0:42:17 I don’t do that anymore.
0:42:18 I’m an old dude now.”
0:42:20 And they’re like, “You’re the only one who’s ever done it.”
0:42:24 And so he goes to his wife and he’s like, “I guess I got to go kill this dragon.
0:42:25 We got to figure out how to do this.”
0:42:29 And it’s told from her perspective as they go down and try to figure out how to kill a dragon
0:42:33 as middle-aged people and be smart about it rather than charging you with a sword.
0:42:40 And her story is she has been told by her teacher she could be the greatest wizard ever.
0:42:42 She’s got a raw natural talent.
0:42:47 But she has divided her time between studying and having a family.
0:42:51 And her teacher’s like, “You really should give up that family stuff.
0:42:54 Just really focus on your magic.”
0:42:56 But you know, this is her crisis.
0:43:00 And through going down, she kind of learns about the dragon magic
0:43:04 and she starts to get really into that and not to give spoilers,
0:43:09 but there’s an opportunity for her to just go and become what she’d always dreamed.
0:43:13 And her crisis is, “Do I go do this right now or do I not?”
0:43:15 And I’m reading this book and it’s really cool.
0:43:16 It’s inventive.
0:43:23 And I realize at some point, my mother, she graduated first in her class
0:43:28 in accounting in a year where she was the only woman in most of her accounting classes, right?
0:43:34 She had been offered a really prestigious scholarship to go get her CPA.
0:43:36 And she had decided not to.
0:43:41 She decided that she wanted to be home with young kids when she had young kids,
0:43:45 which I do not think is a decision anyone should make for you,
0:43:47 but it’s a decision she made for herself.
0:43:51 She later, after having kids, went on and had a really great career as an accountant,
0:43:57 but she gave up some really important things that as I’m reading this book,
0:43:59 I had always heard these stories.
0:44:00 You know, she would tell them.
0:44:02 She wants us to know that she…
0:44:05 And I always thought, “Of course you did, mom.
0:44:06 Look at me.
0:44:08 I’m great.
0:44:10 This is what you should have done.”
0:44:13 I’m reading this book and I’m like, “Ditch the kids.
0:44:14 Go be a wizard.
0:44:16 Wizarding is awesome.
0:44:18 The kids will get along.
0:44:19 They’ll figure it out.”
0:44:22 And I get done with this book.
0:44:27 And on one hand, it’s kind of a silly book about wizards and dragons, right?
0:44:31 And I get done with this book and I understand my mom better.
0:44:36 And this book built empathy in me for someone that, you know,
0:44:38 I’m a 14-year-old boy.
0:44:42 I’m understanding a middle-aged woman in ways I’d never been able to before
0:44:44 and I’d had fun while doing it.
0:44:46 And there was a magic to that.
0:44:50 And I don’t use that word lightly as a storyteller, as a writer of fantasy.
0:44:55 There was a magic to that author being able to convey a life experience
0:44:59 of someone that just entered my brain and has never left.
0:45:03 And I said, “Just like if you went and saw a magic trick,
0:45:05 you’re an analytical person.
0:45:07 You probably want to say, ‘How did they do it?
0:45:09 How did they vanish that thing?
0:45:11 What type of mirrors did they use?’
0:45:14 I read this and said, ‘I need to know how this is done.
0:45:15 I have to know.’
0:45:17 And I just started reading voraciously.
0:45:19 I went to the card catalog because I’m old.
0:45:21 I’m even older than you.
0:45:22 Oh, I remember those card catalogs.
0:45:23 Yeah.
0:45:26 And I went and got the next book in line, just alphabetical,
0:45:27 because it started with dragon.
0:45:28 And I read everything.
0:45:32 It had dragons in it in the school library just to figure it out.
0:45:35 And, you know, something changed in me that day.
0:45:38 I went from a C student to an A student over summer.
0:45:41 C’s in eighth grade, A’s in ninth grade.
0:45:43 Why that changed?
0:45:46 Because I discovered stories about wizards.
0:45:49 I discovered there was something I wanted to do, right?
0:45:52 There was now a reason to get good grades.
0:45:57 I was in Nebraska and UNL is good for some things.
0:46:00 I later learned that it actually has a decent writing program,
0:46:06 but I wanted a good education and I wanted to go to BYU
0:46:07 where my parents had gone.
0:46:10 And I realized I probably wouldn’t get into BYU.
0:46:13 Because the private school, you do have to have, you know,
0:46:17 better grades than C’s generally to make it into some of these schools.
0:46:19 And so suddenly I had a reason.
0:46:21 Like, well, I want to go to a better school.
0:46:22 Again, I was dumb.
0:46:24 UNL is actually a really good school.
0:46:27 But as a kid, I’m like, I need to get into this school.
0:46:29 And so my grades went up.
0:46:30 Like, I need to be a writer.
0:46:31 I need a degree.
0:46:32 I need to learn about this.
0:46:34 Therefore, I’m going to have to go to college.
0:46:36 Therefore, I’m going to have to learn to learn,
0:46:38 because otherwise I won’t figure out how to do this.
0:46:42 And having a purpose, having a reason to do well,
0:46:44 changed my entire outlook.
0:46:47 And I was not Valovictorian.
0:46:49 I was one grade off of it,
0:46:51 because I took a semester and moved to France
0:46:53 that tanked my grades.
0:46:55 It wasn’t a full semester, about half a semester.
0:46:58 But I never caught up on all the stuff that I needed to do.
0:47:00 So I got a B+ in one class.
0:47:01 But it was totally worth it.
0:47:02 Go live in France.
0:47:04 How did you decide to go to France?
0:47:09 I took four years of French, and my teacher in French
0:47:12 was the best teacher I had, Ms. Dress.
0:47:14 And when you have good teachers,
0:47:17 it changes your passion for a class, right?
0:47:18 Completely.
0:47:20 You know, I wouldn’t have picked French as my favorite subject,
0:47:22 but it was my favorite class.
0:47:24 And so I had three years of that.
0:47:27 And she said, hey, I’m taking a study abroad to Paris.
0:47:30 You’re going to have to miss half a semester.
0:47:31 You’ll have to do makeup work,
0:47:34 but we’ll live in Paris and go visit all the sites
0:47:35 and go to all the museums.
0:47:36 And I’m like, I am in.
0:47:39 You’re so passionate about your trips to Paris.
0:47:40 And it was so wonderful.
0:47:42 Like, stayed with a host family,
0:47:46 and then did day trips to just places around Paris.
0:47:49 Went to, you know, Givarni and Versailles,
0:47:53 and saw everything and museums every day,
0:47:56 and bad grades and math.
0:47:58 Sounds like a good trade in terms of the B.
0:48:00 Yes, it was absolutely a good trade.
0:48:03 It’s so parallel to what happened to me with Mr. Shimano
0:48:06 in the high school when I transferred schools,
0:48:09 ended up taking Japanese, had no plans to go to Japan,
0:48:11 and then six months in, he didn’t go with me,
0:48:14 but that’s how the study abroad came about,
0:48:16 and completely changed everything.
0:48:19 But I spent the next few summers catching up with summer school
0:48:21 because none of the grades transferred.
0:48:22 I love Japan.
0:48:25 I’ve only been once, but it was just delightful.
0:48:28 Just walking around Tokyo is such a surreal
0:48:30 and interesting experience.
0:48:33 Yeah, I tell people it’s like 30% Blade Runner
0:48:35 and 70% DMV.
0:48:37 Like, if you live in Japan, it’s just like,
0:48:39 I have to do another carbon copy.
0:48:41 Like, when then we have to fax, what is this?
0:48:42 Why?
0:48:44 Yeah, my few of my friends have moved
0:48:47 and have since confirmed that that is their experience.
0:48:51 So, I’m focusing on, had been focusing,
0:48:53 and I’m going to come back to the class
0:48:57 because you’ve thought about writing very deeply,
0:49:00 and it’s basically a filtering function
0:49:04 for ferreting out some of the key ingredients
0:49:06 as you see them in your writing process.
0:49:09 You mentioned narrative and how,
0:49:12 from a positioning perspective, people think of you
0:49:13 and it’s very helpful.
0:49:15 It’s also valid in some ways as a world builder,
0:49:17 but that first and foremost, it’s like,
0:49:19 it’s world building in service of a narrative,
0:49:21 not the other way around.
0:49:23 How do you teach narrative?
0:49:24 Are there particular books?
0:49:26 Is it like a three act play?
0:49:27 Is it the hero’s journey?
0:49:29 What are we talking about?
0:49:33 So, I do two lectures on narrative,
0:49:36 and generally the first day I do not talk about hero’s journey
0:49:39 or three act structure or any of these things.
0:49:40 That’s for the second week,
0:49:44 because I do my classes one giant lecture each week,
0:49:45 followed by a workshop.
0:49:46 Are these available anywhere?
0:49:47 Yeah, they’re on YouTube.
0:49:48 Amazing.
0:49:49 Yeah, you can watch the,
0:49:50 we’re doing new ones this year.
0:49:52 So, you can go watch these two lectures
0:49:53 that I’m talking about.
0:49:59 The first one, I just talk about the theory of plot.
0:50:01 What makes someone turn a page?
0:50:03 Why does someone start at page one
0:50:05 and then end?
0:50:07 What is a page turner?
0:50:12 And my theory on this is it is a sense of progress.
0:50:16 We like to see things count up as human beings,
0:50:20 and the great plots are doing this beneath the hood.
0:50:24 They are showing incremental slow progress forward,
0:50:25 sometimes backwards,
0:50:28 sometimes a little of each, toward a goal.
0:50:33 And the idea for plot is to identify what type of plot it is.
0:50:35 If you’re doing a mystery,
0:50:39 then that progress is going to be in the form of information.
0:50:42 The story starts without the characters without the information,
0:50:44 the reader without the information, generally,
0:50:47 and ends with them gaining the information.
0:50:50 And so, the story, the progress,
0:50:53 is all about these little bits of information
0:50:55 that you get through the story.
0:50:58 And at its fundamental, this does some fun things.
0:51:00 For instance, buddy cop movies and romances
0:51:03 have the same sort of fundamental structure,
0:51:06 which is it’s about a relationship between two people
0:51:08 where slowly you are finding out
0:51:10 that they work better together than apart.
0:51:14 And so, your progress is seeing how they rub each other wrong,
0:51:18 and then how Dave, my own teacher, talked about braiding roses.
0:51:22 How if the thorns are pointed outward for these characters,
0:51:24 rather than pointed inward,
0:51:26 they become a defensive bulwark for one another.
0:51:27 What does that mean?
0:51:28 Braided roses.
0:51:29 Yeah, oh, I see.
0:51:30 So, it’s sort of us against the world.
0:51:31 Us against the world.
0:51:33 If you take two roses and you don’t braid them,
0:51:35 you stick them together, they poke each other.
0:51:37 But if you braid them really well,
0:51:40 then all the thorns point outward,
0:51:43 and these two roses suddenly become stronger together
0:51:44 than they were apart.
0:51:45 That’s a very cool imagery.
0:51:47 Yeah, again, stole that one from Dave.
0:51:50 And so, the idea for a character plot
0:51:51 is you are braiding the roses.
0:51:54 And over time, you’re seeing that those points.
0:51:56 Number one, you see how dangerous
0:51:57 they are poking into each other.
0:52:00 But then you see how pointed outward,
0:52:02 these people actually work better.
0:52:05 And kind of the holes, the places where one doesn’t have a thorn
0:52:08 and can get hit, another one’s thorn protects,
0:52:09 and things like that.
0:52:11 And over the course of the story,
0:52:13 you see that rose get braided to the point
0:52:16 that you are saying you guys are so much better together
0:52:18 than apart, you need to be together.
0:52:21 And then when they either hook up or become partners,
0:52:23 again, same story structure,
0:52:25 then you stand up and you cheer.
0:52:29 So, the idea is it is promise.
0:52:30 You promise at the start.
0:52:32 In a romance novel, you show two people apart.
0:52:34 You show what their thorns are.
0:52:36 You promise just by featuring them
0:52:38 that they’re gonna get together.
0:52:40 Buddy cop movie, here’s this cop.
0:52:42 He works alone, but he has, you know,
0:52:44 there’s a problem.
0:52:45 There’s something that’s hurting.
0:52:46 And here’s this other cop.
0:52:48 He’s gonna retire soon, but, you know,
0:52:50 he’s missing something in his life.
0:52:53 And then you slowly, that’s your promise.
0:52:56 Your progress is showing them work well together.
0:52:59 And then your payoff is the moment at the end
0:53:03 where all that work you’ve put into it comes to fruition
0:53:07 as they hook up or in certain stories, they don’t.
0:53:11 You can be either way, but promise, progress, payoff,
0:53:14 that is what makes people love stories
0:53:18 and read through on a kind of macro scale.
0:53:21 Getting through an individual chapter is something different.
0:53:23 But on a macro scale, that is plot.
0:53:25 And that is, you know, I talk about on the first day,
0:53:27 this idea of how to do that,
0:53:31 how to have twists that are actually fulfilling promises.
0:53:33 And that one’s fun.
0:53:37 The best twists don’t just surprise the reader.
0:53:39 A complication should surprise the reader,
0:53:43 but a twist should be surprising yet inevitable.
0:53:46 And if you do it right, people are wanting that twist
0:53:49 before they realize it happens and then it does.
0:53:50 And that is day one.
0:53:52 Then day two is, I’m like, all right,
0:53:54 here are some structures that people have used.
0:53:55 Here’s your toolbox.
0:53:57 Some people use the hero’s journey.
0:53:59 Here’s what the hero’s journey is in brief.
0:54:00 Here is what it’s good for.
0:54:02 Here are some things to watch out for
0:54:05 because the hero’s journey can steer you wrong sometimes.
0:54:06 Here’s three act format.
0:54:07 Here’s what it’s good at.
0:54:10 Here’s maybe some foibles of three act format.
0:54:12 Here’s Robert Jordan’s method,
0:54:14 which he called points on the map.
0:54:17 Here’s how a lot of screwball comedy is written.
0:54:19 It’s called yes, but no and.
0:54:22 All of these different tools I try to talk about
0:54:24 and say, and there’s a ton more.
0:54:26 There’s nine point story structure.
0:54:28 There’s seven point story structure or whatever.
0:54:30 But the idea is here’s some things to try,
0:54:33 but keep in mind promise, progress, payoff.
0:54:36 And I feel like that gives sort of an overview
0:54:38 of how to build narrative.
0:54:40 Are there any, in addition to your classes, of course,
0:54:42 and we’ll link to those in the show notes,
0:54:46 are there any books or resources that you encourage people
0:54:49 to read to get a better understanding of narrative
0:54:51 or these different forms of narrative?
0:54:55 And what came to my mind, even though it’s not directed
0:54:58 at potential novelists, is a book called Save the Cat
0:55:01 Goes to the Movies that examines different genres
0:55:02 within screenwriting.
0:55:04 Okay, that’s not the original Save the Cat.
0:55:05 No, it’s not.
0:55:06 That’s the new one.
0:55:07 So I do recommend Save the Cat,
0:55:09 but Save the Cat goes to the movies.
0:55:10 I haven’t read that, that sounds good.
0:55:11 It’s fun.
0:55:12 Yeah, the first one’s also excellent.
0:55:13 I mean, I enjoyed it.
0:55:15 Yeah, so Save the Cat is kind of,
0:55:18 it’s a really good leaping off point.
0:55:20 And if you want the opposite of Save the Cat,
0:55:23 on writing by Stephen King is a leaping off point
0:55:25 in Save the Cat’s about structure
0:55:29 and on writing’s about the life of a writer and not structure.
0:55:32 And those will give you kind of two of the kind of,
0:55:35 yeah, different viewpoints on storytelling,
0:55:37 and they’re both very good.
0:55:40 My agent always recommends writing to sell by Scott Meredith.
0:55:44 I find it a little too structure-focused.
0:55:46 There is art to writing.
0:55:50 And the dirty secret of outlining is you’re still going to have
0:55:52 to learn to garden.
0:55:54 Because yeah, you’ll have these points in the outline,
0:55:56 but then when you sit down to write them,
0:55:58 you’re a gardener getting between these two points
0:55:59 in the outline.
0:56:01 And so both skills are really important.
0:56:04 But Scott Meredith, I did read that and like it quite a bit.
0:56:11 So where do you fall in general or now between the gardening
0:56:13 or gardener and architect?
0:56:15 Yeah, so I’ve tried all the tools.
0:56:18 I have a middle grade series called Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians,
0:56:20 which are pure garden.
0:56:22 I actually use a method a little like,
0:56:24 do you know the old show?
0:56:25 Whose line is it anyway?
0:56:26 Sure.
0:56:27 I pull a bunch of ideas.
0:56:29 I brainstorm a bunch of random ideas.
0:56:31 And then I say, I’ve got to use all of these.
0:56:32 Go.
0:56:34 And I write a story without an outline.
0:56:36 That’s to practice the tool.
0:56:42 And I generally fall these days on a 75% outline sort of thing.
0:56:44 I do a lot of work building on my plot,
0:56:47 and I do a lot of building on my setting.
0:56:50 And then I write my way into characters.
0:56:54 One of the big dangers of outlining too much is characters
0:56:57 that feel wooden or cardboard because they’re there
0:57:00 merely to get you between point A and point B.
0:57:03 And then, you know, from point B to point C on your outline.
0:57:07 And if you have characters that your early readers like these
0:57:10 feel a little wooden, it might be because instead of going
0:57:12 according to the character’s motivations,
0:57:14 you’re just going according to the outline.
0:57:17 And I find that if I let myself write my way into character
0:57:19 and then rebuild my outline.
0:57:22 By going to character, by that you mean you’re creating
0:57:24 the setting, the environment.
0:57:25 And the plot.
0:57:26 And the plot.
0:57:29 But then I rewrite the plot once I know the character.
0:57:30 Here’s my process.
0:57:36 So I start usually with a couple of really good ideas, right?
0:57:39 I usually want to have multiple interesting ideas
0:57:42 for my setting, at least one hook for each character.
0:57:43 If not more.
0:57:45 Could you give an example of this starting?
0:57:46 Yeah.
0:57:49 So let’s, I’ll build it from one of my books, Mistborn, right?
0:57:50 Right.
0:57:52 So Mistborn had a series of ideas.
0:57:55 The first idea came, I was reading Harry Potter
0:57:57 back in the Harry Potter boom.
0:58:00 And I thought, man, these Dark Lords never get a break.
0:58:01 Right?
0:58:04 Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Wheel of Time.
0:58:07 There’s this Dark Lord and what happens is like
0:58:11 some furry-footed British kid throws their ring in a hole
0:58:13 and their entire empire collapses.
0:58:15 Or, you know, there’s a kid you’re going to kill
0:58:17 and the power of a mother’s love protects him.
0:58:20 How can you plan for the power of a mother’s love
0:58:21 when you’re a Dark Lord?
0:58:23 That’s just a complete oddball.
0:58:25 And I think they never get a break.
0:58:27 What if the Dark Lord won?
0:58:30 What if Frodo got to the end of Lord of the Rings with the ring
0:58:32 and Sauron was there, he’s like,
0:58:35 “My ring, you know how long I’ve been looking for that?
0:58:36 Thank you so much for it.
0:58:39 That must have been a hard journey bringing that all the way here.
0:58:40 Thank you.”
0:58:42 And then killed him and took over the world, right?
0:58:43 What if?
0:58:46 And I thought, “That’s a downer of a book.”
0:58:48 I don’t know that I want to write a book
0:58:50 about the traditional hero’s journey
0:58:51 that ends with the Dark Lord winning,
0:58:53 but it went in the back of the head, right?
0:58:58 And then I have a deep and abiding love of the heist genre.
0:59:00 You know, Sneakers is one of my favorite films of all time.
0:59:02 Oldy but goody, The Sting,
0:59:05 all the way up to kind of, you know, the Ocean’s Elevens
0:59:08 and the Italian job, both the old one and the new one,
0:59:12 just the inception, you do a good heist, you can get me.
0:59:15 And as a writer, some of your light bulb moments
0:59:18 are when you’re like, “Hey, I love this thing
0:59:20 and I’ve never written about it.”
0:59:24 And that’s gold when you feel like you’ve covered everything
0:59:27 and then you realize there’s some area of passion and love
0:59:29 that you haven’t tapped at all.
0:59:31 I’m like, “I need to do a fantasy heist.”
0:59:34 What if I did a heist where every member of this heist crew
0:59:37 had a magical talent and they all combined together?
0:59:39 I’m like, “Nobody’s done this.”
0:59:41 It was really kind of a big deal to me
0:59:43 when I realized no one had done this because as a writer,
0:59:46 you’re always looking for the things that no one has done it.
0:59:48 The truth is, everyone’s done everything.
0:59:50 But when you find something, you’re like,
0:59:53 “I can’t think of a major story that has done
0:59:56 a full-on heist in fantasy.”
0:59:57 I was super excited.
1:00:01 Then I realized, “Fantasy heist, Dark Lord One,
1:00:06 team of thieves, Rob the Dark Lord, I have a plot.”
1:00:09 That’s my inception.
1:00:14 Meanwhile, I want a good idea for each character.
1:00:16 Mistborn’s about two characters.
1:00:20 One is about Kelsier, who is my concept for him for myself,
1:00:24 was the gentleman thief who lived his life conning people,
1:00:28 kind of small-time cons but living among upper society
1:00:31 where he liked to do, that something went horribly wrong
1:00:33 and he found out he’s like,
1:00:35 “I haven’t been making the world a better place.
1:00:37 I haven’t been helping anyone.
1:00:40 I’ve just been coasting on my charm
1:00:43 and has a crisis of conscience on,
1:00:46 should I be actually using this to do something?”
1:00:49 What happens is his wife is killed,
1:00:53 his heist goes wrong, and he decides he wants revenge
1:00:55 and he’s going to do it by robbing the Dark Lord.
1:00:57 That’s my concept for him.
1:01:01 My concept for Vin, who’s the other main character,
1:01:04 is this idea of a young woman who lives in this world
1:01:06 with a magical talent and doesn’t know it.
1:01:08 I’m looking for a conflict, right?
1:01:12 For her, her conflict is she’s managed to remain a good person
1:01:15 but she’s lost her belief that anyone else is good.
1:01:17 She gets betrayed in some ways.
1:01:21 It just makes her give up on kind of humanity in general.
1:01:23 And the idea is putting them two together.
1:01:27 Kelsier, who still kind of has this deep and abiding optimism.
1:01:29 He’s like, “I’m going to do something good.”
1:01:30 He’s learned optimism, right?
1:01:32 He’s learned, “I need to do something good with my life.”
1:01:34 And he’s by force in her who’s lost it.
1:01:36 And she becomes the apprentice to him
1:01:38 as he recruits her into the team
1:01:41 and this idea of a heist where these two people are growing.
1:01:43 Can I ask a question?
1:01:46 Not to interrupt, but did you have all of this
1:01:50 before you put pen to paper, metaphorically speaking, to write?
1:01:52 Yes, this much I had.
1:01:54 And in what form does that exist?
1:01:57 So it exists for me generally in…
1:01:59 I do a new document that says,
1:02:03 “Does setting stop, then character, then plot?”
1:02:07 And the setting will have, you know, some of the Dark Lord one,
1:02:08 that’s setting stuff, right?
1:02:10 What does a world look like where the Dark Lord is one
1:02:12 and ruled for a thousand years?
1:02:14 In my books, I like to have an interesting use of magic.
1:02:16 We can talk about that at some point.
1:02:17 Oh yeah, we will.
1:02:19 But what is the interesting use of magic?
1:02:20 That’s how I got into writing excuses.
1:02:21 Yeah, is it?
1:02:22 Yeah.
1:02:24 How do I walk the line between nerding out
1:02:26 and making it feel like approachable?
1:02:29 Because I don’t want my books to read like an encyclopedia entry
1:02:30 or a video game, right?
1:02:33 I want it to read like a new branch of science
1:02:35 that’s really fun.
1:02:37 And then character, I’ll have these things.
1:02:40 And so with the character, you’ll notice these are seeds.
1:02:42 Vin is like this, Kelsea is like this.
1:02:45 I don’t know yet how their interaction is going to go
1:02:46 and how they’re going to be.
1:02:50 In fact, I wrote three chapters with Vin first,
1:02:52 three different first chapters,
1:02:53 trying different personalities.
1:02:55 I started her with an artful dodger type,
1:02:57 really confident, moving in the underworld,
1:02:59 ripping people off, and it just did not work.
1:03:01 And then I tried another one.
1:03:02 I can’t even remember what that one was.
1:03:03 But then I tried a third one,
1:03:05 which is the personality she ended up with.
1:03:07 Kelsea, I kind of had right from the get-go.
1:03:08 All right.
1:03:10 It’s my job to interrupt, so I’ll do it again.
1:03:12 How did you know this first two didn’t work?
1:03:14 This is where it’s an art.
1:03:15 Is it just like a water feel?
1:03:16 Yeah.
1:03:17 Kind of thing that you’ve acquired over time?
1:03:18 This is art and not science.
1:03:21 It just, and sometimes it doesn’t work
1:03:23 and you don’t figure it out till late.
1:03:25 Like my most famous series,
1:03:27 they’re probably Mistborn in the Stormlight Archive
1:03:29 or About Tide for most famous.
1:03:32 Stormlight, I wrote an entire novel,
1:03:34 like 300,000 words long,
1:03:36 with the character having the wrong personality
1:03:37 the entire time.
1:03:39 And it was only at the end that I’m like,
1:03:40 “This is just wrong.”
1:03:42 And I threw the book away,
1:03:44 wrote it again eight years later
1:03:46 with a different personality and it worked.
1:03:50 But in order to have the characters live and breathe
1:03:52 and feel like real people,
1:03:54 I feel like I need to give them that volition,
1:03:56 which is kind of destructive
1:04:00 for all that narrative structure I’ve come up with.
1:04:03 But that’s good because having that structure
1:04:04 and then saying,
1:04:06 “All right, now that I know what this person would do,
1:04:09 how does that influence how they would actually approach
1:04:10 this structure?
1:04:11 And I’ll go and I’ll change that.”
1:04:13 And knowing about, you know,
1:04:15 promise, progress, payoff,
1:04:18 which I couldn’t have named for you back in 2004
1:04:19 when I was writing Mistborn,
1:04:22 but I kind of understood intrinsically.
1:04:25 I could tweak to the character personalities as I went
1:04:27 so that I was making sure
1:04:30 that these things were threading the needles, so to speak,
1:04:32 where you’ve got this character.
1:04:33 You need them to go through this plot,
1:04:36 but you need to make sure they feel like they’re a real person
1:04:39 so you can’t hold them to any one point,
1:04:42 but you can make it come together, hopefully.
1:04:44 So I want to come back to Stormlight for a second
1:04:46 because this struck me that
1:04:53 you have the ability to put things on the back burner
1:04:57 or scrap and effectively start from scratch,
1:05:02 restart something that you’ve put a lot of some cost into.
1:05:06 And that is hard for most people.
1:05:10 So I’m wondering, say, in the case of this character
1:05:12 with the wrong personality,
1:05:16 that you really conclude at 300,000 words or so,
1:05:18 it’s not working the way I want it to work.
1:05:22 What is the inner monologue
1:05:25 that you have to get to the point where you’re like,
1:05:27 “Park it,” particularly,
1:05:30 I mean, we don’t need to get maybe into this aspect of it.
1:05:31 When you have external pressures,
1:05:33 maybe you’ve applied pressure to yourself,
1:05:34 maybe you have deadlines in mind,
1:05:37 how do you get to that point?
1:05:39 What is your internal process for that?
1:05:43 You know, it’s happened to me three major times
1:05:44 where I’ve done it.
1:05:47 And of those, only one did I ever come back to,
1:05:50 two of them I parked and have laid fallow.
1:05:53 One important mindset is kind of a ground rule,
1:05:56 is remembering as a writer
1:06:01 that the piece of art is not necessarily
1:06:03 just the story you’re creating,
1:06:05 that you are the piece of art.
1:06:10 The time you spend writing is improving you as a writer,
1:06:13 and that is the most important thing.
1:06:16 The book is almost a side product, not really,
1:06:19 but it almost is to the fact that you are becoming,
1:06:20 you are the art.
1:06:23 And if you know that, it helps a lot.
1:06:25 One of the things that prose do
1:06:28 that amateurs have trouble with in writing
1:06:32 is prose throwaway chapters a lot in my experience.
1:06:36 You write it and you get done with the chapter
1:06:38 and you’re like, “That just did not work.”
1:06:41 I’m going to toss that and start over the next day.
1:06:44 Amateurs have a lot of trouble with this in my experience.
1:06:46 There’s a lot of causes of writer’s block,
1:06:48 but one of the main ones I’m convinced
1:06:51 is that you’re writing the chapter wrong,
1:06:53 you have enough instincts as a writer
1:06:55 because you’ve practiced long enough to know
1:06:56 you should throw it away,
1:06:58 but you don’t want to because you did the work,
1:07:01 but your instincts won’t let you continue doing it wrong
1:07:05 and you’re not willing to toss it and try over.
1:07:08 And so there is that.
1:07:10 What happens with a whole book?
1:07:12 You get done with the whole book
1:07:14 and one of a couple of things happen.
1:07:16 With two of the three of these books,
1:07:17 I get done and I’m like,
1:07:21 “That just doesn’t give me the shine, the feel,
1:07:25 the feel of excitement that I want this book to have.
1:07:27 There’s something fundamentally wrong with it.”
1:07:31 And I’m sometimes not even sure what it is for a while.
1:07:34 When I put aside the Way of Kings, the 2002 version,
1:07:36 we call it Way of Kings Prime,
1:07:37 I put it aside and said,
1:07:39 “I don’t know why this went wrong.”
1:07:40 It was actually two things.
1:07:43 It wasn’t just having Caledon have the wrong personality.
1:07:45 It was that I went into this book,
1:07:47 wanted to write a giant epic,
1:07:50 while reading The Wheel of Time,
1:07:52 which was one of my favorite book series at the time,
1:07:55 was before I had taken it over.
1:07:57 This was five years before I would get that call.
1:07:58 Which is a wild story.
1:08:00 Yeah, it is a wild story.
1:08:03 Game of Thrones was huge at the time
1:08:05 and I’ve been studying Game of Thrones and I’m like,
1:08:07 “I want to write something like this.”
1:08:11 And so I started with a huge cast up front,
1:08:14 not recognizing that both of those examples I gave,
1:08:17 started with a cast who was relatively small,
1:08:19 that over the course of several books,
1:08:23 grew into this complex web of different characters
1:08:25 having different relationships.
1:08:27 And it had this nice, odd-boarding.
1:08:29 And so what I did is I wrote a book
1:08:32 that was the beginning of like 10 characters’ stories,
1:08:34 and didn’t get through any of them.
1:08:36 It was too, oh, all over the place.
1:08:38 And the other was I had the wrong personality.
1:08:40 Something feels wrong and as an artist,
1:08:42 I just say, I don’t know what this is yet,
1:08:43 I put it aside.
1:08:46 Once in a while it happens during Alpha and Beta Reads.
1:08:48 I’m getting the wrong response.
1:08:50 People are reading this book
1:08:53 and they are thinking something completely opposite
1:08:55 from what I wanted them to.
1:08:58 The parts that I wanted them to enjoy, they’re bored by.
1:09:00 Or the character I wanted them to click with,
1:09:03 they’re just annoyed by and aren’t interested in.
1:09:06 And you realize something is just wrong.
1:09:09 Something is fundamentally wrong with this story.
1:09:12 And I don’t want to release it until I know what that is.
1:09:16 Sometimes you might figure that out and be able to fix it.
1:09:19 Sometimes you might look at that and be like,
1:09:21 “You know what, I don’t mind if people have this response.
1:09:23 This is the piece of art and this piece of art
1:09:25 is going to have this response
1:09:27 from some percentage of the audience.”
1:09:30 That’s maybe not a selling point,
1:09:33 but it is part of the art.
1:09:36 But with those three books, I put them aside.
1:09:38 And with Way of Kings, I eventually figured out what it was.
1:09:39 And I tried it again.
1:09:41 The other two I haven’t gotten there yet.
1:09:44 So let’s come back to habits
1:09:47 and your schedule for writing.
1:09:50 Do you still have two primary blocks of writing?
1:09:56 And could you explain what your current schedule tends to look like?
1:10:01 So I find that for what I do and where my personal psychology is,
1:10:06 an eight-hour block is not sustainable for writing.
1:10:09 This means I can do it for a week or two at eight hours,
1:10:11 but it’s going to brain drain me.
1:10:12 It’s going to exhaust me.
1:10:16 I get done with eight hours and I am mentally worn out.
1:10:20 I find that if I do two four-hour blocks instead,
1:10:23 I never quite get there and it’s more sustainable.
1:10:28 And so what I do is I will get up late.
1:10:31 I get up at around noon or one.
1:10:37 And I will go to the gym, which is different from me than other people.
1:10:39 The gym is writing time for me.
1:10:41 I’m not hitting it super hard.
1:10:44 I am there to think through what I’m doing.
1:10:46 Some motion moving your body.
1:10:47 Number one, it’s good for you,
1:10:49 but that’s a side effect for me too.
1:10:51 I can put on music and I can move
1:10:54 and I can think about what I’m going to write.
1:10:59 Then I go and I work from two until six these days.
1:11:00 It’s usually what I do.
1:11:04 One until five, something like that.
1:11:05 And then I’m done.
1:11:07 I go, I shower at 6.30.
1:11:09 I’m ready to hang with my family.
1:11:14 And I’ll be with family from six until 6.30 to 10.30.
1:11:16 Go out with my wife, hang with my kids,
1:11:19 build some Legos, play some video games, whatever it is.
1:11:21 I learned early in my career.
1:11:23 One of the most important things I ever did
1:11:28 was take that time and demarcate it as non-writing time.
1:11:31 I found early in my marriage that writing,
1:11:34 it will consume every moment possible.
1:11:38 And I was always anxious to get back to the story.
1:11:41 And as soon as I changed my brain and said,
1:11:44 “No, no, no, no, even if your wife is away,
1:11:46 6.30 to 10.30 can’t be writing time.”
1:11:48 It is off limits.
1:11:50 You have to do something else.
1:11:55 Suddenly, it was a lot easier for me to be there for my family.
1:11:57 And I think, I mean, you’ve interviewed
1:12:00 a lot of highly productive, highly successful people.
1:12:04 I think a lot of them are going to talk about the same thing,
1:12:06 that it’s very hard to be there with people
1:12:08 when you’re there with people.
1:12:10 Sure, comes up a lot.
1:12:13 Because your brain is always working on the next big thing.
1:12:17 Yes, particularly true with people who work on big creative projects.
1:12:19 Yeah, and that gave me this permission.
1:12:22 It actually came the moment my wife,
1:12:24 I went out to dinner with some writer friends.
1:12:26 And afterward, I’m like, “That was such a great dinner.”
1:12:30 And she’s like, “Yeah, but you didn’t look at me once.”
1:12:32 And I realized she had become invisible to me
1:12:34 because the writing was consuming all.
1:12:36 And so, made that change.
1:12:38 10.30, kids are supposed to go to bed.
1:12:40 They’re older now, they just don’t.
1:12:43 But sometime around there, they drift off.
1:12:45 My wife goes to bed.
1:12:47 She was a school teacher for many years.
1:12:49 Still kind of keeps school teachers hours.
1:12:51 And she is wonderful for getting up with the kids.
1:12:54 I don’t have to do that and never have.
1:12:56 And I go back to work at about 11.
1:12:58 I write from 11 to 3.
1:13:04 And then 3 to 4 or 5 is just whatever I want to do.
1:13:06 That’s the real goof-off time.
1:13:09 That’s to go play with my magic cards time.
1:13:12 That’s the play a video game, pop out the Steam Deck time.
1:13:18 And this schedule, you’ll notice I don’t have to worry about commuting,
1:13:20 which gives me an advantage here,
1:13:22 has been really sustainable for me.
1:13:24 So that’s a home office predominantly?
1:13:25 Yeah.
1:13:26 Where you’re writing?
1:13:27 I write from my home office.
1:13:28 I do like to move around.
1:13:29 I go in the gazebo.
1:13:31 Lately, I’ve gone in the gazebo when it’s really cold.
1:13:35 And I hire one of my kids to come put logs on a fire for me.
1:13:37 And I sit by the fireplace.
1:13:39 Sometimes I like to be on the beach.
1:13:41 Sometimes I like when I’m around here,
1:13:43 I like to be in different places.
1:13:45 I can set up a hammock here or there.
1:13:48 So with my laptop, I do not work at a desk.
1:13:50 That’s really sustainable.
1:13:52 It’s worked for me for the last 20 years.
1:13:53 That’s incredible.
1:13:57 I got all my best writing done really late at night when I was–
1:13:59 I mean, still I’m writing.
1:14:00 I’m working on a new book.
1:14:02 But when I was working on my first few books especially,
1:14:05 it was always when everyone else was asleep.
1:14:08 Let’s talk about the non-home environment.
1:14:11 We’re sitting in a quite a large building
1:14:13 or at least a building with a lot of large rooms.
1:14:14 Yes.
1:14:18 Why do you have this company?
1:14:20 Why have you and your wife built this company?
1:14:21 All right.
1:14:22 Because there are a lot of writers out there
1:14:24 who just want to focus on writing.
1:14:26 They go the traditional publishing route,
1:14:30 which I’m not saying it’s a mutually exclusive choice.
1:14:32 But why do you have all this?
1:14:34 How long? How long do you want to go?
1:14:35 This is the big one.
1:14:38 This is a long form podcast that we have all the time we want.
1:14:39 All right.
1:14:40 So you’re right.
1:14:45 Most writers want to sell a book and live that kind of dream
1:14:48 you see presented in film and television,
1:14:52 which is accurate to the top percentage of writers.
1:14:56 Most writers you read about or see in film are the big ones.
1:14:58 They’re doing really well.
1:15:00 And so they’re off in a cabin telling their story.
1:15:04 They’re the ones that have to be pried away from their easy chair
1:15:07 to get them to even do any publicity whatsoever.
1:15:11 They want to live that life that is the classic life of a writer.
1:15:13 And there’s some of me that wants that.
1:15:17 But the secret is I was raised by an accountant and a businessman.
1:15:20 And particularly my mother, that accountant,
1:15:24 she instilled into me some aspirations.
1:15:27 And I call this my superpower.
1:15:30 My superpower is to be an artist raised by an accountant.
1:15:35 And I’ve always had a bit of that entrepreneurial sense.
1:15:36 What were the aspirations?
1:15:39 The aspirations, well, they started small.
1:15:41 They started with, you know what,
1:15:43 I want to be able to make a living from writing.
1:15:48 Got back from Korea and said, all right,
1:15:51 I am not very good at this writing thing,
1:15:53 but I really, really love it.
1:15:58 I could tell because when I spent time doing the writing,
1:16:01 time didn’t matter anymore, right?
1:16:03 I could spend hours doing this.
1:16:06 And it’s the first thing I found other than reading or video games
1:16:09 that I could spend hours doing and just come out of it
1:16:11 feeling tired but fulfilled.
1:16:14 And I’m like, I want to do this.
1:16:17 So I sat down and I took what I’d learned,
1:16:20 both kind of from my mother and kind of missions
1:16:22 have kind of a regimented structure.
1:16:24 And I said, I’m going to apply this all to writing.
1:16:27 And I’m going to, I’m just going to start writing books.
1:16:30 And I heard your first five books are generally terrible.
1:16:31 I said, well, that’s good.
1:16:33 I don’t have to be good yet.
1:16:35 It took a lot of pressure off me.
1:16:37 I said, I’m going to write six.
1:16:40 And the first five I’m not going to send out to any publishers.
1:16:41 Wow.
1:16:42 Right?
1:16:45 And that’s bad advice for someone, right?
1:16:46 Yeah, wow.
1:16:47 You didn’t even send them out.
1:16:48 I didn’t send them out.
1:16:51 It was just weight training in the gym for your mind
1:16:52 for the number six.
1:16:53 Yep.
1:16:54 I didn’t send them out.
1:16:58 I did eventually, I shared number five with some, some people.
1:17:03 I got involved with the local science fiction magazine as an editor.
1:17:05 I eventually took it over because that’s what I do.
1:17:06 And I was head editor.
1:17:09 And I eventually said, well, I do have a book.
1:17:12 And I started sharing book five with people right around that time.
1:17:14 You didn’t even have test readers.
1:17:16 I didn’t have test readers.
1:17:18 I just wrote the books.
1:17:20 And again, this is why the advice can be bad.
1:17:22 There’s some people out there that would be bad advice for.
1:17:25 Pat Rothfuss published his first book and it’s brilliant.
1:17:26 Name of the Wind.
1:17:27 Name of the Wind.
1:17:28 Yeah.
1:17:29 That is a spectacular book.
1:17:30 First novel.
1:17:31 Now he did a ton of revisions on that.
1:17:34 He spent as much time revising that book as I spent writing mine.
1:17:38 But for me, the good advice was your first five books are terrible.
1:17:39 Don’t stress.
1:17:41 And so weight training for my mind.
1:17:42 I wrote five books.
1:17:43 And then I sat down.
1:17:45 This was before you had an agent.
1:17:46 Before I had an agent.
1:17:47 Before I had anything.
1:17:48 Before I even knew what an agent was.
1:17:50 Before I’d taken Dave’s class.
1:17:53 I took Dave’s class the year that I finished the launch.
1:17:54 Which is book number six.
1:17:56 I had just finished that one.
1:17:58 And so I said, all right.
1:17:59 Book six.
1:18:00 That’s a launch.
1:18:01 That’s the one I eventually ended up selling.
1:18:03 Those five I’d written in different subgenres.
1:18:05 I knew I like sci-fi fantasy.
1:18:07 But the risk of being too nerdy.
1:18:08 My subgenres.
1:18:09 I did an epic fantasy.
1:18:11 I did a comedic fantasy.
1:18:14 A Terry Pratchett style sort of thing.
1:18:15 I did a cyberpunk.
1:18:16 I did a space opera.
1:18:19 And then I wrote a sequel to my epic fantasy to kind of GB.
1:18:21 Like, is this what I want to do?
1:18:24 What characterizes an epic fantasy?
1:18:25 So epic fantasy.
1:18:32 Fantasy, in short, follows three main lines of descent.
1:18:37 One line comes from what we call portal fantasies.
1:18:43 And your kind of line of descent of that starts in the modern era with Alice in Wonderland.
1:18:46 Goes to Narnia and Harry Potter is one of the more example.
1:18:48 This is kids from our world get sucked into a fantasy world.
1:18:49 And experience it.
1:18:51 It’s usually a young adult focused.
1:18:55 You can trace that all the way back to the old stories of the fairy tales.
1:18:57 People go into the woods and then come out of the woods.
1:18:59 They go into the fantasy world, come out, right?
1:19:02 The second line is what we call heroic fantasy.
1:19:07 Heroic fantasy’s lines kind of really starts with the Greek epics and Beowulf.
1:19:10 But in modern terms, you would recognize Conan as the virginity.
1:19:16 It is heroic men fighting against the monsters of the world and taming them.
1:19:19 And just kind of destroying them.
1:19:21 It’s heroic man versus evil wizard.
1:19:23 A lot of the old serials were that.
1:19:26 And in modern terms, our grimdark kind of line.
1:19:31 You kind of look at Joe Abercrombie as kind of the modern version of that.
1:19:32 So the blade itself.
1:19:33 The blade itself.
1:19:34 Fantastic.
1:19:35 So fun.
1:19:38 Also one of the best voice actors I’ve ever heard.
1:19:40 Joe is amazing.
1:19:41 He’s delightful.
1:19:43 Tangent, you want my Joe Abercrombie story?
1:19:44 Yes, please.
1:19:45 Tangent.
1:19:47 I am flying to Spain.
1:19:48 Right.
1:19:51 And Joe is going to meet me there because we’re both doing con together.
1:19:52 It’s called Celsius.
1:19:53 I’m actually going back this year.
1:19:55 So I’m passing through Amsterdam.
1:19:57 And I did a thing back then.
1:19:58 Maybe we’ll talk about it now.
1:20:00 I signed my books in airports.
1:20:02 I would see a book of mine in an airport bookstore.
1:20:05 I would sign it and I would post on Twitter.
1:20:07 And I’d say, I signed my book.
1:20:09 First one gets there, gets to get the book.
1:20:10 This was a thing of mine.
1:20:11 My fans loved it.
1:20:13 I don’t travel that way as much anymore.
1:20:15 And there’s fewer airport bookstores.
1:20:16 They’ve all died off.
1:20:17 So I don’t really do it anymore.
1:20:18 But for a while, I did that.
1:20:21 They named it Brandylizing.
1:20:22 Yeah.
1:20:25 And I did this thing in the airport.
1:20:26 I left my book.
1:20:28 I took a picture of it in the spot.
1:20:30 And I’m getting in the line to get on the plane.
1:20:31 Right.
1:20:33 And I get a tweet.
1:20:34 And it’s from Joe.
1:20:38 And he says, “Sanderson, my book’s next year’s and you didn’t sign it.”
1:20:40 And I’m going to tweet back.
1:20:41 I’m like, well, it’s not my book.
1:20:44 He’s like, “Sign my book, Sanderson.”
1:20:47 And all caps, exclamation and point.
1:20:49 And so I have to leave the line.
1:20:50 They’re calling the line.
1:20:51 Run to the bookstore.
1:20:52 Sign Joe Abercrombie’s book.
1:20:54 Take a picture of it.
1:20:57 Post it and say, “Your book is signed by me.”
1:20:58 And then I did make my flight.
1:21:01 But I almost missed my flight, signing Joe’s book.
1:21:04 So someone out there went and bought Joe’s book signed by me.
1:21:05 Because I–
1:21:09 How long had you known each other at that point?
1:21:14 We had met at conventions and been on panels together and Joe is a riot.
1:21:19 Like, if you get a chance, if he’s anywhere that you can go see him,
1:21:23 Joe has this magic to turn any panel into a enjoyable panel,
1:21:25 no matter who’s on it with him.
1:21:28 And so, like, I won’t say that I’m best buds with Joe.
1:21:30 I don’t know Joe really well, but we’re professional colleagues.
1:21:32 And I love being on a panel with him.
1:21:36 He makes me look intelligent and funny, which I love.
1:21:38 So we’ve got choral fantasy.
1:21:40 We’ve got heroic fantasy, right?
1:21:42 Michael Morkock, all of that stuff.
1:21:44 Then we have epic fantasy.
1:21:49 And epic fantasy is termed by completely different fantasy world.
1:21:51 The other two are generally have roots in our world.
1:21:55 Portal, you start in our world, and heroic tends to be kind of our world.
1:21:57 The modern ones aren’t.
1:22:01 But, you know, Conan takes place in the prehistory of our world and things like that.
1:22:04 Epic fantasy really starts with Tolkien.
1:22:08 You can say that some of the heroic epics had a big part in this, too, right?
1:22:10 Gilgamesh even and stuff like that.
1:22:15 But this idea of epic fantasy is the movement of worlds.
1:22:16 The world is at stake.
1:22:18 Secondary world is what we call it.
1:22:20 It’s very moved from our planet.
1:22:23 All new rules, all new world, all new magic.
1:22:26 And it’s this idea that they’re the big, thick ones.
1:22:31 They’re kind of like historical epics, but in a different world.
1:22:33 So that’s their similarity.
1:22:36 And, you know, Game of Thrones is this.
1:22:38 The Game of Thrones borrows a little from heroic.
1:22:40 That’s kind of his secret sauce.
1:22:44 He takes heroic characters and sticks them in an epic fantasy plot.
1:22:50 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.
1:22:52 Epic is me and Robert Jordan and things like that.
1:22:53 That’s epic fantasy.
1:22:55 It’s just stakes of the world.
1:22:56 Got it.
1:23:00 And I took us off track a little bit because the question was, why are we sitting in this huge office?
1:23:01 Yeah.
1:23:02 And then you’re like, well, it’s backtrack.
1:23:03 Yeah.
1:23:04 Right?
1:23:05 Artist raised by an accountant.
1:23:06 Artist raised by an accountant.
1:23:08 And then we came through and you’re like, number six.
1:23:09 Number six.
1:23:10 That was go time.
1:23:11 That was go time.
1:23:12 Right?
1:23:13 Right?
1:23:14 A launch.
1:23:18 And at that point, my goal was only, I’m going to try to conquer this and become a professional writer.
1:23:24 If I can earn a living doing this, I will have been successful.
1:23:25 But then I did.
1:23:27 I actually, it took me a few more years.
1:23:30 I wrote 13 novels before I sold one.
1:23:35 I sold number six after I’d finished number 13, which was Way of Kings Prime.
1:23:42 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?
1:23:44 12 books and no one’s buying them.
1:23:45 Maybe I’m, maybe I’m really bad at this.
1:23:46 But anyway.
1:23:50 When did you start, you started trying to sell them at which book?
1:23:51 About book six.
1:24:04 Right around and I hit perfectly at Dave’s class about when I was working on book sex, 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.
1:24:18 And then I took Dave’s class and I started flying out to these conventions and trying to meet editors in person and just kind of hearing from their mouths what they want, what they’re buying, what they’re interested in and trying to target my books at them.
1:24:25 By that point that I was doing that I had eight or nine and six, seven and eight were pretty good books.
1:24:27 Any one of those three probably could have broken me out.
1:24:29 I didn’t ever publish seven or eight.
1:24:30 I just published six.
1:24:45 Then I sell a book and I realized, well, now the job is to make this a career because I sold my book for a grand total of $10,000 that was broken across three years.
1:24:49 So I made $5,000 and then 2,500 and then 2,500.
1:24:53 So you can imagine that’s a meager sum.
1:25:01 I fortunately was married to someone who was making very sweet, great income as a public school teacher.
1:25:02 She was the sugar mama.
1:25:11 We were living on her 22,000 a year as a public school teacher, but she supported me while I was doing that and breaking in with those books.
1:25:13 We did meet after I’d at least sold one.
1:25:15 So I at least had something to say, look, it’s real.
1:25:21 It made us $5,000 this year, but it made me, we weren’t married then, but you know what I mean.
1:25:23 And so yeah, first year of marriage I made $2,500.
1:25:25 That was what I grand total I contributed.
1:25:29 But at that point, your job is to get stable.
1:25:32 And the danger point after, there’s two danger points.
1:25:36 One is never selling a book, but the number two danger point is your second book.
1:25:38 We talked a little bit about this.
1:25:40 Second book is like do or die time.
1:25:45 And I can talk all about like I, it was pretty big do or die for me.
1:25:49 But then it stabilized, then things started to work.
1:25:52 I hit the best seller list and then Wheel of Time happened.
1:25:55 That was with the, that was with the first or the second book.
1:25:58 Oh, it was my fourth that hit, or yeah, my fourth that hit the best seller.
1:26:00 Yeah, it was Mistborn 3.
1:26:02 It was my first one, very low on.
1:26:03 It was either Mistborn 3.
1:26:09 It might have been Warbreaker, but it’s four or five hit like the times list went to 35 then and I hit like number 35.
1:26:10 Right?
1:26:11 Still counts.
1:26:12 Still counts, still counts.
1:26:14 It was for 2000 copies in a week.
1:26:20 It doesn’t sound like very much to be a best seller, but I hit that best seller list and then Wheel of Time happened and my entire life changed.
1:26:22 And I’m sure we’ll get to that.
1:26:30 But about 2012 through 2014, I started to realize some things.
1:26:33 Somewhere in there, I can’t remember the exact date.
1:26:34 You can look it up.
1:26:38 Amazon turned off the ability to buy all McMillan books.
1:26:41 Poor my publishers, the subsidiary of McMillan.
1:26:43 This is because their contract disputes.
1:26:47 Amazon wanted to pricey books cheaper to sell Kindles.
1:26:53 They wanted the lost lead in order to control the market, which was very smart on their end.
1:27:06 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 is selling for a dollar and paying us on those books like $8.
1:27:07 And they’re like, what’s the problem?
1:27:08 We sell them for a dollar.
1:27:10 You still make your $8.
1:27:13 And the publishers are like, yeah, but people are going to expect books to be a dollar.
1:27:17 And when you control the market, you’re going to say, well, we’re not paying you $8 on these books anymore.
1:27:21 We’re going to pay you the 70 cents that you would get off of a $1 book.
1:27:24 And so whole panic, big contract disputes.
1:27:30 Amazon is working very hard to become, you know, dominant in this market and the publishers are fighting them.
1:27:33 And Amazon turns off the ability to buy my books.
1:27:44 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.
1:27:49 All the way through publishing history, your audience, your buyers were the bookstores, really.
1:27:51 Core were the bookstores.
1:27:58 If you convinced the bookstores to shelve your books, then people went to the bookstores and the more books you have in the shelf, the more you sold.
1:28:06 Old publishing adage that Tom Doherty, founder of Tor, very smart man would say is like, I want to have 10 books on the shelf, even if only one of themselves.
1:28:12 Because eventually, nine of them are going to sell 10 of a copy because everyone will go and say, this must be an important book.
1:28:14 They have 10 copies of it here.
1:28:17 The best advertisement for a book is having as many on the shelf.
1:28:20 And so your fight was to get the bookstores to carry your book.
1:28:21 It was real estate.
1:28:22 Yep.
1:28:24 That was no longer the case.
1:28:28 Your audience, your market was not the bookstores, it was only Amazon.
1:28:30 Amazon controlled everything.
1:28:32 By then they had Audible.
1:28:36 And Audible has become the growth segment of the market.
1:28:41 They controlled eBooks and they were coming to control print books.
1:28:46 And having one person be able to turn off my books was a big deal to me.
1:28:51 It happened previously with the Alcatraz books where boarders decided not to carry one of them.
1:28:53 But Barnes & Noble did.
1:28:57 And so it was still the book succeeded and eventually boarders came around and decided to carry it.
1:28:59 There’s only one person.
1:29:01 They control your entire career.
1:29:04 And I said, I cannot be subject.
1:29:09 And that’s when the big entrepreneurial part of my brain said, all right, let’s change.
1:29:14 I went to the publishers and I said, there are certain things I think we should be doing.
1:29:17 And publishing blessed their hearts.
1:29:21 They’re still trapped in a lot of ways in the 1900s.
1:29:23 Maybe the 1800s.
1:29:25 They do not change very quickly.
1:29:31 And I looked at other markets and I said, what is music doing?
1:29:33 What is movies doing?
1:29:35 What were music and movies?
1:29:38 What were my friends who were independent comic publishers doing?
1:29:41 You know, Howard Taylor, he was on “Right, Excuse Us With Me.”
1:29:42 I’m like, what’s he doing?
1:29:43 He gives it away for free.
1:29:46 If Amazon decides that my books are essentially free, how do I make a living?
1:29:48 How’s he making a living?
1:29:51 He gives it away for free and he still makes a living.
1:29:58 And I started to see some trends and they involved having a variety of product prices.
1:30:04 One was having something really high end that the super fans could buy to display to show off.
1:30:10 Whether that be the vinyl, whether that be the equivalent of going to a concert and buying merch there.
1:30:16 Whether it be buying the book online that is free but you want to have a copy to show off.
1:30:22 All the way down the really cheap product and in a lot of ways if you have the really expensive thing,
1:30:26 that subsidizes the really cheap product so that everybody can get the books.
1:30:30 Everyone’s served better by a variety of offerings.
1:30:31 Different pricing tiers.
1:30:34 Different pricing tiers letting people buy in to what they want.
1:30:40 And I realized if people are buying into the expensive one, you can go lower on the cheap one
1:30:43 and the people who can’t afford this or don’t want it are happy.
1:30:44 The people who want this are happy.
1:30:46 Everyone is more happy.
1:30:47 And I went to the publisher.
1:30:50 I’m like, we should be upselling to merchandise.
1:30:55 Lord of the Rings released these cool DVDs that came with bookends.
1:30:56 Gollum bookends, right?
1:30:59 Said we should be doing things like that for big books.
1:31:03 We should be bundling e-book and audiobook with a hardcover.
1:31:05 We should be selling leather bounce.
1:31:07 Really high-end, nice ones.
1:31:09 But we shouldn’t be charging what you’re charging.
1:31:11 They were charging $250 for the leather bounce.
1:31:13 I’m like, that’s a too high a price point.
1:31:15 We should be doing $100 price point.
1:31:18 And the publisher said to me, we can’t do this.
1:31:20 And they had some good reasons.
1:31:26 I think they’re not insurmountable, but their reasons were, look, the bookstores can’t carry these special editions.
1:31:28 We just can’t figure out how to make them work.
1:31:30 The bookstores can’t sell merch.
1:31:38 The bookstores can’t sell the leather bounce because we printed 250 copies of the Wheel of Time leather bounce.
1:31:42 And we had so much trouble selling them because fans didn’t know where to get them.
1:31:47 The bookstores didn’t want to carry something that expensive that they weren’t sure if they were going to sell.
1:31:49 It was just all a big mess.
1:31:57 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.
1:31:59 And I could not make any inroads.
1:32:05 And that’s when, you know, the voice of my mother whispered, well, Brandon, I trained you better than that.
1:32:07 Do it yourself.
1:32:09 And I said, I just have to.
1:32:11 And so I got my team together.
1:32:15 And I said, we are going to try to Amazon proof ourselves.
1:32:18 That means we are going to direct sale.
1:32:22 We are going to start building our own direct to our consumer.
1:32:24 And I started with the leather bounce.
1:32:27 My decision was this was something the market wanted.
1:32:28 I kept hearing from fans they wanted them.
1:32:30 I heard from the publisher they can’t sell them.
1:32:33 So I went to the publisher said, can you give me those rights back?
1:32:35 And he’s like, sure, they’re just free.
1:32:36 We can’t do anything with them.
1:32:37 Maybe you can.
1:32:39 And that’s again, to their credit, right?
1:32:43 The publishers are, I’m guessing in retrospect.
1:32:45 In retrospect.
1:32:47 But they couldn’t have done it.
1:32:49 They couldn’t have done it because it had to be direct to consumer.
1:32:55 Part of the reason is like the fans running out to buy the specialization of the bookstore.
1:32:57 It’s just that it’s a bad methodology.
1:32:59 So I said to my team, we’re going to build these.
1:33:01 We’re going to do leather bounds.
1:33:03 They sold 250 copies.
1:33:05 I want to sell 10,000.
1:33:06 Right.
1:33:07 Well, we started five.
1:33:08 I want to sell 5,000.
1:33:09 We ended up selling 50,000.
1:33:10 Right.
1:33:12 Now is that of multiple books?
1:33:13 That’s the first one.
1:33:14 Wow.
1:33:15 Right.
1:33:16 50,000.
1:33:17 Nowadays.
1:33:18 Hard bound.
1:33:19 Leather bound.
1:33:21 Leather bounds at 100 to 250.
1:33:24 Nowadays, our initial print runs are 50,000.
1:33:28 Back then it was 10,000 and then 5,000 more than 5,000 more and then things like that.
1:33:29 Right.
1:33:31 They will, everyone we get in stock will sell.
1:33:35 Everyone’s signed that is in stock will just instantly sell.
1:33:38 And so there’s obviously a very big market.
1:33:45 In fact, such a big market, I cannot physically produce enough of them to sell the signed ones.
1:33:50 We have the unsigned ones that people still buy, but the signed ones go instantly.
1:33:51 Quality problem to have.
1:33:52 Yeah.
1:33:54 It is a quality problem to have.
1:34:02 It means that my time suddenly got a very strange monetary constraint on it, which is
1:34:06 something that I try to pay attention to, but not too much.
1:34:10 I don’t know if you’ve had this, but do you ever try to put a dollar amount on your time
1:34:12 and is that just madness for you?
1:34:13 It is madness.
1:34:15 I did that for a very long time.
1:34:22 I think it is helpful in some of the maybe earlier intermediate entrepreneurial stages
1:34:27 so that you don’t find yourself, if you are like me, a perfectionist, micromanaging or
1:34:29 doing too much yourself.
1:34:34 However, there is a point where I think it just makes you miserable because you end up
1:34:41 placing so high a per hour value on your time that every squandered minute is like having
1:34:45 a pound of flesh taken and you can drive yourself insane.
1:34:46 Yeah.
1:34:53 I wind in that because if I sign my name, that’s $250 because of leather belt, but I don’t
1:34:55 want to spend my life signing my name.
1:35:02 I want to write the books, but the most money I can earn per hour, I can sign a thousand
1:35:06 of those in an hour and that’s $250 each, which is just an unreal.
1:35:08 If you think about that, that’s like, yeah.
1:35:09 That is bananas.
1:35:10 That is bananas.
1:35:14 My normal writing time, I can put a different dollar amount depends on what I’m writing.
1:35:19 Did you ever get pulled because it happened to me with speaking engagements, different
1:35:25 things, but did you get pulled away from the creative work or the actual wordsmithing
1:35:27 at any point or were you able to hold the line?
1:35:29 I was able to hold the line but barely.
1:35:34 At one point, I started to get popular enough that people wanted me on the speaking tour
1:35:36 and so I put a dollar amount on it.
1:35:40 Well, at that point, a day of writing, and it takes me two days, a day of writing is
1:35:43 $25,000, so two days, $50,000.
1:35:48 We put it up there instantly, like 10 inquiries.
1:35:51 I’m like, I don’t want to do that.
1:35:52 Now what?
1:35:53 Now what?
1:35:54 I just said, you know what?
1:35:56 No, we were wrong.
1:36:01 Part of that is because I don’t feel like I’m $50,000 worth of speaking.
1:36:05 There are really good motivational speakers that are maybe worth that.
1:36:06 I don’t think I am.
1:36:07 My time is worth that.
1:36:09 They would probably disagree.
1:36:10 They’re like, whatever.
1:36:12 We have this money set aside for speakers.
1:36:13 It’s what speakers cost.
1:36:17 But the other thing is that’s what my writing time was and I love writing.
1:36:21 And if I’m going to spend two days writing, I want to spend it writing.
1:36:23 And nowadays, it would be ridiculous.
1:36:27 For me to go do one of these things, it would cost like $400,000.
1:36:29 It’d be even worse.
1:36:34 And so I did have to stop thinking about the hour, whatever, but it is a helpful metric
1:36:36 for where you spend your time.
1:36:39 Put your time where you’re happy and excited.
1:36:42 But also if you can choose among different things that you’re having inside of you,
1:36:43 you can do that.
1:36:45 So anyway, that’s the side of the point.
1:36:50 I gave this challenge to my team and it worked.
1:36:53 We started to do all the things that the publishers weren’t doing.
1:36:59 And then that’s when I said, all right, now we’re going to actually build a team and grow.
1:37:02 And we moved to doing crowdfunding.
1:37:03 It’s really a lot better.
1:37:05 We did pre-orders on the initial ones.
1:37:06 We moved to crowdfunding.
1:37:11 And that’s when we went, my team all through the teams was maybe 10 people.
1:37:13 Probably didn’t even quite get there.
1:37:15 And who were those people?
1:37:17 What was the kind of org chart at the time?
1:37:18 So me and Emily.
1:37:23 So Emily runs the business and I run the creative, right?
1:37:24 So she does HR.
1:37:26 She does accounting.
1:37:30 She does operations is what we call it and all of that stuff.
1:37:35 And is operations sort of the logistics of manufacturing and shipping?
1:37:36 Yes.
1:37:37 It’s manufacturing shipping.
1:37:38 It’s HR.
1:37:40 It’s facilities.
1:37:42 Basically, she’s over that.
1:37:47 So if you look at my org chart, Emily and I are at the top and I am over what we call creative development,
1:37:49 which early on was one person.
1:37:51 All of these were one person.
1:37:54 Creative development and publicity are kind of under me.
1:37:56 And what did creative development do at that?
1:37:57 That’s our art team.
1:37:58 Okay, got it.
1:37:59 So that was art.
1:38:02 So art and then editorial and publicity were me.
1:38:05 And then merchandising events and facilities were her.
1:38:08 And so we started 2007.
1:38:10 I hired my first employee.
1:38:12 I broke out in 2005.
1:38:13 2007.
1:38:19 I hire an assistant editor whose job is to do executive assistant and editorial work for me.
1:38:20 Well, very soon.
1:38:22 Oh, wait, you’re actually our first.
1:38:23 Becky’s like you.
1:38:25 That wasn’t it was our first like full-time employee.
1:38:29 Our first one, we hire Becky to do shipping.
1:38:31 So actually, our first employee is shipping.
1:38:32 You’re going to love this.
1:38:35 My second book, we had, they have remainders.
1:38:37 You know what remainders are.
1:38:39 You should explain for the people listening though.
1:38:40 Boy, we’re on a tangent to a tangent.
1:38:41 I love this.
1:38:42 You’re pretty good.
1:38:44 I’m impressed with your ability to reel it in though.
1:38:49 What you haven’t done, which happens to me all the time is someone will say,
1:38:50 what were we talking about?
1:38:51 What was your question again?
1:38:52 You’re very good at doing callbacks.
1:38:53 You’re good at reminding me.
1:38:54 You’ve been reminding me.
1:38:56 So publishing, like Tom already said,
1:39:00 he wants 10 books on the shelf and you really want to sell seven of those,
1:39:01 seven to eight.
1:39:04 If you sell everyone, that means you didn’t put enough on the shelf.
1:39:07 Someone walked into that store and couldn’t buy a book.
1:39:10 If you sell two, you actually printed way too many.
1:39:13 Tom would still want them for publicity reasons,
1:39:16 but industry kind of common sense says,
1:39:18 you want to have remainders somewhere around.
1:39:21 Remainders are left over at the end of a print run.
1:39:23 You want to have around 20%.
1:39:28 Anything between 30% to 10% is fine.
1:39:32 40% starts to look sketchy and less than 10% is bad also.
1:39:36 So you end up getting thousands of books shipped back, right?
1:39:41 Elantris, they printed 10,000 and they had remainders on Elantris,
1:39:42 or not Elantris, Mistborn.
1:39:43 Elantris, they didn’t have remainders.
1:39:44 They didn’t print enough of them.
1:39:45 Mistborn, they did.
1:39:47 They actually overprinted a little bit.
1:39:48 So they had too many remainders.
1:39:50 They said, Brandon, you can have these.
1:39:52 It’s a dollar a piece.
1:39:55 I’m like, entrepreneur, what does my mom say?
1:39:57 You buy those books at a dollar and you sign them
1:39:58 and you sell them at cover price,
1:40:00 and you use that to supplement your income, right?
1:40:02 You’re making $2,500 a year.
1:40:04 You need to supplement that somehow.
1:40:05 So I bought them all.
1:40:08 Okay, so this is going back early days.
1:40:09 Way back early.
1:40:10 Bought them all, put them in our garage.
1:40:12 Couldn’t park our car anymore.
1:40:15 Then we hired Becky, who’s my sister-in-law,
1:40:17 to take the orders.
1:40:18 We put them up on my website signed.
1:40:22 And it’s a trickle, 10 a week or even that many.
1:40:23 But she was shipping that.
1:40:24 So first person is shipping.
1:40:27 Second person is editorial, executive assistant editorial.
1:40:29 Soon there’s enough editorial work for him
1:40:30 that I need another assistant.
1:40:33 So then we hire a merchandising person.
1:40:34 What is the merch?
1:40:37 So the merch at that point was looking at doing t-shirts
1:40:42 and stickers and take over the shipping from Becky.
1:40:44 They have like a full in-house thing.
1:40:46 So that’s when we let Becky go.
1:40:47 So she was our first employee.
1:40:48 I’m nodding.
1:40:49 She’s over here in the corner.
1:40:50 She eventually got hired again.
1:40:52 She’ll still come back into the story.
1:40:54 But then we have like a full-time person
1:40:57 who is shipping and to come up with merchandising.
1:40:59 And then I hire her husband.
1:41:03 We hired them as a team for 20 hours each a week.
1:41:04 As 140-hour employee.
1:41:05 He was an artist.
1:41:08 He’d done all my art for Elantris or Mistborn.
1:41:10 See, he’s saying Elantris for Mistborn.
1:41:13 And she was, she’s the person we had been off
1:41:15 loading our merchandise to so far
1:41:16 that it started doing it.
1:41:18 We’re like, we’re bringing this in-house.
1:41:20 So posters, art prints, all of that stuff.
1:41:23 And then our next employee is right around the same time
1:41:25 is publicity and marketing altogether.
1:41:27 That’s Adam whom you’ve met.
1:41:30 So then we have our structure all set, right?
1:41:33 We have, for me, I have an editorial person.
1:41:37 I have a creative element, which art person
1:41:39 and I have a publicity person.
1:41:42 And then Emily has a person for shipping
1:41:44 and for merchandise together.
1:41:46 And then she hired a facilities person
1:41:48 to kind of, our little office at the time
1:41:50 to clean it up, to make sure people need
1:41:52 to change light bulbs and things like that.
1:41:55 And then she handled herself all of the HR
1:41:57 and things like that.
1:41:58 And that’s where we began.
1:42:01 And that’s what we were for like 10 years
1:42:04 until the first Kickstarter where things exploded.
1:42:07 And slowly we’ve been adding people to shipping
1:42:09 and we’ve been shipping out of the house
1:42:11 next door that we bought.
1:42:14 And that’s when we said,
1:42:15 “All right, it’s time to level up.”
1:42:16 And I said,
1:42:17 “Everyone’s going to build a department.
1:42:19 I want a full team for each one
1:42:22 because we’re going to go somewhere with this
1:42:24 now that I have this team.”
1:42:25 And just to give people a visual.
1:42:29 So when I got my amazing tour earlier,
1:42:32 I remember walking into the warehouse
1:42:33 and I was like,
1:42:35 “I feel like I’m at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
1:42:40 This is a gigantic space with levels upon levels
1:42:44 and palettes upon palettes upon palettes.”
1:42:49 It is really jaw-dropping to walk into that space.
1:42:50 Now you mentioned Kickstarter.
1:42:52 I know we’re jumping ahead a little bit.
1:42:55 And I’m going to want to come back to Warbreaker
1:42:56 and all sorts of other things.
1:43:00 But since you already mentioned Kickstarter,
1:43:04 I recall very distinctly when your launch video
1:43:08 was sent to me by a number of friends.
1:43:10 You could listen to Raiders usually.
1:43:13 So I got this video and I was like,
1:43:14 “Oh, this should be fun to watch.”
1:43:18 So for people who don’t have any context,
1:43:20 this is the big one.
1:43:21 The big one.
1:43:23 How do you want to set that up?
1:43:25 Because it’s so mind-boggling.
1:43:27 I don’t even know which angle to take on it.
1:43:30 I have a couple of big level-up moments in my life.
1:43:33 The first one is when I pitched Mistborn
1:43:35 going from Elantris to Mistborn,
1:43:37 where I said I’m not doing sequel to Elantris.
1:43:38 I’m doing this whole new thing.
1:43:40 And I’ve got big aspirations.
1:43:42 The next one is when the Wheel of Time hit me.
1:43:45 The next one is when we started doing our Leather Bounds.
1:43:47 And the most recent one is our Kickstarter.
1:43:49 Now, I say our Kickstarter because it’s the famous one.
1:43:52 We’d actually done one before that hit $7 million.
1:43:54 That was for the Way of Kings Leather Bound.
1:43:56 We moved our Leather Bounds from…
1:43:59 So we did Elantris and the Mistborn books
1:44:02 in Warbreaker just as pre-orders during the 20 teams.
1:44:05 And then coming to the 2020s,
1:44:07 we said, “All right, we’re moving to Kickstarter.”
1:44:10 This happened actually because of my friend Howard Taylor,
1:44:12 who was one of my models,
1:44:15 where he’s the guy who did a web comic,
1:44:18 comic book that he sold the print editions
1:44:21 in order to subsidize the free thing online.
1:44:22 And he came to me and said,
1:44:24 “Brandon, you should be doing crowdfunding.”
1:44:26 I’m like, “We have a nice pre-order system.”
1:44:29 He’s like, “No, crowdfunding hits publicity
1:44:30 in a different way.”
1:44:32 And I realized he’s right.
1:44:33 I should have been doing these.
1:44:35 One of the problems with the pre-orders
1:44:38 is we never knew how many to order, right?
1:44:40 And with a Kickstarter, you get all those orders come in.
1:44:42 And you have to pay a chunk to Kickstarter,
1:44:45 but they have a nice back-end structure.
1:44:47 And we investigated that.
1:44:49 And Kara, my person who’s in charge of fulfillment,
1:44:51 is like, “This would be so much easier
1:44:53 than what we’re doing because you can mail-merge
1:44:55 all these things and they keep all of this track
1:44:58 of all of the stuff with the shipping and the prices.”
1:45:01 It just makes it so much easier
1:45:03 than there’s the publicity side
1:45:06 where you can start adding all of these add-ons
1:45:07 and things.
1:45:10 And so we tried one out with the way of Kingslover bound.
1:45:14 It was successful, $7 million, which is pretty good.
1:45:16 And then COVID hit.
1:45:20 Okay, so before we get to COVID hits,
1:45:22 now before we get to that,
1:45:24 what did you guys learn?
1:45:28 What were the key lessons learned with that first prototype run?
1:45:29 Let’s just say.
1:45:30 Yeah, first prototype run.
1:45:31 So there’s a couple things.
1:45:34 Number one, there’s a whole lot of organization
1:45:38 that goes into shipping out 50,000 books at once
1:45:40 instead of 50,000 books across 10 years.
1:45:41 Yeah, yeah.
1:45:43 Because a lot of folks who do Kickstarter,
1:45:45 if they’re successful, get the hug of death.
1:45:46 Exactly.
1:45:47 And they implode.
1:45:50 Yep, they implode because managing and shipping
1:45:51 and keeping everyone happy.
1:45:53 When you do what we were doing,
1:45:55 where we’re sending out a few thousand, you know,
1:45:58 every month or things like that,
1:46:01 people get their books in a timely way.
1:46:02 In a Kickstarter,
1:46:04 suddenly you have to figure out how to send 50,000 books
1:46:06 and keep everyone updated on it, right?
1:46:08 And you have to figure out how to get merchandise
1:46:11 and books shipped together or in separate packages.
1:46:15 That’s a really big one because what we found with our books is
1:46:19 we could drop ship the books direct from the printer,
1:46:21 but not the merchandise,
1:46:24 which comes in on different boats from around the world
1:46:27 because you’re printing them all in different places.
1:46:30 And so we had to figure out how are we doing all the shipping?
1:46:33 The logistics do kill a lot of people,
1:46:34 and we were able to build that.
1:46:36 So that’s all behind the scene stuff.
1:46:37 That’s a lesson.
1:46:38 Having your logistics in place,
1:46:40 knowing how you’re going to fulfill
1:46:42 if you are successful is a very big deal.
1:46:46 Knowing that you can already produce these things at scale,
1:46:48 have them arrive,
1:46:51 like a lot of people who do Kickstarter don’t understand,
1:46:55 like the sheer fact of these big trucks coming in
1:46:57 can only go to certain places,
1:47:00 and they can only offload in certain ways.
1:47:03 And some of them need a high dock,
1:47:04 and some of them will have a ramp,
1:47:07 and you have to find out where can they deposit these things.
1:47:09 If you don’t have a warehouse with a high dock,
1:47:12 you better then know that the trucks are coming in with a ramp
1:47:14 and a pallet jack.
1:47:16 Otherwise, they’re going to arrive and be like,
1:47:17 “All right, move these.”
1:47:19 And you’re like, “What do we do?”
1:47:21 We actually had one of those where they’d all had ramps before
1:47:23 and then run arrived without.
1:47:26 And they’re like, “All right, how are you getting this out?”
1:47:29 And we had to have a bunch of people go into the back of the book
1:47:32 and move them off of the pallets by box.
1:47:34 So these are all lessons learned.
1:47:36 So there’s all these logistical things.
1:47:39 The second thing we learned was that it was true.
1:47:43 A crowdfunding campaign where you bring all of the might of your fan base
1:47:48 together for one event cuts through the noise.
1:47:51 There’s a certain principle I’ve started calling,
1:47:54 like escape velocity of attention.
1:47:58 Escape velocity of attention is in today’s media environment.
1:48:03 It’s like people’s attention have a gravitational pull
1:48:06 to what they’ve already been paying attention to.
1:48:11 And they love the things that they love and getting anything else
1:48:13 to achieve that escape velocity,
1:48:17 to go off and to make a splash,
1:48:21 but any idea to not just crash and burn to get out into the universe
1:48:25 and draw the attention of other people is just super difficult.
1:48:28 And most things like sit on the planet
1:48:31 and never get up into the universe where everyone can see it.
1:48:34 They crash and burn and it’s like this layer
1:48:38 keeping people’s attention away from paying attention to this thing over here.
1:48:41 And in order to make any sort of noise,
1:48:44 any sort of attention outside of a very small group,
1:48:47 you need a certain amount of attention being paid to it
1:48:50 so that you achieve this escape velocity and you blast out
1:48:53 and then the rest of the planets pay attention to it,
1:48:56 not just the one that is your little planet of attention.
1:48:59 And it’s really hard.
1:49:03 Like launching new books for new authors today is much harder.
1:49:06 You might notice, I’ve noticed,
1:49:10 there are fewer big people who break out now than used to.
1:49:13 More authors are earning a living now than used to,
1:49:16 but they’re earning less because there are fewer breakouts.
1:49:19 There are fewer movie stars than there used to be.
1:49:22 There are fewer giant bands than there used to be.
1:49:25 And this is all because our attention is…
1:49:28 There’s so many things vying for it that we put up this barrier
1:49:30 and we don’t want to look up.
1:49:32 And it’s very natural.
1:49:37 And so having a Kickstarter gets that momentum behind you,
1:49:38 starts to make noise.
1:49:40 -Executed properly. -Executed properly.
1:49:43 A lot of them flop, but actually you’re bringing all of your fan base together
1:49:45 and making a lot of noise.
1:49:48 Suddenly, more people pay attention to you.
1:49:50 And with our way of King’s Kickstarter,
1:49:53 it still only reached our audience, right?
1:49:57 But even reaching your audience is really hard today.
1:50:02 All of the social media platforms that we have learned to rely upon in use
1:50:05 have found out that people can’t pay attention to everything.
1:50:07 They will click too many names.
1:50:09 They will want to follow these names,
1:50:13 but then they’ll be too much spam of all these names on their feeds
1:50:15 and all of them use algorithms because, number one,
1:50:17 they need to monetize somehow.
1:50:20 And number two, people follow too many things
1:50:22 and it overwhelms most people so they come
1:50:26 and they bounce off of even their social media platforms.
1:50:29 And so in the early days of social media,
1:50:32 if someone followed you on Facebook and you did a post,
1:50:34 it showed up on their feed automatically.
1:50:37 -No longer the case. -And that stopped in the 20 teens.
1:50:40 And so it depended on how many people liked the thing.
1:50:42 So if you even want to reach your own audience,
1:50:45 you have to have an escape velocity of attention.
1:50:47 You have to break through these barriers,
1:50:51 preventing even your fan base from seeing what’s happening.
1:50:53 I still get people who come to me like,
1:50:56 “Wow, you did this big Kickstarter. I didn’t even hear about this.”
1:51:00 We sold only 10% of our audience with the big one that we’re getting to, right?
1:51:03 -That’s insane. -That’s only 10%.
1:51:06 And that’s all that effort to get to 10%.
1:51:10 And I would say the big Kickstarter was 30% to 40% new people.
1:51:12 So we really only reached 5% of my audience.
1:51:15 But regardless, it taught us that.
1:51:17 It taught me about escape velocity of attention,
1:51:19 how to break through, get into the sky,
1:51:22 and start getting everyone’s attention maybe a little bit,
1:51:25 or at least get high enough that your whole planet that follows you,
1:51:27 more of them can see it.
1:51:31 So I want to give people just a bit of a carrot dangling
1:51:33 on the end of a stick here.
1:51:36 -And then we’re going to go back to COVID hitting. -Yeah.
1:51:39 With the big campaign that we keep referring to,
1:51:41 what did that end up totaling?
1:51:46 So it was 41. something million official,
1:51:49 45 when you would do all the people.
1:51:52 You have people that can add on extra stuff.
1:51:54 The behind the scenes was another four and a half or so.
1:51:56 We ended right at 45 million.
1:51:59 So if you go look at it right now, it’s 41. something.
1:52:01 Do you have it there? What is it? 41.
1:52:04 I don’t have it actually at the points. I just have roughly 41.
1:52:06 Roughly 41 million.
1:52:10 And the previous highest Kickstarter had been 21.
1:52:12 And we still have the record.
1:52:15 Here’s what’s wild, it’s four books.
1:52:17 If you go look at that top 10,
1:52:20 everything else is some cool tech innovation.
1:52:23 And we have it for novels.
1:52:26 So COVID hits.
1:52:30 I have gone through cycles in my life multiple times
1:52:32 where I say yes to too many things.
1:52:34 And then I’m traveling too much.
1:52:36 And 2019 was one of those years.
1:52:38 As an author, you know this.
1:52:40 People want you in person.
1:52:42 And traveling is fun.
1:52:43 I enjoy seeing the world.
1:52:45 So you say yes to a bunch of things.
1:52:48 And then you end up, as I did in 2019,
1:52:50 with three different trips to Europe.
1:52:51 And Europe can be kind of exhausting.
1:52:53 Three tours in Europe, multiple tours around here.
1:52:57 And I calculated I’d been on the road one third of my days.
1:53:01 COVID hits and I had 2020 was set for the same thing.
1:53:03 And all that gets canceled.
1:53:05 No one can travel.
1:53:09 And suddenly I have one third of my time back.
1:53:12 In the meantime, I’d started to feel dissatisfied
1:53:13 with something in my life.
1:53:16 When I was early in my career,
1:53:18 I could just have a random idea.
1:53:20 And I would shelve it until I was done with my current book.
1:53:22 But I could have something that was really exciting to me.
1:53:24 And when I finished my current book,
1:53:26 I could go in and I could write that cool idea.
1:53:28 Warbreaker that you mentioned was one of these.
1:53:30 Just a standalone book that I wrote, you know,
1:53:31 Mistborn Trilogy.
1:53:33 Between the Mistborn Trilogy,
1:53:36 The Wheel of Time and Stormlight on either side,
1:53:39 I have this little standalone book that was a cool idea I had.
1:53:41 And I love that about fantasy.
1:53:44 Some of my favorite fantasy novels are standalone books.
1:53:46 Guy Gavriel Kay is very good at them.
1:53:51 Lions of Al-Rassan or Taigana are too highly recommended.
1:53:52 They’re ’90s fantasy.
1:53:54 They’re a little slower than modern fantasy.
1:53:56 Really just single volume,
1:53:58 really digging into one world,
1:54:00 but it doesn’t overstay its welcome.
1:54:04 And I hadn’t been able to do that in a while.
1:54:07 I was writing series, all these series.
1:54:09 Everything I wrote turned into a big series.
1:54:11 And I didn’t have a place for these wacky ideas.
1:54:14 And I started to hit my mid-40s.
1:54:16 And I started to realize,
1:54:19 I’m only really going to be able to do this probably
1:54:22 till my 70s, if I’m lucky, right?
1:54:26 Most authors really slow down when they hit their 70s.
1:54:30 This is what people who are fans of Game of Thrones have found.
1:54:32 George was always a little on the slower side,
1:54:35 and then he hit retirement age, and he slowed down.
1:54:37 And a lot of authors that happened to.
1:54:39 And I started to calculate out,
1:54:41 and I’m like, I don’t have room for any of these cool ideas.
1:54:43 That makes me sad.
1:54:46 But then suddenly I had a third of my time back.
1:54:49 And I started watching movies with my kids.
1:54:52 They were old enough that we could show them some of our favorite movies.
1:54:55 And we showed them The Princess Bride.
1:54:57 One of my favorite movies and favorite books.
1:54:58 -Amazing. -Yeah.
1:54:59 -Amazing, amazing. -Just because–
1:55:01 -Amazing Everything, William Goldman. -Yeah.
1:55:03 It’s a wonderful, wonderful book, wonderful.
1:55:05 Written by William Goldman,
1:55:07 who’s a great screenwriter,
1:55:09 he’s written a lot of classics.
1:55:11 Butch Cassie and Sundance Kid was one of his.
1:55:13 And just brilliant screenwriter,
1:55:15 who script-doctored a ton of your favorite movies,
1:55:18 as well as wrote multiple on his own of your favorite movies.
1:55:21 And so, I was watching this movie,
1:55:23 and I love just the feel of it.
1:55:26 This sort of fantasy that is fun,
1:55:28 but doesn’t quite take itself too seriously.
1:55:30 And we got done with that.
1:55:32 And my wife’s like, “I love that movie.”
1:55:34 And she said, “Isn’t it funny
1:55:36 that The Princess doesn’t do anything
1:55:38 in the movie The Princess Bride?”
1:55:41 She even tries to hit a rat once and she misses, right?
1:55:44 Like, that’s the most she accomplishes.
1:55:46 That and marrying the bad guy, almost.
1:55:47 Yeah.
1:55:49 And she’s like, “Wouldn’t it be nice if she did something?”
1:55:50 Marriage.
1:55:51 Oh, marriage.
1:55:53 So, that stuck in my brain.
1:55:55 I’m like, “What if The Princess Bride?”
1:55:57 What if, you know, Princess Bride starts with,
1:55:59 “Guy goes off to seek his fortune,
1:56:00 says, “Wait for me.
1:56:02 I’m gonna go find my fortune and come back,
1:56:04 and then we can get married and I’ll have money.”
1:56:06 What if he went off and he got captured by pirates?
1:56:07 Mm-hmm.
1:56:09 What if that story happened,
1:56:11 but the princess said,
1:56:14 “Well, I guess I have to go find him now.”
1:56:16 And went to find him, right?
1:56:17 No one’s gonna go find him.
1:56:18 Well, it’s down to me.
1:56:19 She has no experience with this,
1:56:21 but she’s like, “I’m the only one.”
1:56:22 So, she goes off.
1:56:25 And that, I wrote a story that was more fairy-tell-ish.
1:56:27 It’s still in my cosmic universe,
1:56:28 all my connected things.
1:56:30 So, it’s told by my story-tell-y character,
1:56:34 based a little bit off of some Shakespearean fool vibes
1:56:36 from like, Twelfth Night and stuff like that.
1:56:39 And let me, I’m just gonna sidebar because we might not get to it.
1:56:40 Yeah.
1:56:42 You have someone among you,
1:56:45 within this company whose job,
1:56:47 sole job, as I understand it, is continuity.
1:56:48 Yes.
1:56:49 Right?
1:56:52 And you have an internal wiki to keep track of everything in this universe
1:56:54 so that it interconnects and coheres.
1:56:56 As good as I am with narrative,
1:56:58 I need all of this stuff still.
1:56:59 So, we have someone.
1:57:01 So, from his voice,
1:57:03 this is the first time I’ve done this, right?
1:57:04 All my other books are in my voice.
1:57:05 And I said,
1:57:07 “What if a character told a story to someone else about this,
1:57:08 this young woman?”
1:57:11 And it became the story, Tress of the Emerald Sea,
1:57:14 that I wrote without any plans to publish it,
1:57:17 without any contracts, without any expectations.
1:57:19 I didn’t tell the fans it was coming.
1:57:22 I wrote it and just gave the chapters to my wife to read
1:57:23 as I was writing it.
1:57:27 And it was liberating with no deadlines, no contracts.
1:57:30 It just, I wrote it because I had a little extra time.
1:57:32 And I thought, “That was amazing.
1:57:33 That’s something I’ve been missing.”
1:57:35 And COVID gave me this chance across those like,
1:57:38 two or three years that we canceled everything,
1:57:40 that I used that extra time.
1:57:43 I fulfilled all of my contractual obligations
1:57:44 writing books,
1:57:47 but I also ended up writing four novels
1:57:49 that were just squeezed between.
1:57:52 And I say, you know, these are each 100,000 words, right?
1:57:55 So, they’re one Stormlight Archive book.
1:57:58 So, it’s about 18 months of writing time
1:58:01 that I squeezed in there between different things.
1:58:05 And I wrote these four books and I realized,
1:58:09 well, at about book three, I realized I had something.
1:58:11 That I could spring on people.
1:58:14 And COVID had been so miserable for so many people.
1:58:16 It was delightful for me.
1:58:18 I’m writing books, I’m watching movies with my kids.
1:58:21 No one’s asking me to go on tour anymore.
1:58:25 And so, in the midst of all this, I started to have a plan.
1:58:27 And I started to have an idea.
1:58:29 And I got that fourth one written.
1:58:31 And I wrote the fourth one deliberately for the Kickstarter.
1:58:34 I realized I wanted one that felt more like my classic novels,
1:58:37 so that fans who like Mistworn and Stormlight
1:58:41 would get something because number one and number three of that
1:58:43 were told from my storyteller voice.
1:58:45 And then number two was something completely different.
1:58:48 It’s a science fiction novel unrelated to every my other stuff.
1:58:50 And so, I wrote one kind of for the fans.
1:58:54 And then I sprung them on my company, said,
1:58:57 there’s four books out of nowhere.
1:58:58 Tell me what you think.
1:59:02 And I watched their reaction to finding four unexpected books
1:59:06 in the excitement that just moved through the company.
1:59:09 And I said, all right, I’ve got something.
1:59:11 I did it again with test audience.
1:59:15 Some of my, you know, sworn to secrecy, early readers.
1:59:18 Do you use the same early readers?
1:59:20 I have a pool of about a hundred of them.
1:59:22 And we don’t use them all for every book.
1:59:25 We just kind of randomly decide.
1:59:28 And I said, Brandon has an extra book.
1:59:31 And we actually splint like the hundred and the groups of 25
1:59:33 and sent them all four different books.
1:59:35 And they all talk on it.
1:59:37 Do you say two groups of 45?
1:59:38 No, sorry.
1:59:39 Sorry, four groups of 25.
1:59:40 Four groups of 25.
1:59:41 Sorry.
1:59:42 I probably misspoke on the head.
1:59:43 No, no, no.
1:59:44 I think I missheard it.
1:59:45 Okay, four groups of 25.
1:59:48 And they all talk on like discords and things.
1:59:50 And we sent them each a different book.
1:59:52 And then I watched the discord as they all realized
1:59:55 I had written four books in secret.
2:00:00 And I spun this into the video that you watched.
2:00:02 I went to my team and I said, I want to do something.
2:00:05 And they were a little resistant because sometimes
2:00:09 some of these big ideas that I have, I’m the big idea person
2:00:12 and they can be really daunting such as the,
2:00:14 we’re going to do our own leather balance.
2:00:16 We’re going to start doing kick starters.
2:00:20 I kind of have to, my job is to, we always talk, Emily and I,
2:00:24 my job is to look and pull people toward that star future.
2:00:27 And her job is to say, remember to be practical.
2:00:28 Remember to be practical.
2:00:29 Can we actually accomplish this?
2:00:31 Well, it would take to actually accomplish this.
2:00:35 And I went to them and I said, I want to do a video where
2:00:38 I pretend that I’m coming out with some big scandal
2:00:41 and I’m retiring from writing because I’ve secretly,
2:00:45 you know, done something just horrible that happens periodically.
2:00:48 And it’s probably, it may be not be something really fun
2:00:51 to make fun of, but you know, you have a lot of writers like,
2:00:54 you know, I have to admit that I plagiarized or I have to admit
2:00:57 that anyway, all those apology videos that people,
2:01:00 and I said, I’m going to make a fake apology video.
2:01:03 And the reason being is everyone’s going to get gotten by it
2:01:05 and they’re going to share it with their friends.
2:01:06 He’ll get gotten by it.
2:01:08 They’ll just say, hey, watch this.
2:01:10 And then you’ll be, oh no, Sanderson, what’s up with him?
2:01:13 And we’ll tap into that sort of horror mentality that watch
2:01:17 a train wreck, car wreck, people, you know, want to slow down.
2:01:19 If they think something, Brandon’s going to announce
2:01:22 something terrible and then I hit them instead of it being
2:01:24 another terrible COVID thing.
2:01:26 It was, there’s four surprise books.
2:01:29 You get this delightful thing in your life instead.
2:01:32 And I knew this would go viral.
2:01:33 I just knew it would.
2:01:37 They were scared of it because they’re like, this, you know,
2:01:39 sounds like you have like cancer or something.
2:01:41 And that’s not something to make fun of.
2:01:43 And I’m like, yes, it is not, I agree.
2:01:46 But at the same time, I knew it would work.
2:01:50 I am a storyteller and that’s a video with a story.
2:01:51 Right?
2:01:53 Like I live for the reveal.
2:01:57 If people read my books, you will tell I live for that ending
2:01:59 where I’ve been distracting with something
2:02:01 and then I pull out that surprise.
2:02:03 I love the great twist.
2:02:06 I love the really good complication that you’re not expecting.
2:02:09 I love when a story comes together right at the end.
2:02:11 And that video did it.
2:02:15 And it announced a Kickstarter for four secret books.
2:02:20 We did not expect to go to $41 million.
2:02:25 We were hoping to get to around seven to 10 like we’d done before.
2:02:27 But that escaped velocity of attention.
2:02:28 Right?
2:02:33 I suddenly, it’s the first time in my life where suddenly people
2:02:37 are paying attention who are not in my circle of influence,
2:02:38 who don’t read Epic Fantasy.
2:02:40 Suddenly news stories are everywhere.
2:02:42 Everyone’s talking about it.
2:02:46 I get interviewed by like, you know, legit news media.
2:02:49 And the closest I had ever gotten to that was the Wheel of Time
2:02:50 way back when.
2:02:52 And even then, no one really interviewed me.
2:02:53 Yeah, which we’ll come back to.
2:02:55 I did appear on Colbert Report.
2:02:56 That’s a big one.
2:03:01 Well, my face appeared.
2:03:02 Does that count?
2:03:03 I think that counts.
2:03:07 So Stephen Colbert had a piece on Zeppelins
2:03:08 because he was in character.
2:03:09 This is Colbert Report.
2:03:10 Yeah.
2:03:12 About how much he hates Zeppelins or whatever.
2:03:15 And he holds up because USA Today had done a thing on Zeppelins
2:03:17 and he holds up a USA Today page.
2:03:18 And there’s my little picture.
2:03:21 Because doofus takes over Wheel of Time.
2:03:23 It’s like the bottom story on the page, below the fold.
2:03:25 And there’s this giant Zeppelins story.
2:03:27 And he holds it up and he points at Zeppelins.
2:03:28 And then there’s me.
2:03:30 My face was on the Colbert Report.
2:03:31 It’s pixelated.
2:03:32 You can barely tell.
2:03:33 But you appeared.
2:03:34 But I appeared.
2:03:35 Yeah.
2:03:36 As seen on.
2:03:37 As seen on Stephen Colbert.
2:03:39 Brad and Sanderson.
2:03:41 My claim thing.
2:03:43 My fans all tweeted me.
2:03:45 This is way back in like 2009.
2:03:46 It was 2007.
2:03:48 It was right where the Wheel of Time happened.
2:03:53 So when you look at this record breaking success.
2:03:55 This Kickstarter.
2:04:01 Were there aspects of it or packages that just outperformed
2:04:03 all expectations?
2:04:04 Yeah.
2:04:06 It was the main tier.
2:04:08 The buy everything tier.
2:04:09 So we did it.
2:04:12 Again, I like to have people be able to self-select it.
2:04:16 And so there was a relatively inexpensive e-book and audio
2:04:18 book bundle that you got together.
2:04:23 And I think it was $15 each for those.
2:04:24 Okay.
2:04:28 So each book in the audio e-book combo was $15.
2:04:29 $15.
2:04:30 Yep.
2:04:33 Which is about the price of an Audible credit.
2:04:34 Plus you get the e-book.
2:04:35 Sure.
2:04:36 We thought that was.
2:04:38 So for $60 you got all four books on that.
2:04:42 And then the high end we did, you get all four books in our
2:04:43 nice editions.
2:04:46 They’re not leather bound, but they’re like a $55 price
2:04:47 point.
2:04:48 We sold them at $40 on this.
2:04:52 Plus a box every month of Brandon Sanderson swag.
2:04:54 Of just magical swag.
2:04:55 For how long?
2:04:56 For a year.
2:04:57 For a year.
2:04:58 Yeah.
2:05:00 I like the idea of subscription boxes, but I have a problem
2:05:04 with them in that they, there was the big subscription box
2:05:06 craze of the late teens.
2:05:09 And I feel like their incentive was misplaced.
2:05:11 They wanted to keep you going as long as they could.
2:05:14 Because of that, they will stretch out the cool objects.
2:05:16 They will run out of steam.
2:05:19 And Adam actually in our company pitched, why don’t we do a
2:05:20 subscription box?
2:05:23 And I’ve always been hesitant because I feel like you eventually
2:05:26 end up with too much crap you don’t want.
2:05:28 But I went to the team and I said, what if we did eight
2:05:29 boxes?
2:05:30 Four books and eight boxes.
2:05:32 So across a year you get a book every quarter.
2:05:35 And then you get two boxes of swag.
2:05:37 And we just make that swag awesome.
2:05:39 We put all of our best ideas into it.
2:05:42 We make eight really killer boxes and then we’re done.
2:05:45 We don’t ask people to subscribe for longer.
2:05:48 We just, you got your cool boxes of interesting stuff.
2:05:51 And that just went great.
2:05:53 What was the price point for that?
2:05:55 So those were 40 bucks each, I think also.
2:05:58 So it’s the idea is that it’s $40 a month.
2:06:00 For those months you get a book.
2:06:04 And then eight of those months you get a $40 box.
2:06:06 That has other cool stuff in it.
2:06:08 And $40 was a high enough price point.
2:06:10 We could make some really quality cool things.
2:06:12 So it’s like just under 500 bucks for that.
2:06:13 Yep.
2:06:17 And that one, that tier was, I believe, our biggest tier.
2:06:19 If it wasn’t that one, it was the tier of just all the
2:06:21 books in their high, those editions.
2:06:24 Those two were the ones that just went gangbusters.
2:06:27 Almost nobody bought the lower tiers.
2:06:28 Did that surprise you?
2:06:29 Yeah.
2:06:30 That surprised me.
2:06:31 But again, everyone’s happy.
2:06:32 They all get a self-select.
2:06:36 How do you explain that based on what you said earlier,
2:06:39 which is that you only hit 5% to 10% of your audience
2:06:43 and you had 30% to 40% newbies going for the gold?
2:06:45 I mean, that just strikes me as so unexpected.
2:06:46 Yeah.
2:06:48 I think part of it is, I would guess,
2:06:52 the majority of that 30% to 40% were people who had heard of me
2:06:54 and had not tried me yet.
2:06:55 Right?
2:06:57 I wasn’t grabbing people who had never, you know,
2:06:58 that didn’t ever read.
2:07:00 But it was people who had friends that say,
2:07:01 “Hey, Brandon Sanderson.”
2:07:03 And these four books were all starter books.
2:07:05 They were all meant, even the fourth one,
2:07:08 which is kind of tied into things, to be books you could just
2:07:11 pick up and read without knowing any of my other things.
2:07:13 And to this day, Tress of the Emerald Sea,
2:07:16 you want to hear weird stuff, another tangent.
2:07:17 Love weird stuff.
2:07:18 Tress of the Emerald Sea.
2:07:21 You would think I have plumbed the depths of my audience,
2:07:24 right, doing this Kickstarter, $45 million,
2:07:28 shipped out 150,000 copies of that book, right,
2:07:31 with the Kickstarter and all said and done.
2:07:35 That is my best-selling book through an edition,
2:07:40 but from the publisher after Mistborn and Stormlight Archive.
2:07:42 After the first books of those, not even the sequels,
2:07:45 like, after Mistborn 1 and Stormlight 1,
2:07:48 Tress of the Emerald Sea, that book sells as much.
2:07:49 It’s really comparable.
2:07:51 They’re the weeks where it kind of beats them.
2:07:55 So this book that you would think we’d sold to everybody,
2:07:57 the publisher releases an edition expecting,
2:07:59 well, there’s not much, but we’ll have it on the shelves,
2:08:04 becomes their third best-selling Sanderson book of all time.
2:08:05 How do you explain that?
2:08:08 It’s because it’s that escape philosophy of attention.
2:08:10 People hear about you.
2:08:13 They want to try you out, but they don’t know where to start
2:08:16 or there’s so many things and something cuts through.
2:08:18 People can say, “Tress is a great place to start.”
2:08:20 Book talk really likes Tress.
2:08:24 It talks about and says, “Great place to start on Sanderson.
2:08:26 A little bit more romantic, a little bit more whimsical.
2:08:29 It fits with what a lot of people like on book talk.”
2:08:31 So they buy it even though.
2:08:33 So it’s really interesting.
2:08:35 The starter books do sell the best.
2:08:38 Anyway, we’re going back to, we released this thing
2:08:41 and those are the ones like people want.
2:08:43 They’ve heard of me.
2:08:45 They say, “Well, I’ll try this thing.”
2:08:47 And they become part of something.
2:08:49 And so they all buy in and then there’s that thing.
2:08:51 We call it the year of Sanderson.
2:08:53 And we started shipping these boxes out
2:08:55 and people got their boxes and their books
2:08:57 and it was wonderful.
2:09:00 It was the best year of my life, right?
2:09:01 It’s incredible.
2:09:02 It’s so incredible.
2:09:04 So I have a question about the four times 25 people,
2:09:05 the test readers.
2:09:06 Yeah.
2:09:08 And this actually ties into some of the questions
2:09:09 I wanted to ask about Warbreaker.
2:09:13 But let’s focus on the test readers, the four groups 25.
2:09:17 When you have a new book of any type,
2:09:20 do you use 25 to 100 test readers?
2:09:21 Yeah.
2:09:22 Okay.
2:09:26 How do you absorb or evaluate that feedback?
2:09:30 Because that is, I could foresee that being a lot of feedback.
2:09:35 I pay my team, my editorial team,
2:09:39 to condense it into the most relevant information.
2:09:43 So this is a big difference to me and a lot of writers
2:09:46 is I look at books a little bit
2:09:50 like Hollywood looks at movies with test audiences.
2:09:53 I want to know what my audience is going to say
2:09:55 about a book before I release it.
2:09:57 Sometimes it’ll change what I write.
2:09:58 Often it will.
2:09:59 Sometimes it won’t.
2:10:00 I just want to know.
2:10:02 I want to understand how it’s going to perform,
2:10:04 what people are going to think of it.
2:10:07 And a lot of writers do this with a couple of early readers.
2:10:09 I find that doesn’t give me an actual test audience.
2:10:12 It doesn’t give me the pulse of an audience.
2:10:17 I need like 20 to 30, if not 40 to 50 people reading it.
2:10:20 Even that’s just a tiny percentage of the audience.
2:10:22 But it’s been really key to me.
2:10:26 It started when I was nobody before I sold for an agent,
2:10:27 for an editor.
2:10:29 I actually sold to an editor before I got an agent.
2:10:30 So I’m reverse.
2:10:34 But back before I had any of that and I was ahead of that magazine,
2:10:38 I started using those readers and passing out my books.
2:10:41 And I would print off physical copies because this is the late 90s.
2:10:45 And I would have a pack of gel pens of different colors.
2:10:48 And I’d say, pick a color, write your name and that color.
2:10:50 So I know who’s writing the comment.
2:10:53 Read through the book and write your feedback all in that color.
2:10:56 Go ahead and respond to what other people have written.
2:10:59 And they would pass around my friends and they would all take a different color.
2:11:03 And you’d have these conversations on the margins about what people thought of certain scenes.
2:11:06 And I saw that and I’m like, this is really handy.
2:11:10 Did you ask for particular types of feedback to focus it?
2:11:14 So what I want is just, I don’t want people to fix the book.
2:11:19 I want people to give their descriptive responses to the book.
2:11:22 If you were just reading this as a professionally published thing,
2:11:23 where are the places you’re bored?
2:11:25 Where are the places you’re confused?
2:11:27 Where are the places that you’re standing up and sharing?
2:11:30 Where are the places that, you know, where are you engaged?
2:11:32 Where are you not engaged?
2:11:34 Just what are you enjoying?
2:11:35 Don’t tell me what’s wrong.
2:11:37 Don’t tell me what to fix.
2:11:43 Tell me what where you’re bored and tell me where you’re confused.
2:11:47 Tell me where you’re excited and tell me where you’re turning the pages so fast
2:11:51 you have to come back and write your feedback because you don’t want to stop to write your feedback.
2:11:54 And that became really valuable to me.
2:11:58 And so when we moved beyond that and I was actually published,
2:12:04 I started making spreadsheets where I’m like, you get the book, go on the spreadsheet
2:12:09 and go to the chapters tab on the spreadsheet on like a Google sheet
2:12:12 and go look and respond to what people are saying.
2:12:15 And if, you know, just make a comment say, I feel this about this chapter
2:12:17 and then respond to what other people are saying.
2:12:23 And then each chapter fills up with giant conversations about that chapter,
2:12:26 almost like you have a book club out there reading the book and having a discussion.
2:12:29 I mean, you want people to respond to things because it helps you spot patterns.
2:12:30 Yes.
2:12:32 Someone’s like, yeah, I started dragging here.
2:12:34 I didn’t really understand why this character did this.
2:12:35 And then you have somebody like, yeah, me too.
2:12:36 Yeah, me too.
2:12:37 Yeah, exactly.
2:12:38 They’ll say, no, no, no, it was this.
2:12:40 And the first one was like, oh, that made sense.
2:12:41 I went back and read it.
2:12:46 Like you’ll see emerging where the problems are and where they aren’t.
2:12:52 And nowadays what we let people do is they just add a checkmark next to it if they agree with it.
2:12:54 And if they disagree, have them write out why.
2:12:56 And that’s in a spreadsheet or using something.
2:12:57 Spread spreadsheet.
2:12:58 We use Google Sheets.
2:13:00 And no, no, we started using an actual program.
2:13:08 Peter, who’s head of editorial was like, we need an actual program that’s a little that’s secure and that can track.
2:13:12 Like people will write a line number where they have their comment now and stuff.
2:13:17 So we actually use a program, but sometimes we still use Google Sheets for kind of what we call it.
2:13:19 Is that program an off the shelf program that?
2:13:24 One of my beta readers, which is what we call these people worked for the company and pitched it to us.
2:13:27 And the name of it’s escaping me right now.
2:13:28 I can find out what it is.
2:13:29 We can figure it out.
2:13:31 Maybe put it in the show notes if we can find it.
2:13:36 So part of the reason I’m asking is that I started working on this book six, seven years ago.
2:13:37 Is this your fantasy?
2:13:38 No.
2:13:39 No, this is a different book.
2:13:44 This is an entire book on saying no and basically finding clarity in a world of noise.
2:13:46 It’s a really good book to write.
2:13:47 And I started working on it.
2:13:49 It’s the first book I ever shelved.
2:13:51 I was like, you know what?
2:13:53 I’m not quite ready to write this.
2:13:56 And I canceled the contract return the biggest advance that I’ve ever received.
2:13:58 And now I’m working on it.
2:14:05 But I’ve found myself just paying attention energetically to what’s energizing me or draining me.
2:14:07 The idea of serial release.
2:14:08 Yeah.
2:14:09 That’s really big.
2:14:10 Because I’ve never done it.
2:14:11 I’ve never done it.
2:14:16 And that raises a whole lot of questions, which is one of the reasons I wanted to talk about Warbreaker.
2:14:17 Yeah.
2:14:20 And releasing early drafts for free on the website with Creative Commons.
2:14:23 Let’s go to that and just saying, let me finish what I do with the beta reading.
2:14:24 Yeah, yeah.
2:14:26 I give all that to my team.
2:14:30 I go read the end of part summaries and the end of book summaries.
2:14:31 They take the rest.
2:14:32 They distill it.
2:14:37 And then they actually put it into a copy of the book, the manuscript, just interstitials.
2:14:38 They said this at this point.
2:14:39 They said this at this point.
2:14:44 So I never even have to go to the document except to read like end of part one.
2:14:45 What are people’s general responses?
2:14:48 And these are comments in a word doc or something like that.
2:14:50 Comments in a word doc just in track changes.
2:14:51 Yeah.
2:14:52 So that I see.
2:14:56 Here’s a big discussion that happened here.
2:15:00 They only take like 10 to 20% of it and put it in.
2:15:03 What are the criteria for selection?
2:15:05 They’re only taking 10 to 20%.
2:15:08 It’s Peter and Karen and they know me really well.
2:15:09 Yeah.
2:15:11 These are people that I’ve worked with since college.
2:15:12 Yeah.
2:15:13 Okay.
2:15:14 And so it’s over time.
2:15:16 And I will star and say, this is a good comment.
2:15:19 This is one that I, you know, they handle editorial.
2:15:22 They’ll see what I revise and what I don’t.
2:15:25 And they’ll know in the future, watch for this.
2:15:28 And do remember, I’m going and looking at the end of part and reading all of
2:15:29 people’s general comments.
2:15:31 So this is just for a given chapter.
2:15:35 If there’s a speed bump or something like that, but they, they figured it out.
2:15:40 And then looking at war breaker, why did you release it in the way that you released it?
2:15:42 Maybe you just describe how you went about it.
2:15:43 Yeah.
2:15:46 So war breaker happened after I wrote the Mistborn trilogy.
2:15:52 And I was chatting with Corey Doctro, kind of a famous tech blogger and creative
2:15:54 commons advocate.
2:15:57 Every interaction with Corey has been really positive.
2:15:59 Like super class act.
2:16:01 I was once at the Hugo awards.
2:16:05 And this is the end of like the Academy Awards in sci-fi fantasy.
2:16:10 And I was nominated and you get a little pin if you’re nominated to wear around in
2:16:11 your lapel.
2:16:13 And I didn’t know that was in my basket.
2:16:14 I didn’t know is there.
2:16:15 He sighed and have mine.
2:16:16 I’m like, Oh, I don’t have my pen.
2:16:18 And he took off because he, he had several.
2:16:22 You wear any that you, any nominations you’ve had during that night.
2:16:25 And so he took off one of his hands and he just pinned it on me.
2:16:26 You know, that’s kind of a class act.
2:16:27 Corey is.
2:16:34 So I was talking to him and he really believes and believed that attention is
2:16:39 people’s most valuable commodity, not their money, their attention.
2:16:44 If you can get their attention, you will eventually be able to in some ways get money
2:16:47 from that audience to support yourself because start with the attention.
2:16:49 And this was really smart.
2:16:53 He released all of his books in the creative comments and he’s a big advocate for that.
2:16:58 I realized at the time I had Mistborn coming out and this was right when Wheel of Time
2:16:59 was being announced.
2:17:00 It was way back when it’s 2007.
2:17:04 So I wrote a lot of the book, but there are parts I hadn’t written.
2:17:10 So the idea was I started releasing the chapters just on forums to let people give feedback
2:17:16 to me, trying a serialized version of the book with the main goal being see how an audience
2:17:21 online gives feedback different from my beta readers, but also to have a chance to kind
2:17:23 of bring my audience together into one place.
2:17:26 And then when it was done, I released the book under the creative comments.
2:17:30 Partially as an experiment, how does this impact giving away the book for free?
2:17:33 How does this impact the sales of the commercial edition?
2:17:36 I wanted data on that.
2:17:40 And the data says doesn’t really impact it.
2:17:44 It sells just as well as the launchers does, even a little bit better.
2:17:46 And a launchers wasn’t released in the creative comments.
2:17:51 So it doesn’t sell as well as Stormlight or Mistborn, but those are my breakouts, you know,
2:17:53 my standard successes.
2:17:56 And I don’t think, you know, that has anything to do with it.
2:17:59 Have you released any books after that with creative comments?
2:18:00 No, I’m planning.
2:18:02 I keep wanting to do another one.
2:18:04 And I haven’t found the right one to do.
2:18:07 But I am planning to do that at some point.
2:18:12 How did you find the feedback online in the forums differed from beta testers?
2:18:13 It was about the same.
2:18:14 It was?
2:18:15 It really was.
2:18:17 But remember, we’ve got an insular audience of superfans at that point.
2:18:20 That’s the only people paying attention to me in 2007.
2:18:22 Now it would probably be different.
2:18:28 But I can get a little bit of that by watching, we do re-release one chapter a week
2:18:33 or two chapters a week of new books leading up to launch to about a third of the book.
2:18:38 And I can go read the threads on Reddit about that.
2:18:41 And they actually mirror the beta readers really closely.
2:18:42 Amazing.
2:18:43 It’s really interesting.
2:18:44 There are a few things.
2:18:45 This newest book surprised me.
2:18:47 Only one thing surprised me.
2:18:55 And that is in the newest book, people are responding to modernized language more than I expected them to.
2:18:56 What do you mean by that?
2:18:57 Epic fantasy.
2:18:59 You walk this line in epic fantasy.
2:19:02 Do you use OK or do you use all right?
2:19:08 And I’ve been moving the Stormlight Archive toward modern language across the course of the novels
2:19:12 as we’re preparing to kind of go a little bit more, what we call mage punk,
2:19:14 a little more modern for the next one.
2:19:15 Mage punk.
2:19:16 I’ve never heard that.
2:19:17 That’s great.
2:19:18 It’s not my term.
2:19:23 It’s just what people kind of call when fantasy magic becomes technology.
2:19:30 So if you watch any sort of film or thing where you have ships powered by a magical technology,
2:19:33 they will call that mage pex tech and arcane.
2:19:34 Arcane is mage punk.
2:19:37 That’s the straight up subgenre of that.
2:19:39 So I was taken by surprise on that.
2:19:41 People are kind of responding against that.
2:19:48 And I think this could just be like people want more sincerity in their media nowadays.
2:19:51 I think they’re tired of media being cynical.
2:19:53 And this is a sign.
2:19:57 Maybe I don’t think it went cynical, but this is like a danger sign of that.
2:20:00 So they’re like, you know, they’re like, they would like me to pull back.
2:20:03 They want me to call it courting instead of dating, right?
2:20:06 And just kind of stay a little bit more with that fantasy feel.
2:20:07 That one took me by surprise.
2:20:09 My beta readers didn’t spot that.
2:20:11 Everything else in those threads were things.
2:20:18 My beta reader spotted that I either, you know, that I’d left because I felt this was integral to the narrative I’m telling.
2:20:21 If it’s negative, it’s all right for it to be negative.
2:20:23 This is the piece of art, right?
2:20:29 Some people don’t like Impressionist, but you can’t make Impressionism better by not being Impressionist.
2:20:32 Each piece of art is going to have things like that.
2:20:33 Quick question.
2:20:42 When you’re releasing, say chapter by chapter, up to a third of a new book, what is your cadence of releasing those chapters?
2:20:43 Is it once per week?
2:20:45 Once per week is what we’ve been doing.
2:20:50 I could see value in twice a week, but once a week, everyone gets the other.
2:20:52 The threads on Reddit are really cool.
2:20:54 Where do you release those chapters?
2:20:57 We release them on TOR’s website, TOR’s publicity website.
2:21:01 Right now it’s called Reactor, used to be TOR.com.
2:21:04 And that’s a good place for them.
2:21:09 Why not release them on your own site or in some other way?
2:21:10 So yeah, good question.
2:21:13 So there’s arguments for that.
2:21:18 The thing about it is we’ve found over time, personal websites are important,
2:21:25 but they’re much less important than social media or aggregate websites in today’s mind economy.
2:21:26 What do you mean by aggregate websites?
2:21:38 So TOR’s website is a website that just has posts every day, things like shared blogs or places you go to that find a whole bunch of articles.
2:21:39 Right.
2:21:43 What we’ve found is, for instance, people will come to me to buy their print books.
2:21:46 They will not come to me to buy their ebooks.
2:21:49 We had an ebook store, maybe we’ll put it back up.
2:21:51 And we might even have a few that we’re selling now.
2:21:53 We sell in the tens of copies of my ebooks.
2:21:55 People like their platform.
2:21:58 They want to have a Kindle and buy the books on their Kindle, which makes perfect sense.
2:22:04 They do not want to go somewhere else, buy an ebook and load it to the Kindle, even if it’s cheaper somewhere else.
2:22:07 Those who control the platform control the world.
2:22:08 You control the space.
2:22:11 Well, here it’s you control the platform.
2:22:12 That’s why Amazon did what it did.
2:22:23 That’s why Amazon worked so hard to make Kindle a thing, even going so far as to pay out millions and millions in dollars in order to try to corner that market and gain that mind share of going to Kindle.
2:22:26 I don’t mind TOR trying to turn their website into that.
2:22:28 It helps other authors.
2:22:30 Fans get used to going there.
2:22:31 Yeah, that’s great.
2:22:34 No, it’s like the tech world, like the hacker news.
2:22:36 Yeah, stuff like that.
2:22:38 And we link to it on my website.
2:22:40 It’s not like it’s not there.
2:22:41 So I don’t have a big problem.
2:22:44 We might have even double posted them on my website.
2:22:45 I can’t remember.
2:22:47 But normally we just do them on TOR.
2:22:49 But you said something I want to ask you about.
2:22:50 Sure.
2:22:56 Tell me if this is if this is tread day, if we want to tread lightly or if this is, but you’d still take advances.
2:23:01 Well, so I took advances on my past books.
2:23:04 I considered profit share agreements.
2:23:14 And actually, when I was beginning to consider rebooting, you know, dusting off and rebooting that book that I’d had on the back shelf.
2:23:20 I spoke with a number of larger publishers who as humans, I liked a lot.
2:23:27 And they on the phone were very enthusiastic about doing some type of very generous profit share agreement.
2:23:33 And then they sent me the contracts and there was so much Hollywood accounting that I found it to be insulting.
2:23:38 I’m like, all right, so there’s this X percentage double digit distribution fee.
2:23:44 And then there’s a promotional fee that is in perpetuity, even though they’re not going to do very much promotion.
2:23:49 And maybe that’s for two to four weeks if they do any, but then they’re going to move on to their new roster.
2:24:01 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.
2:24:05 But I’m foregoing the advance not because I don’t have confidence in the books.
2:24:13 But I like having publishers experience some sunk cost so that they’re incentivized with loss aversion.
2:24:14 But there is that argument.
2:24:18 But at this point with the new book, I’m not planning on doing any of that.
2:24:25 And the field is wide open to the experimentation that I could do.
2:24:32 And I haven’t figured it out. I’ve thought about keeping audio and e-book although I’ll come back to that.
2:24:33 I’d love your perspective on this.
2:24:38 And then maybe doing a print only deal because I do not have as you do the sort of facilities.
2:24:45 I’m almost perfectly happy to farm that out with an appropriately specced agreement.
2:24:47 The deal terms need to make sense.
2:24:54 But then there are even arguments for me to say license with a reversion of rights.
2:24:55 I think that’s the point.
2:24:59 Hugh Howie is so smart with this.
2:25:05 And as you noted before, I used to have an audiobook club with Audible.
2:25:09 This was back in the day with ACX when you get up to like 75% royalties.
2:25:10 Before they killed that?
2:25:11 Yeah.
2:25:22 And I understand as a business, as you have more and more, as you amass more and more critical mass in terms of control of a market,
2:25:27 and then change your compensation scheme with royalties.
2:25:32 But as soon as it got to the point where it’s like, OK, I’m going to max out at whatever it is, 25, 35.
2:25:36 This is no longer worth the time that I would put into it, so I stopped doing it.
2:25:40 So I’ve thought about keeping audio and e-book.
2:25:41 I’m still considering it.
2:25:47 But the fact of the matter is it seems like larger publishers have negotiated superior deal terms.
2:25:54 So even, no, OK, that’s the pitch that I keep getting, which is even if you get a lower percentage of the total,
2:25:58 the absolute dollars you’re still going to make more because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
2:26:05 So this is all very current for me, but I don’t care about advance at this point in my life.
2:26:09 So what they’re saying on audiobooks has some truth.
2:26:10 Yeah.
2:26:11 Not true on e-books.
2:26:12 Yeah.
2:26:21 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.
2:26:24 Even I have not been able to fight them down on this.
2:26:27 They will let the New York publishers charge more than $10.
2:26:29 Yeah.
2:26:32 And so there is that.
2:26:33 This is on e-books.
2:26:34 On e-books.
2:26:35 Yeah.
2:26:36 On audio.
2:26:38 So this can get technical and nerdy.
2:26:39 Yeah, let’s do it.
2:26:40 I like technical and nerdy.
2:26:46 So on e-books, basically the publisher is getting 70% of price.
2:26:47 It’s $10.
2:26:49 They’re getting seven bucks sent to them.
2:26:57 As an indie author, it’s doing it yourself, you will get seven bucks, but they will take out a tiny distribution fee at Amazon, which is super annoying.
2:26:59 If you have a lot of artwork, it can get higher.
2:27:05 Usually it’s only like 10, 15 cents, but they will take that out where they don’t for the New York publishers.
2:27:06 So that’s one of the big differences.
2:27:10 The other thing is, they’ll let the New York publisher charge $14.99 for their book.
2:27:11 You, they will only let charge $10.
2:27:15 If you go over $10, they’ll only give you a 20% instead of a 70% royalty.
2:27:17 They really need to then that or break that.
2:27:20 They want to keep you between $2.99 and $9.99.
2:27:21 Yep.
2:27:27 So if your book is priced at $9.99, as an e-book, there is almost no incentive to go to New York.
2:27:34 Audio books, New York has negotiated all of their payments from Audible based on cover price of the book.
2:27:40 So they can change the cover price of the book and get different things going on.
2:27:43 But almost everything on Audible sells by credit.
2:27:50 And getting out of the publishers, how much they get off of a credit is like pulling teeth.
2:27:56 Getting out of Audible, how much you earn off of a credit is like pulling teeth because in their sense,
2:28:02 and this is the big problem with audio books, I don’t like that you are the customer of Audible,
2:28:04 not the customer of the authors.
2:28:08 When you sign up for Audible, and Audible is a great company, don’t get me wrong.
2:28:13 They made huge advances in audio book, distribution, readability.
2:28:16 They’ve improved that market quite a bit.
2:28:18 They are a net positive for everyone.
2:28:24 But they control so much of the market that they are able to do some of these practices that we talked about.
2:28:28 But beyond that, people sign up for a subscription fee.
2:28:36 This is partially Apple’s fault, Apple and Google, because if you buy an audio book through Audible’s app,
2:28:40 Google and Apple want to take 30% of that.
2:28:44 And the publishers don’t want to do that.
2:28:46 30% is egregious. It’s insane.
2:28:49 There’s all sorts of lawsuits going on that, you know, them taking that much.
2:28:53 But because of that, they do the subscription service.
2:28:55 So you sign up for the subscription on their website.
2:28:57 Google or Apple get none.
2:28:59 You get a credit every month. You can spend a credit.
2:29:01 None of that credit goes because it’s by credit.
2:29:04 But then that turns all the audience into subscribers to Audible.
2:29:08 So if Audible stops carrying a book, people just stop buying it.
2:29:13 Once again, he who controls the spice, he who controls the platform, controls everything.
2:29:17 Which means that they get to say, well, it’s a credit.
2:29:18 What is a credit?
2:29:20 Well, a credit is divided this way.
2:29:23 And we give out this many free books as part of the promotions with credits.
2:29:26 And so that plays into it. And some of the credits go for books like this.
2:29:31 And so they have this huge spreadsheet that to their credit, credit, I’m saying credit too much,
2:29:35 they have started being more open with how that spreadsheet works for us.
2:29:37 And we can plug in the numbers and see that.
2:29:40 They only started doing that in the last year as we push them.
2:29:45 But it turns out that there’s all this Tenanigans, they get $15.
2:29:50 And after all our work and things, we get on average like four bucks out of that 15.
2:29:56 The publishers do have something where they’re getting a little bit more.
2:30:02 But at the end of the day, I earn more this way than I do with the publishers.
2:30:09 Even though the publishers can make up for it a little bit by having certain weird deals on what they get paid.
2:30:15 At the end of the day, I really wish we could push audiobooks into that transparent.
2:30:19 You get 70% of that 15 bucks is what should go to the author.
2:30:22 Or certain percentage of that to the author, certain percentage of the reader.
2:30:25 Narrators don’t get royalties, which is kind of a thing.
2:30:30 And I just really wish we could pierce that and make it happen, but we haven’t been able to.
2:30:35 So it sounds like if I’m hearing you correctly, your advice would be to hold on to it to yourself.
2:30:37 So it depends.
2:30:39 But ebook, yes.
2:30:44 I have found that my system that I have, which is a profit share,
2:30:52 and we took a sledgehammer to that contract that you got offered and eventually got it to a place where it was good.
2:30:56 It’s really close to a straight up profit share.
2:31:01 There’s a few little Hollywood accounting things they do, but they have to account them very clearly.
2:31:10 And we end up doing with our profit share 10 to 20% better than we used to do as much as 50% better in some cases.
2:31:11 That’s not trivial.
2:31:14 So I could actually get those actual numbers.
2:31:16 I should get them and see.
2:31:20 But it’s significant what we’re making more with the profit share.
2:31:22 But my best thing has been trust.
2:31:24 They took a print-only deal.
2:31:26 I have ebook and audiobook.
2:31:29 And I have a profit share on the print with them.
2:31:33 And then the ebook and audiobook, the ebook straight up is better.
2:31:39 The audiobook, we make more, but we would make almost the same with the publisher.
2:31:43 And are you just interfacing directly with Amazon platforms for the–
2:31:46 Amazon and everyone else doing my best.
2:31:50 Amazon would pay us better if we put them only on Amazon, but I refuse.
2:31:52 And that’s one of the reasons the publishers deal.
2:31:54 It’s a little better.
2:31:59 Amazon gives them the deal that they give if you’re exclusive to Amazon.
2:32:02 As an indie, they were forced to be exclusive to get the good deal.
2:32:05 They give that deal to the publishers, but they can be on everything.
2:32:08 It’s all so messy, right?
2:32:10 This is all in the weeds.
2:32:12 But here’s the takeaway.
2:32:17 The power is in two people’s hands right now.
2:32:20 It’s in the creators and the platform controllers.
2:32:23 It’s not in New York’s hand anymore.
2:32:27 And that’s in some ways bad because those are good people.
2:32:31 I think most creatives in the audio industry hate their business.
2:32:36 Most authors are pretty, like you said, the people are good.
2:32:40 The contracts sometimes you have to take a sledgehammer to,
2:32:43 but I generally don’t mind New York.
2:32:48 They generally, I think, try to treat authors well.
2:32:52 But in this new world, we control the content.
2:32:57 And if you can figure out how to control your platform also, then that’s king.
2:33:02 But you as a content creator, I think, should be looking at the platforms
2:33:05 and learning how to manipulate all the different platforms
2:33:09 so that you can have the best world you can.
2:33:11 So that’s where we live right now.
2:33:15 So let’s go back to the list of your inflection points for a second
2:33:18 because I’ve made promises I want to keep with my listeners.
2:33:24 Namely, so we have Mistborn, Wheel of Time, Leatherbound,
2:33:26 and then the COVID Kickstarter.
2:33:28 We have not covered the Wheel of Time.
2:33:31 So for people who don’t even recognize the name,
2:33:36 what is this and then how did you end up becoming involved?
2:33:39 So I talked about the three kind of genres of fantasy.
2:33:42 For the ’90s and early 2000s,
2:33:47 the flag bearer of the best-selling epic fantasy was the Wheel of Time.
2:33:50 It was eventually dethroned by Game of Thrones
2:33:52 when the television show for Game of Thrones came out.
2:33:55 Until the television show, Wheel of Time was the top.
2:34:00 Beyond that, Robert Jordan got sick in the early 2000s
2:34:02 with a rare blood disease.
2:34:08 And because of this, his book releases slowed down quite a bit.
2:34:11 And that’s when Game of Thrones was taking off.
2:34:14 But for most of, you know, for all of my childhood,
2:34:18 Wheel of Time was the kind of flag bearer for epic fantasy.
2:34:20 It was the heir to Tolkien, so to speak.
2:34:24 And selling millions of copies, doing really, really well.
2:34:27 And he got sick.
2:34:29 It was really positive.
2:34:32 But then in 2007, he passed away,
2:34:34 having left his series unfinished.
2:34:37 And I was a fan of this series.
2:34:40 I had grown up reading it. It was one of my favorites.
2:34:44 And I did not know him or his wife.
2:34:46 His wife was his editor.
2:34:48 It’s actually really fun.
2:34:50 She was his editor before she was his wife.
2:34:52 And so I always joke that that’s a good way
2:34:54 to make sure your editorial direction gets taken.
2:34:56 You marry your author.
2:34:58 She had discovered him in Charleston,
2:35:00 where she had moved away from the big city.
2:35:02 She was TOR’s editorial director.
2:35:04 She kind of helped Tom Doherty build TOR.
2:35:06 She’s the editor, if you guys know your sci-fi fantasy,
2:35:09 she was the editor of The Book of Swords by Fred Saber-Hagan.
2:35:11 She’s the editor of the book Ender’s Game.
2:35:13 Really, really top-notch editor.
2:35:15 And then she discovered Wheel of Time.
2:35:19 And so he passes away in 2007.
2:35:23 And before he passes away, he asks her to find someone
2:35:25 to finish his series.
2:35:27 He decides he does want it finished.
2:35:29 He puts that on her.
2:35:31 She considered a dying request.
2:35:33 So 2007 happens.
2:35:35 And one morning I get up,
2:35:37 and there’s a voicemail on my phone.
2:35:39 As we’ve talked about, I get up late,
2:35:41 and that’s even later for New York, right?
2:35:45 By the time I get up, it’s 3 p.m. in New York.
2:35:47 Now, is there something that happened
2:35:49 before the voice memo or no?
2:35:51 So there is, but I didn’t know it.
2:35:54 I get this voice memo from someone I’d never met,
2:35:56 but I knew by reputation.
2:35:58 I know every word in inflection.
2:36:00 All right, let’s hear it.
2:36:01 So in 200 times.
2:36:03 Hello, Brandon Sanderson.
2:36:05 This is Harriet McDougall-Rigney.
2:36:07 I am Robert Jordan’s widow.
2:36:09 And I would like you to call me back.
2:36:11 There’s something I want to talk to you about.
2:36:13 Just that by itself.
2:36:17 So I get this voicemail, and I’m like,
2:36:21 “Robert Jordan’s widow, Harriet McDougall, the editor?”
2:36:24 Okay, so I call her back, and I don’t get a response.
2:36:26 She’s out getting a massage.
2:36:27 I later find.
2:36:29 So I call my agent.
2:36:30 No, I call my editor.
2:36:31 He doesn’t respond.
2:36:32 He never responded.
2:36:36 Moshe, he kept ours even weirder than mine
2:36:39 when he’s still around, but he was my editor.
2:36:40 He’s retired since then.
2:36:42 But Moshe, great guy.
2:36:44 I know this is something that you’ve talked about.
2:36:46 Bipolar, so they’re huge swaths of time
2:36:48 where you just couldn’t get ahold of him.
2:36:50 He’s self-medicated with the History Channel.
2:36:52 And so sometimes you’d have to find out
2:36:53 how to get ahold of Moshe.
2:36:55 And so he didn’t answer, not a big deal.
2:36:57 Call my agent, he always answers.
2:37:00 He’s very professional, doesn’t answer.
2:37:04 So I’m like freaking out, and my wife sees me,
2:37:07 and I am not a nervous person.
2:37:11 I’m not a person that emotions strike very powerfully.
2:37:14 That’s just my own weird neurodivergence.
2:37:17 I don’t generally feel strong emotions.
2:37:20 But that day, I’m walking in a circle babbling.
2:37:22 And she’s like, “What’s going on?”
2:37:24 I’ve never seen Brandon like this.
2:37:28 And I’m like, “Robert Jordan’s wife just called me.”
2:37:30 And she’s like, “What? What do you want?”
2:37:32 And I’m like, “I don’t know.”
2:37:35 So I finally call Tor, I reach an editor at Tor,
2:37:36 who’s one of the managing editors.
2:37:38 And he says, “Oh, that.
2:37:40 Yeah, it’s what you think it is.
2:37:43 I’ll get her to call you back.”
2:37:45 What do I think it is?
2:37:47 Well, I knew that I’d written a little thing
2:37:50 about Robert Jordan on my website a few days earlier,
2:37:52 just kind of talking about how much he’d meant to me.
2:37:54 It’s very short, it’s like three paragraphs.
2:37:57 So I’m like, “Maybe she wants to talk about that.”
2:38:01 Why would the widow call you to talk about your piece?
2:38:05 But you’re not wanting to assume anything.
2:38:07 Again, I didn’t know any of them.
2:38:09 So she calls me and she says,
2:38:13 “Well, I’m looking for someone to finish my late husband’s work.
2:38:16 And I was wondering if you’d be interested.”
2:38:19 And I literally responded, “Bah!”
2:38:22 Like, I can talk.
2:38:23 I’m a talker.
2:38:24 I could not talk.
2:38:25 Turned into a sheep.
2:38:26 I turned into a sheep.
2:38:28 I actually wrote her an email that night
2:38:30 after not sleeping all night that said,
2:38:32 “Dear Harry, I promise I’m not an idiot.”
2:38:33 That was the first lines.
2:38:37 I’m like, I couldn’t speak because this is so unexpected.
2:38:39 And I spent that night thinking, I’m like,
2:38:42 “Man, if I say yes to this and I screw it up,
2:38:47 like, we can have seen how major media properties
2:38:49 have had someone take over for them
2:38:52 and then maybe not do as quite as good a job
2:38:54 as the fan bases wanted
2:38:57 and what that has done perhaps to reputations
2:38:58 and things like that.”
2:39:00 And just so we can place this in time,
2:39:02 where in your career were you?
2:39:03 This is 2007.
2:39:05 I only have three books out.
2:39:06 Maybe two.
2:39:07 I have two books.
2:39:08 No, three.
2:39:09 I have three books out.
2:39:11 I have Elantris and Mistborn
2:39:12 and then the first of my kids’ series,
2:39:14 the ones I discovered, wrote.
2:39:17 I’m about to go on tour for my second Mistborn novel.
2:39:19 This is before I’ve blown up.
2:39:21 I blew up on Mistborn 2.
2:39:23 We can talk about that moment before.
2:39:24 That’s the first one.
2:39:26 Mistborn 2 is where the publisher knew.
2:39:28 So they didn’t know yet.
2:39:33 They still thought I was maybe going to be a failure as a writer.
2:39:35 We’ll get to that.
2:39:38 So the publisher had not brought my name up to her.
2:39:41 When she had asked who should finish it.
2:39:42 Thanks, guys.
2:39:43 Nobody mentioned me.
2:39:47 Mistborn had been floundering for reasons we’ll talk about.
2:39:49 Mistborn had been floundering.
2:39:51 My name was not mentioned.
2:39:56 But somebody that day, her name was Elise Matheson,
2:39:58 and I’m very thankful to her,
2:40:00 was printing off things on the internet,
2:40:02 nice things that people had said about Robert Jordan.
2:40:05 And she printed off my thing and she put it in the stack.
2:40:09 And that night Harriet read it with the other things.
2:40:11 And I mentioned that he had influenced my writing.
2:40:13 And she’s like, well, this is really eloquent.
2:40:14 He wrote this really well.
2:40:15 He’s a writer.
2:40:17 So she called Tom Doherty.
2:40:19 Were there any lines that stuck out to her?
2:40:21 It was the last line.
2:40:23 I wrote something along the lines of you go quietly,
2:40:25 but you leave us trembling, right?
2:40:28 Just something, you know, it was…
2:40:32 And so she calls Tom and says,
2:40:33 “What about this Brandon Sanderson guy?”
2:40:35 And he’s like, “Oh, yeah, he’s one of her authors.
2:40:36 I’ve read one of his books.
2:40:38 Pretty good. Let me send you one of his books.”
2:40:40 Because he was super excited it was one of his authors
2:40:41 she was asking about.
2:40:44 Because a lot of the names that came up were not his authors.
2:40:46 The main one that kept coming up was George Martin,
2:40:48 because he and Robert Jordan were friends.
2:40:52 Well, George was already behind on his books in 2007.
2:40:55 And the publishing industry would not stand for him
2:40:57 taking someone else’s book series.
2:40:58 Going on a side quest.
2:40:59 Side quest.
2:41:02 But a lot of the names that came up were not Tom’s authors.
2:41:04 And so he’s like, “Oh, it’s one of my authors.”
2:41:06 And so he sends her missed one.
2:41:08 And so she’s like,
2:41:10 “Well, before I read this book,
2:41:12 I should find out if the young man’s interested.”
2:41:14 You know, maybe he doesn’t want to do this.
2:41:16 And so that’s when she called me
2:41:17 and asked if I was interested.
2:41:19 And that’s when I bawd like a sheep.
2:41:21 And then I wrote her that email that night and said,
2:41:23 “You know, I’ve thought about it a lot.
2:41:25 I thought if someone’s going to do this
2:41:27 and it can’t be him, I want it to be me.
2:41:29 At least I know I’m a fan.”
2:41:31 Like I always use this Venn diagram, right?
2:41:35 Venn diagram of pretty good sci-fi fantasy writers
2:41:37 and pretty big Robert Jordan fans.
2:41:41 There are bigger Robert Jordan fans out there than me.
2:41:43 Hardcore by far.
2:41:46 There are better writers than me, right?
2:41:48 Terry Pratchett.
2:41:51 I always call the greatest writer of my generation, right?
2:41:54 Like, you know, there are amazing writers.
2:41:56 George is a fantastic writer.
2:41:58 I would probably rank George
2:42:00 as the greatest living sci-fi fantasy writer.
2:42:03 There’s Jane Yolen, who’s just incredible.
2:42:06 But if you put that Venn diagram together,
2:42:09 there’s not a lot of people in the middle there
2:42:11 that are pretty big Robert Jordan fans.
2:42:14 And I think pretty excellent sci-fi fantasy writers,
2:42:15 and that was me.
2:42:17 And so I realized I want it to be me
2:42:19 because if it doesn’t go to me,
2:42:21 it might go to someone who’s a good writer
2:42:23 but doesn’t know the books.
2:42:26 And so she said, “All right, well, I’m considering.”
2:42:28 There’s some names I’m considering.
2:42:31 It was me or George I later found out.
2:42:33 And when she tells this story, she says,
2:42:34 “There was really only one.”
2:42:36 It was Brandon because she knew by then
2:42:37 she couldn’t have George.
2:42:39 And so she went and she read Mistborn.
2:42:42 And then she thought on it.
2:42:43 She took a month.
2:42:45 She read Mistborn and thought on it for a month.
2:42:47 I went on tour not knowing
2:42:49 if I was going to finish the wheel of time
2:42:51 and not being able to tell anybody.
2:42:53 And that’s when Mistborn 2 just exploded.
2:42:55 And then at the end of that tour,
2:42:57 she called me and she said, “I want you to do it.”
2:42:59 Actually, he’s in the middle of the tour
2:43:00 because I was still on tour
2:43:02 when she told some of the other people
2:43:03 it’s because they came and met me.
2:43:05 So I didn’t have to wait that long.
2:43:06 It was pretty excruciating.
2:43:08 It was probably only like two weeks.
2:43:10 And she calls me and says, “I would like you to do it.”
2:43:12 And so I call my agent and I say,
2:43:14 “They’re going to offer us a deal. Take it.”
2:43:16 And he says, “Well, we’ll negotiate.”
2:43:18 I’m like, “No, no, no.
2:43:20 This is just a yes.
2:43:23 Whatever they offer, you just say yes.”
2:43:25 And she was very generous.
2:43:27 It was a good deal right off the bat.
2:43:28 My agent’s like, “Wow,
2:43:30 there’s not even really that much to negotiate.”
2:43:31 He like went to bat.
2:43:34 He forced me to let him go to bat on like some foreign percentage
2:43:36 just so agents have to flex their muscles, right?
2:43:38 But I just said yes.
2:43:41 And then by December, I had the manuscript.
2:43:44 And then I got the call in like September, October.
2:43:48 In the manuscript, he’d written like 50 pages of the final book.
2:43:49 So.
2:43:50 Wow. Okay.
2:43:54 So we could spend, I’m sure, another three hours talking about
2:43:56 how you pieced everything together and worked on that.
2:43:59 But I want to pick up on something you said because
2:44:01 I don’t know anything about it.
2:44:04 And I’m in the process of reading Miss Born Right Now,
2:44:05 and I’m ripping through it.
2:44:07 So when you said it was floundering, I was like,
2:44:09 “Huh, yeah, that’s interesting.
2:44:10 Why was it floundering?”
2:44:13 So when you’re a new author,
2:44:16 you have a shiny new author glow with your first book.
2:44:20 And you get picked up a little bit more for reviews.
2:44:22 You get picked up more by people who are like,
2:44:24 “Oh, I’ve never heard of this person.”
2:44:27 There’s a certain demographic of reader who’ll just read a first book
2:44:29 by an author to try them out.
2:44:34 That is why generally publishers recommend that you take your first book
2:44:36 and you write a sequel to it as your second book.
2:44:40 Because when you jump from a sequel to a different series,
2:44:42 you lose a percentage of audience.
2:44:45 And so I had the shiny new author thing.
2:44:48 We sold about 10,000 copies in hardcover of Elantra,
2:44:50 which is really good for a debut author.
2:44:51 It’s even better now.
2:44:54 Back then it was good. Now it’s fantastic.
2:44:57 And Tom Doherty called me and was like,
2:44:58 “Well, we want a sequel to Elantra.”
2:45:01 And I said, “No, I’ve got this idea of Mistborn
2:45:02 and I really want to do this.”
2:45:07 One of my real goals, my powerful goals early on,
2:45:10 was I wanted to build an audience for me,
2:45:12 not for a given book series.
2:45:14 I wanted to write in a lot of different subgenres.
2:45:16 I wanted to do a lot of different things.
2:45:20 I wanted the flexibility to do this thing called the Cosmere,
2:45:22 which is probably bigger than this podcast can get into.
2:45:25 But if you haven’t read the books, it’s like the MCU,
2:45:26 but for fantasy.
2:45:30 And I did this two years before the MCU’s first movie came out.
2:45:32 It’s where it’s an interconnected universe
2:45:33 of a whole bunch of different planets
2:45:35 with all these epic fantasy and there’s characters.
2:45:38 And MCU is all the Marvel movies.
2:45:40 All the Marvel movies where you have like,
2:45:42 and so Mistborn, Elantra, Warbreaker,
2:45:45 I’ll have one character who’s traveling between these planets
2:45:47 with a mysterious objective behind the scenes.
2:45:48 His name is Hoyt.
2:45:50 And you’ll see him in all three of them.
2:45:52 He’s a main character in Stormlight then.
2:45:54 And I wanted to do this big thing
2:45:56 and I was really ambitious about it
2:45:58 and I wanted to build something bigger
2:46:00 than Elantra’s in a sequel.
2:46:03 And the publisher is like, it’s a bad idea.
2:46:07 I’m like, it’s a bad idea except it’s investing in my future.
2:46:12 If I do it right, then when I finish Mistborn
2:46:13 and go to something else,
2:46:15 they will follow me to the something else
2:46:19 because so many authors get trapped in one series.
2:46:21 We were talking about this before we started recording
2:46:23 that that was also sort of after the four hour work week.
2:46:25 And I was like, well, then I can do the three hour work week
2:46:26 and the two hour work week
2:46:29 or the four hour work week for single mothers and so on.
2:46:31 And I was like, no, no, this is a window
2:46:35 where I can potentially buy my freedom
2:46:37 to work in a lot of different things.
2:46:40 And we have the exact same wavelength on that.
2:46:44 But Tom Doherty, he’s a publisher, not an editor.
2:46:46 Like his job is to look at the business.
2:46:47 And he was right.
2:46:49 So Elantra’s came out, sold 10,000.
2:46:53 Mistborn 1 comes out in hardcover and it sells fewer.
2:46:57 The audience that liked Elantra’s certain percentage
2:46:59 of them just didn’t move to Mistborn
2:47:00 because it was in the sequel.
2:47:02 I no longer have the new author, Shiny Glow,
2:47:05 so that people who are looking for a book are like,
2:47:06 oh, I saw that before.
2:47:08 Let’s pick up this other book by a new author.
2:47:13 So Mistborn’s a stronger book than Elantra’s by many fold.
2:47:15 Mistborn’s my sixth book, Mistborn’s my 14th.
2:47:16 I learned a lot.
2:47:18 It’s still one of the best starting points.
2:47:21 And so it’s a much stronger book,
2:47:24 but I get fewer sales.
2:47:26 They released the paperback and the paperback
2:47:28 has a dreadful cover.
2:47:29 I love the illustrator.
2:47:30 He did the hard covers of all of them.
2:47:33 But once in a while, the cover just doesn’t click.
2:47:37 And this cover was one of the worst covers that I’ve had.
2:47:39 It didn’t click with my audience
2:47:42 and that paperback came out and just crashed.
2:47:44 Just completely tanked.
2:47:47 And that’s the most dangerous point my career has had.
2:47:48 I was right then thinking,
2:47:51 I’m going to be a middle grade author writing these kids’ books
2:47:52 because that’s the only thing.
2:47:53 That’s the new thing.
2:47:56 But I went to my agent and we went to the publisher
2:47:58 and said, we need a new cover.
2:47:59 This cover is not clicking.
2:48:01 And we fought and we fought and we fought.
2:48:04 And I said, remember way back when you released The Wheel of Time,
2:48:07 you released like a 4.99 version?
2:48:09 I think it was 3.99 then.
2:48:11 Do a 4.99 version of Mistborn.
2:48:14 Let’s jumpstart my career, do a new cover.
2:48:16 And Tom Doherty, again, to his credit, I had to fight him.
2:48:20 But he said, yes, we released a new paperback
2:48:23 a few months before Mistborn 2 with a new cover.
2:48:25 And that one, boom, it sold.
2:48:28 Now, there’s this thing in publishing called The Death Spiral.
2:48:30 Much bigger back in the bookstores.
2:48:31 It doesn’t sound good.
2:48:34 If you sell 10,000 of your first book
2:48:38 and then 8,000 or 7,000 like Mistborn sold,
2:48:40 what do they order for your third book?
2:48:41 5,000.
2:48:42 It’s called The Death Spiral.
2:48:44 So they ordered like 5,000 copies.
2:48:47 And then it becomes, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
2:48:48 Self-fulfilling.
2:48:51 Because you don’t have the exposure in the retail points that you need.
2:48:53 Then you don’t have the space on the shelf.
2:48:55 People can go to bookstores and not find the book
2:48:58 if you’re down to like that many copies and things like that.
2:49:01 And so Death Spiral is what they call it.
2:49:04 And we’d already gotten the, we got the orders from Mistborn 2
2:49:06 and they were bad, right?
2:49:08 They were, you know, on The Death Spiral.
2:49:12 But then the paperback, that paperback we got selling.
2:49:14 And so what happened is Mistborn 2 came out,
2:49:16 instantly sold out.
2:49:17 All right, so hold on.
2:49:18 I got to pause this for a second.
2:49:23 So what else contributed to the relaunch
2:49:27 of that lower price paperback of Mistborn 1
2:49:29 besides the cover?
2:49:30 Was there anything else?
2:49:33 It was the lower price point and it was the cover.
2:49:34 Those are the only things we changed.
2:49:36 Now, you’ll love this.
2:49:38 Publishing is weird.
2:49:41 They were not willing to release a new version of the book
2:49:44 with a new cover until we said it’s a new edition.
2:49:47 It’s the cheaper until when they had in their head,
2:49:49 it was a new edition.
2:49:51 It’s got a different ISBN guys.
2:49:52 It’s a whole new game.
2:49:53 A whole new game.
2:49:54 They were willing to put a new cover on it.
2:49:57 So actually it was the 499 thing that worked.
2:49:59 We were at our wits end until I thought of that and pitched it.
2:50:02 And they’re like, oh, yeah, a 499 edition.
2:50:03 We do those.
2:50:05 And then suddenly they’re willing to repackage it
2:50:07 and put a new cover on it.
2:50:09 It has a big red banner 499.
2:50:12 It has the nice cover blurb from Robin Hobb,
2:50:14 but the hard cover had that too.
2:50:16 The cover was a little more targeted
2:50:17 at what was popular then.
2:50:20 Photo realism was starting to be a thing for fantasy
2:50:22 partially because of Jim Butcher’s books.
2:50:24 We use the same illustrator cover artists
2:50:25 as Jim Butcher’s books.
2:50:28 It has that sort of urban fantasy feel.
2:50:31 Mistborn was really well primed to take off.
2:50:33 Partially because of Hunger Games.
2:50:38 Teenage girl protagonist in a kind of dark future world.
2:50:42 In fact, in Taiwan, it released before Hunger Games,
2:50:44 and it became the Hunger Games,
2:50:48 meaning the market wanted a dark dystopian teen YA.
2:50:50 And we outsold Hunger Games there.
2:50:52 Hunger Games became the Mistborn,
2:50:54 and Mistborn became the Hunger Games in Taiwan
2:50:55 because we beat it to market.
2:50:58 We didn’t here and we didn’t market it as YA.
2:50:59 It’s an adult.
2:51:02 It’s got two viewpoints, one a teenager, one adult.
2:51:05 But it was really good for the market, right?
2:51:08 And so the fact that it was really good for the market,
2:51:09 it felt dystopian,
2:51:11 but it wasn’t using all the dystopian tropes
2:51:14 that eventually killed the dystopian sort of thing.
2:51:16 No one had read a fantasy heist.
2:51:19 Since about the same time Liza Luck-Morick came out,
2:51:20 which is another one.
2:51:21 That’s Scott Lynch?
2:51:22 Yeah, Scott Lynch.
2:51:23 Fantastic book.
2:51:26 That is a really fun series.
2:51:27 A fantastic book.
2:51:29 And he and I had this on separate continents,
2:51:31 the same idea, and got him out around the same time.
2:51:33 And I highly recommend that one too.
2:51:35 And his is more heisty, even the mind.
2:51:38 Mind takes more of the epic fantasy direction.
2:51:42 Like Kelsier is trying to overthrow the empire by robbing.
2:51:44 And so all of those things meant
2:51:47 that when Mistborn actually got covered right,
2:51:49 it really started selling.
2:51:50 It would have been better if there would have been
2:51:51 books for people to buy,
2:51:54 but instantly selling out week one made the publisher go,
2:51:55 “Oh, wait a minute.”
2:51:56 And then they went to reprint.
2:51:58 And then there was this clamor online,
2:52:01 people emailing bookstores, emailing the publisher,
2:52:03 “Where is our Mistborn 2?
2:52:05 We have to have Mistborn 2.”
2:52:08 And that fueled Mistborn 2 eventually with all the reprints
2:52:11 going to like 12,000 to 15,000 in hardcover.
2:52:14 And that primed Mistborn 3 to hit the best seller list.
2:52:16 Wow, what a story.
2:52:18 So I want to touch on something because you mentioned
2:52:23 Liza Luck-Limora and maybe that’s heistier per se.
2:52:29 But one thing we haven’t talked about is magic systems.
2:52:34 And so I feel like that is something that really shines.
2:52:37 And it’s part of the reason why I wanted to dig into Mistborn also
2:52:39 with the Alamance.
2:52:43 And magic systems, how do you think about magic systems?
2:52:47 I mean, I have the three laws of magic here in front of me,
2:52:49 but I could read them.
2:52:51 How do you want to lead into magic systems?
2:52:54 Because people are going to think to themselves if they haven’t heard this term.
2:52:56 What the hell is a magic system?
2:52:59 Let me talk about it in a way that for the audience,
2:53:01 I’m going to avoid getting the weeds too much.
2:53:05 I don’t want to give you encyclopedia entries and things like this.
2:53:12 But I found when I was writing something that I really love in world building.
2:53:18 And that is, I love in history the time period of the scientific revolution.
2:53:23 The time period between Newton and about the early 1900s,
2:53:28 where people were learning to apply science to everything they did.
2:53:33 Where they were saying, “Hey, wait, all these things we assume,
2:53:36 what if we use the scientific method on them?”
2:53:40 And then they started to discover Newton believed in alchemy.
2:53:43 And he tried to apply the scientific method and couldn’t get it to work,
2:53:45 which is one of the reasons people started saying,
2:53:48 “Well, maybe alchemy isn’t actually scientific.”
2:53:50 Yeah, and spending time was like third of his time.
2:53:51 I mean, it was a lot.
2:53:56 Yeah, he tried so hard to be able to transmute lead into gold or whatever.
2:53:58 And turns out we can do it.
2:54:00 We just need an atom smasher.
2:54:05 But regardless, this idea of spontaneous generation,
2:54:10 people used to think that if you left meat out and it rotted, it spawned flies.
2:54:12 And that’s where flies came from.
2:54:17 The scientific method says, “Well, let’s try some tests and see.”
2:54:20 And lo and behold, it’s not that eggs are being laid, right?
2:54:21 All this stuff.
2:54:26 Up until, like I said, the 1900s, where I read an article once from the time period
2:54:29 about someone who’d gone and studied the science of digging ditches.
2:54:36 And the whole theme of it was, if we can help the ditch diggers, we help everyone, right?
2:54:40 Here’s how they can labor more effectively so it isn’t as hard on their joints,
2:54:45 so that they are more efficient, but also so that they’re happier and they get tired less.
2:54:49 Here’s a whole article of science helping everyone.
2:54:54 And that period of superstition becoming science, I love.
2:54:55 It’s so interesting.
2:55:03 And that’s why Mistborn’s actually set a lot of epic fantasies set around in an analogous of like the 12 to 1400s.
2:55:07 Mistborn set in about 1820s to 1840s, if it were on earth.
2:55:13 They don’t have gunpowder for various reasons, but they’re right pre-Industrial Revolution,
2:55:20 where science and fantasy and superstition are colliding.
2:55:28 And what I found I really like reading is fantasy worlds that take a little bit of science fiction world building
2:55:31 and a little bit of science fiction aesthetic and say,
2:55:35 “What if you apply the scientific method to something that in our world doesn’t exist,
2:55:37 but in their world is a new branch of physics?”
2:55:42 And that lets my characters explore science and magic together.
2:55:45 What is real? What isn’t real? What works? What doesn’t work?
2:55:49 Mistborn has kind of a periodic table of the elements where they’re discovering
2:55:55 that they can use certain metals to do certain things that are magical, doesn’t exist in our world.
2:55:59 The difference between fantasy and science fiction to me is science fiction says,
2:56:04 “This thing could happen. Let’s construct toward that.”
2:56:07 What are the possibilities that would lead to it?
2:56:12 Arthur C. Clarke says, “I think we can do satellites with geo-synchronous orbits.
2:56:16 Here’s all the science. I’m going to write a book where they can do that,
2:56:18 and then later on we’ll figure it out.”
2:56:24 Fantasy for me starts with the cool idea and justifies it through the text without real science.
2:56:34 I want to have people who use these metals to bounce around like ninjas.
2:56:38 You can drop a coin and you can push off of it.
2:56:43 And through Newton’s laws, if it’s pushed against the ground, you’re launched upward.
2:56:47 If you’re pushing on it and you throw your weight against it, it shoots across the room.
2:56:51 And how much can I do with that just by playing with vector science and things?
2:56:58 Again, I don’t want to get in the weeds, but the idea is people applying their intellect to magic,
2:57:01 and that’s a magic system. What is the magic system?
2:57:03 What do people have access to?
2:57:05 Lord of the Rings has several magic systems.
2:57:09 One is the one ring. It’s what we call a hard magic system.
2:57:15 Lord of the Rings, if you put on the ring, you turn invisible, but Sauron can see you.
2:57:22 Very simple. It corrupts people along the way. There are like three rules to the ring and you can understand them.
2:57:26 Making a hard magic doesn’t mean that it’s like it makes sense, right?
2:57:29 Superheroes are generally hard magics, even though it’s like bonkers.
2:57:36 Superman gets powers from sunlight, makes no sense with external logic, but internally it’s consistent.
2:57:39 He gets his powers from the sun and he can do X, Y, and Z.
2:57:41 That’s what we call a hard magic system.
2:57:42 Gandalf.
2:57:44 So rules that are internally consistent.
2:57:49 Yeah. Rules that are internally consistent that the characters can figure out and use.
2:57:51 That’s a hard magic system.
2:57:55 Roto can put the ring on and vanish from Sauron’s eyes,
2:58:00 but he’ll vanish from everyone else’s eyes, but he’ll be seen by Sauron.
2:58:06 So he can pay the cost to get some short-term gain for some long-term detriment by using the ring.
2:58:11 Perfectly within the realm of he can access it and use it.
2:58:13 Gandalf is what we call a soft magic system.
2:58:16 You never really know what Gandalf can do.
2:58:22 And the movies, they do this brilliantly by being like he holds up his staff and like the sun rises
2:58:27 and like did he shoot sunlight at the orcs or is it just like what’s going on?
2:58:31 But they like like Gandalf shows up and magical things happen.
2:58:33 The other characters can’t control this.
2:58:35 You don’t see it being controlled by the narrative.
2:58:38 He just does things and those are cool magic systems.
2:58:40 You can do all kinds of stuff with that.
2:58:46 I found a niche in hard magic systems, that intersection where people are applying their logic.
2:58:47 It’s so much fun.
2:58:50 I talked about Mistborn like, you know, you can drop a coin and launch in the air.
2:58:52 You can throw it and push it at someone.
2:58:55 You throw it, you push it at someone, it hits them, then you get launched backward.
2:59:00 Suddenly, I can have characters having to figure out puzzles in combat.
2:59:06 We’re having a fight scene, but the fight scene is how can I get in position to use this medal against him?
2:59:08 It’s so engaging to write.
2:59:09 It’s so much fun.
2:59:16 It makes every fight scene just a fun little puzzle box to try to figure out.
2:59:24 And so because I like that, I decided to use it as part of my branding, like so hard to stand out.
2:59:25 I know I like these things.
2:59:27 I know I’m going to be doing it in my books.
2:59:29 So I became the magic system guy.
2:59:30 I thought about it a lot.
2:59:31 So I released my three laws.
2:59:37 It’s just kind of their rules that I follow mostly because I did something wrong at some point.
2:59:39 And I’m like, that broke my magic system.
2:59:40 How can I fix that?
2:59:44 And I came up with a rule of thumb for myself that I could follow.
2:59:47 And I use those to kind of build the magic the way I do them.
2:59:49 It’s not the only way to do it.
2:59:54 It’s not the only good way to do it, but it was really helpful to have a thing that was mine.
2:59:56 What are you going to get when you come to one of my books?
3:00:02 You’re going to get, at the core, I want an interesting story about interesting characters.
3:00:06 But I can’t brand that way because that’s what everyone does.
3:00:07 So what’s the branding?
3:00:12 You’re going to get science fiction world building and a fantasy story.
3:00:17 You’re going to get people discovering how magic works that’s repeatable.
3:00:23 And they’re going to be able to use it in order to solve problems and make their lives better
3:00:26 or at least manipulate them in certain ways.
3:00:29 All of my books are going to have that sort of feel.
3:00:32 And that’s what became kind of my thing.
3:00:38 So let me, if you don’t mind, I’ll just, I’ll read these three and have some, some, some follow ups.
3:00:39 Okay.
3:00:40 All right.
3:00:41 Sanderson’s three laws of magic.
3:00:48 So the number one is an author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional
3:00:51 to how well the reader understands said magic.
3:00:55 Number two, weaknesses, limits and costs are more interesting than powers.
3:00:57 That’s one that I kind of latched onto.
3:01:03 Three, the author should expand on what is already a part of the magic system before something entirely new is added.
3:01:08 As this may otherwise entirely change how the magic system fits into the fictional world.
3:01:11 So the second one is the most self-explanatory to me, right?
3:01:13 The power of constraints.
3:01:23 And it can be applied to a million things, but I find that to be very accessible to me.
3:01:26 Could you expand on the number one, number three?
3:01:27 Sure can.
3:01:34 So number one, if you, and I’ve actually added a word to this and a little phrase to this,
3:01:43 author’s ability to solve problems in a satisfying way with magic in a story is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.
3:01:47 So let’s pause it two sort of storylines.
3:01:55 In one, your character is going to use, in both of them, your character is going to use the magic to save the day at the end.
3:02:01 In the first one, the character spends the majority of the book off and on,
3:02:09 figuring out how this magic works to the point that they realize by the ending, wait, everyone’s been doing this wrong.
3:02:10 Here’s the rules.
3:02:12 Here’s how they got misled.
3:02:18 If I make this one little tweak, suddenly I’ll be able to fix the problem that no one else has been able to fix.
3:02:23 And at the ending, they realize that they solve that problem.
3:02:30 They solve that problem and boom, they have taken their wits, their intelligence, their, their progress, right?
3:02:33 We say promise, progress, payoff.
3:02:36 The payoff is to the actual progress of the story.
3:02:39 This person has been studying their entire time.
3:02:41 They’ve learned how the magic works.
3:02:49 So at the end, they’re able to pull off something that no one else could and you believe it because of all that work.
3:02:55 In the other one, they get to the end, they are unable to solve the problem.
3:03:02 But then through the power of just caring really a lot, they figure it out and save the day.
3:03:03 A mother’s love.
3:03:04 A mother’s love.
3:03:07 And see, this is why I use the satisfying way.
3:03:13 The mother’s love protecting Harry is not actually a bad thing because that wasn’t supposed to be a plot element.
3:03:14 Sure.
3:03:15 I’m poking fun a little bit.
3:03:16 But it is poking fun.
3:03:17 Joe deserves it.
3:03:28 We can poke fun at her because JK Rowling was really good at internal logic in a given book and then she’d throw it out the window for the next one, right?
3:03:32 Time turners actually in the time turner book makes sense how they’re used.
3:03:33 She sets up the rule.
3:03:34 She uses them book for it.
3:03:38 They forget they can try time travel and don’t ever use them.
3:03:41 But regardless, you can see what’s going on here.
3:03:53 The idea of Sanderson’s first law is any plot element, but magic and fantasy, a lot of people who don’t read fantasy, they point it to be like, can’t believe any of the stakes because anything can happen.
3:03:55 Yeah, it’s like the Deus Ex Machina.
3:03:56 Deus Ex Machina.
3:04:01 Playwright can’t figure out the ending so God descends from the rafter isn’t.
3:04:02 Yep.
3:04:03 Voila.
3:04:05 But the thing is, any book is that way.
3:04:18 If you want to write a book where at the end, the romance novel in a perfectly realistic setting that they just get together because you decide, you can just Deus Ex Machina that you can Deus Ex Machina the thriller.
3:04:22 You any book, the reader of the author can do that with a goal.
3:04:25 We have an extra tendency toward that with magic.
3:04:30 So the charge that we do that is not unsubstantiated, right?
3:04:34 Occasionally, authors like, well, I have magic, so I’ll snap my fingers and save the day.
3:04:43 But as a reader with a magic system, if you make it so that we understand so that like Star Wars.
3:04:45 Star Wars is such a perfect example.
3:04:52 We believe that Luke can shoot the missiles down the tube when he’s using the force.
3:04:53 Why?
3:04:57 Well, through the course of the story, we’ve seen Obi-Wan Kenobi use this magic.
3:04:59 We’ve seen Luke struggle to use this magic.
3:05:03 We see targeting computers, they fire and they miss.
3:05:06 The targeting computers are fallible.
3:05:09 We’re at the big moment and then use the force Luke.
3:05:10 Obi-Wan is there.
3:05:16 We’ve seen the whole time Obi-Wan preparing him and he takes off the thing and he shoots.
3:05:24 We believe that he can do that because you set up and pay off, promise, progress, pay off.
3:05:26 And that’s what Sanerson’s first lie is.
3:05:31 If you’re going to use magic at the end of your story to solve the problem, promise, progress, pay off.
3:05:38 Now, if you want to solve magic, use it to cause problems or you can use it to solve problems in an unsatisfying way.
3:05:40 And sometimes you want that.
3:05:50 When Gandalf saves the fellowship from the Balrog, it’s actually kind of unsatisfying because Gandalf is dead and you watch the movie, Peter Jackson again, brilliant movies.
3:06:01 After Gandalf dies, everyone is down and like flopped down and crying and broken because the magic use isn’t satisfying.
3:06:03 Gandalf didn’t get up there and save the day.
3:06:09 He sacrificed himself and it actually hits with a very different emotion.
3:06:11 It’s instead an escalation.
3:06:14 So that’s an example of soft magic causing a problem.
3:06:15 Exactly.
3:06:25 And so, yes, Gandalf did save them from the Balrog, but the cost is bigger than the whole point of that is not, “Yay, Gandalf!” It is huge complication.
3:06:27 Gandalf kept the fellowship together.
3:06:31 What’s going to happen when Gandalf isn’t there to prevent Boromir from taking the ring?
3:06:33 And then he pays that off.
3:06:34 The fellowship shatters.
3:06:39 Brilliant use of both a soft magic and a hard magic for what they’re really good at.
3:06:41 George is good at this too.
3:06:42 He uses a lot of soft magics.
3:06:53 Whenever someone uses magic in Game of Thrones, you get scared because people are going to die and things are going to go wrong and everything’s going to suck even worse because of using the magic.
3:06:56 And that soft magic is brilliant for that.
3:07:01 It creates a sense of mystery and danger and sorrow.
3:07:06 It’s sort of an unpredictability that’s exciting, whereas solving problems, the audience is just like, “Ah, come on!”
3:07:07 Yeah, exactly.
3:07:09 And they both do different kinds of things.
3:07:14 And so if you understand this, you can have the emotions you want in the stories, right?
3:07:20 And Tolkien very wisely uses the ring to solve problems and escalate in certain ways.
3:07:25 Like Sam being able to put on the ring to go save Frodo after Frodo is taken by the orcs.
3:07:29 You are totally by that Sam can do that because you know what the ring can do.
3:07:30 It solves a problem.
3:07:32 It’s actually, you’re like, “Yay, Sam! Good job!”
3:07:33 And that’s a heroic moment.
3:07:42 He gets Frodo back, right? Frodo’s alive. Everything’s happy because Sam manipulated the magic that he’s learned to the end.
3:07:46 And then he gives up the ring and you’re like, “Good job, Sam. You have done it.”
3:07:51 Lord of the Rings is just a great manual for how to do both of these things.
3:07:53 We’re going to come to number three.
3:07:54 Yes.
3:08:01 It’s the third law in a second, but I just want to recommend to folks, I had an opportunity to spend some time in Oxford for the first time.
3:08:11 And it is just from a literary perspective, so fun to walk around Oxford and to see all of the influences and the pubs and so on.
3:08:16 We’re Tolkien and C.S. Lewis used to grab drinks and I always blank on the third.
3:08:17 Yep, everybody does.
3:08:22 Or like, “Yeah, sorry, pal.” Or his Dark Materials, right?
3:08:25 And Phil Pullman and that entire world.
3:08:35 Which I have to just air a grievance, which is when things get slotted, this is me being naive, I guess, but into young adult.
3:08:40 My assumption always was, as a so-called adult, like young adult is easier to read.
3:08:48 But it seems to be when the protagonist is a young adult, because I remember reading The Golden Compass and I was like, “I do not understand these 300 nautical terms.”
3:08:51 It was a very, very intricate book.
3:08:57 After this, no one knows what to do with The Golden Compass, because Lara’s actually like eight.
3:09:03 And so it’s not young adult, it’s what the age group that that would be would be middle grade or chapter books.
3:09:05 It was shelved in both sections, no one knows what to do with that.
3:09:10 And that’s an example of breaking the rules fantastically and it working out really well.
3:09:13 I don’t remember how old she is, but she’s not young adult age, she might be 10.
3:09:19 But young adult can be just as complicated as adult.
3:09:22 And it’s mostly a marketing thing, like Mistborn.
3:09:27 All my books Mistborn shelved as adult everywhere, but eventually towards like, it’s really a young adult version.
3:09:29 But in the young adult section, why not?
3:09:30 Maybe new people will find it.
3:09:35 Skyward, which is my actual young adult series, is shelved as adult in the UK.
3:09:39 Because they’re like, “Well, we just want to package it the same as yours and sell it to your audience.”
3:09:40 And I’m like, “Okay.”
3:09:42 So they packaged it and put it in the adult section.
3:09:44 So, all marketing.
3:09:46 Tomato, tomato, the third law.
3:09:48 Third law. All right.
3:09:50 Third law, let me tell you the story of what went wrong.
3:09:51 In Mistborn.
3:09:53 It’s actually a great first line for your next book.
3:09:55 Yeah, let me tell you what went wrong.
3:09:59 In Mistborn, I came up with three separate magic systems for three books.
3:10:00 They’re all there in the first one.
3:10:04 There’s, you know, Alamancey, there’s this thing that Cezed does, which is mysterious.
3:10:07 It’s kind of in the first book, Cezed’s magic is a soft magic.
3:10:11 Even though I know all the rules, you don’t know what he can do.
3:10:21 And when he solves problems with it, it’s like used to create mystery and questions and even some danger, right?
3:10:28 Book two, I start showing you how it works so that it becomes now understandable and things like that.
3:10:30 And then there’s a hemilurgy.
3:10:34 So, each book I wanted to explore a different aspect of the magic.
3:10:40 When it came to do the Stormlight Archive, I had started to fall into a trap.
3:10:42 And the trap is bigger is better.
3:10:45 And this is what killed the original Stormlight Archive.
3:10:49 So, you would think I’d learned this lesson, but people started to say you had three magic systems in Mistborn.
3:10:51 How many will you have in the Stormlight Archive?
3:10:54 And I’m like, there’s going to be 30 magic systems.
3:10:57 It’s going to be so epic, all right?
3:11:03 And then I sat down and I was building all this and I’m like, this is the wrong way to approach the book.
3:11:11 30 magic systems are better than three. Three well-done magic systems are way better than 30 non-well-done magic systems.
3:11:14 I need to sit down and say, what is my book actually about?
3:11:17 What is the world building that’s really going to enhance this story?
3:11:21 Let’s talk about that and do a really good job of it.
3:11:23 This is in video games.
3:11:25 There’s this great series called The Elder Scrolls.
3:11:31 And one of the first games to ever procedurally generate dungeons.
3:11:36 And they pitched one of their games is like, there’s a thousand dungeons you can explore.
3:11:42 But the truth is, all those thousand dungeons are built out of 30 different elements recombined in different ways.
3:11:45 And so, you were bored after the second one.
3:11:52 Later on, they realized if they just take hand care and they build a well-crafted dungeon, they put fewer of them in.
3:11:55 Everyone’s happier. It works way better.
3:12:03 But people would talk about those early Elder Scrolls games and be like, it’s an ocean an inch deep.
3:12:06 You want to avoid that in your storytelling.
3:12:16 So, the idea is that with the third law, it challenges me to reexamine what I have and to go deeper instead of just expanding.
3:12:19 To say, look, you’ve got something interesting and it’s not just magic.
3:12:29 Like, this character, can you dig a little deeper into who this character is instead of adding a new one to make, you know, your story wider but more shallow?
3:12:37 And it’s just a challenge to me to do a good, thoughtful job on my world building instead of always pretending bigger is better.
3:12:42 Got it. So, the third law is to protect yourself, remind yourself.
3:12:43 Yeah, all of them are.
3:12:47 The first one happened because I added something you’ll get there.
3:12:53 I had an editor, and my editor said, the ending of Mistborn 1 isn’t quite as spectacular as we want.
3:12:55 Can you, you know, do something to spice it up?
3:12:58 And I said, cool, yeah, I’ve got this thing I’m going to do in the second book.
3:13:02 I’ll just let it happen in the first book, but I hadn’t set it up.
3:13:04 And then the first book came out and people still really liked it.
3:13:08 But a lot of them are pointing at that and being like, that felt like a little like a Deus Ex Machina.
3:13:11 I’m like, it is. I didn’t set this up at all.
3:13:13 It just is out of nowhere right at the end.
3:13:16 I’m like, why does it work sometimes and not others?
3:13:18 And that’s where this law came from.
3:13:22 And flaws are more interesting is the same direction.
3:13:34 It’s like, you know, looking at all the powers that I’m adding and trying to play with them and things and realizing that, you know, Superman is interesting because of what he can’t do.
3:13:40 Superman as a character is interesting because he has a moral code, which is, you know, a limitation he puts on himself.
3:13:43 And the best stories happen either because of his moral code.
3:13:53 Will he break or not because of the people that he loves, which are also kind of a limitation or because he encounters someone who has kryptonite and his powers are taken away.
3:13:56 Those are the great three Superman stories.
3:14:01 All of them don’t center on what his powers are centers on what he can’t do.
3:14:03 He can’t get lowest to fall in love with him.
3:14:06 He can’t always protect everybody.
3:14:09 He can’t violate his code and he can’t do anything when kryptonite’s around.
3:14:12 Then you’ve suddenly you’ve got conflict and story.
3:14:14 Brandon sir, we’ve covered a lot of ground.
3:14:17 I could keep going for a very, very long time, but you’re doing the majority of the talking.
3:14:19 So you’re doing all the heavy lifting here.
3:14:29 Is there anything we have not covered that you would like to cover or anything that you would like to say to my audience request of my audience, point my audience to.
3:14:31 I never know how to do.
3:14:35 I could that you’d like to wrap things up with land the plan with a little dance.
3:14:36 I don’t know.
3:14:38 There is a zero flaw.
3:14:39 That’s okay.
3:14:40 Zero flaw.
3:14:42 So Adam Asimov added a zero flaw.
3:14:44 I added one chicly, right?
3:14:48 And I guess what I’d say to your audience is I thank you for putting up with me nerding out for three hours.
3:14:56 If they want to try something, I would recommend Mistborn or Truss of the Emerald Sea, depending if they want something more heisty and actiony or something more whimsical.
3:15:01 But Sanderson’s zero flaw is always err on the side of what’s awesome.
3:15:06 And this came about because I realized sometimes I don’t follow the rules.
3:15:11 Sometimes I come up with something that’s just too cool to not put in the story.
3:15:17 And at the end of the day, I’m writing stories because I want to do interesting things with character with plot with.
3:15:19 I just want things to be cool.
3:15:24 And so I came up with this little rule to myself, which is all of this is good.
3:15:25 All this is important.
3:15:30 But when you’re writing, if you come up with something really cool, try it out.
3:15:36 Even if it breaks the outline, it breaks the magic system, try it out and see if it makes the story better.
3:15:39 Because if it does, you’ll figure out a way to make it work.
3:15:41 You can revise so that it’s foreshadowed.
3:15:44 You can you can fix that err on the side of what is awesome.
3:15:45 Try it.
3:15:47 Give yourself permission.
3:15:51 Well, I for one, I’m glad you didn’t end up being a chemist.
3:16:07 So I very much appreciate the time. This is an incredible life and world and collection of worlds that you guys all help build with the team behind you and putting out ungodly numbers of words per year.
3:16:09 It’s just it’s just phenomenal.
3:16:11 And where can people find you?
3:16:13 Where’s the best place to find all things?
3:16:26 Like I said, I need to get a new one. It was written in 2006. So it’s been a while, but it’s on there for free.
3:16:30 You can read a bunch of everything you can, you know, we got socials.
3:16:33 YouTube is a pretty good place for me to my writing lectures are there.
3:16:38 I do a weekly update every week on YouTube where I come on and say where I am in my writing process for the current book.
3:16:40 So I like to do lots of outreach.
3:16:43 Yeah, amazing. Well, I can’t wait to see what you do next.
3:16:55 And I’ll be certainly watching and for people who are interested in anything we talked about, I will link to everything in the show notes at TimedUpLog/podcast.
3:16:58 Thank you, Brandon, for all the time and for hosting me.
3:16:59 What a fun trip.
3:17:06 And to everybody out there, until next time, just be a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself.
3:17:09 And thanks for tuning in.
3:17:15 Hey, guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday.
3:17:20 Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?
3:17:27 Between one and a half and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.
3:17:29 Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.
3:17:38 It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I’ve found or discovered or have started exploring over that week.
3:17:40 It’s kind of like my diary of cool things.
3:17:48 It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on.
3:17:56 They get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field.
3:17:59 And then I test them and then I share them with you.
3:18:07 So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.
3:18:16 If you’d like to try it out, just go to tim.vlog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.vlog/friday, drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one.
3:18:18 Thanks for listening.
3:18:28 I have been fascinated by the microbiome and probiotics as well as prebiotics for decades, but products never quite live up to the hype.
3:18:33 I’ve tried so many dozens and there are a host of problems.
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3:18:48 Now, it turns out that this product, SEEDS DSO1, was recommended to me many months ago by a PhD microbiologist.
3:18:56 So I started using it well before their team ever reached out to me about sponsorship, which is kind of ideal because I used it unbitten, so to speak, came in fresh.
3:19:01 Since then, it has become a daily staple and one of the few supplements I travel with.
3:19:06 I have it in a suitcase literally about 10 feet from me right now.
3:19:08 It goes with me.
3:19:15 I’ve always been very skeptical of most probiotics due to the lack of science behind them and the fact that many do not survive digestion.
3:19:18 To begin with, many of them are shipped dead, DOA.
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3:21:01 Listeners have heard me talk about making before you manage for years.
3:21:09 All that means to me is that when I wake up, I block out three to four hours to do the most important things that are generative, creative, podcasting, writing, etc.
3:21:16 Before I get to the email and the admin stuff and the reactive stuff and everyone else’s agenda for my time.
3:21:23 For me, let’s just say I’m a writer and entrepreneur, I need to focus on the making to be happy.
3:21:30 If I get sucked into all the little bits and pieces that are constantly churning, I end up feeling stressed out.
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3:23:00 (audience applauding)