ADAM: You're good. BRANDON: OK. I think we're live. If so, make
sure to let Adam know in chat that you're seeing this, which should be on both YouTube
and Twitter. Welcome to the third and hopefully final signing session for The Way of Kings
tip in pages. I may have to explain this to you later, but these are tip in pages. What
this is, is this is, well, this is the first signature. It's not even the tip in page.
It's the first signature of The Way of Kings leather-bound that we are doing. The first
eight pages actually. I said 16 last time, but I think it's only eight pages. And these
will be pulled in, sliced, and stuck in, and glued with the rest of the signatures, the
eight-page groupings of pages. I sign them like this so that we don't have
to unbox each one as it's sent to us, so that when we send it to you guys, it hopefully
will be a little less battered and dinged up. Hopefully not at all battered and dinged
up. And yes, we-- you won't be able to see it on Twitter because we can't figure how
to stream landscape on Twitter, if it's impossible, so you have to get portrait. But we do have
Magellan, the macaw, who is going to be hanging out for at least part of it and trying to
eat the pages and my pens. You can see him on YouTube. ADAM: And you can actually see him in the
upper corner, because he put you in a square on Twitter. BRANDON: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah? OK, good. ADAM: So you're good. BRANDON: And Adam is going to be firing questions
at me. He's going to grab the best ones and/or the ones that make me look the silliest, occasionally,
and throw them at us. What? You can't get on my shoulder. Hello.
You guys got to see him. Jell-O Bird. He's learning how to say Jell-O Bird. We call him
Jell-O, even though his name's Magellan because he looks like a bowl of Jell-O. So, yeah. Why don't we launch into it? We
should, later on, have Isaac stopping by. So if you guys have questions for Isaac, my
art director, he is going to visit. And I've asked Emily to bring over an item or two for
show and tell during this stream. That might help us keep it a little more distinctive. ADAM: This first one is from Facebook, from
Jonathan Alder. He says, "Hi, Brandon. From first idea to completed outline, how long
does it take you personally to develop your ideas until you feel comfortable writing?
Do standard plot structures ever help you in developing your plots? BRANDON: So two big questions here. We'll
take the first one. And the answer to that is yes. No, the answer to the second one is
yes. The answer the first one can't be yes. It wasn't a yes or no question. The first
question, how long does it take me to develop an idea before I feel good writing on it,
really depends upon the book. What I do is I am often searching for interesting ideas
that will make a story, and sometimes they are just really simple. I keep them all collected
in a file on my desktop, and they just-- random ideas. Like, actually I wrote one yesterday into
the file that was Viking's versus Cthulhu. Something just sparked my imagination. I'm
like, "Oh, yeah." What if there was something that's like a cross between Eaters of the
Dead by Michael Crichton, where a bunch of Vikings ran into Cthulhu. Or, you know, an
elder space war, or something like that. Probably will never go anywhere. Most of these ideas
don't go anywhere. And so-- Oh, here we go. No, he doesn't like that one
as much. But you brought me the metal one. KARA: Yeah. Emily wanted him to have that
one. BRANDON: OK. Magellan, hey, we've got you
a toy. We got you a new toy that maybe you will be willing to play with instead of trying
so hard to get to my shoulder. You love this one. This is his favorite toy lately. And
so here, come over onto this little one right there and play with your toy. Yeah. Ooo, a
toy. So most ideas go nowhere. And most of them
are either something silly like I just said, or small, or they are I saw a piece of media
and I thought, "Huh. They did something wrong. I wonder if I could do a different version
of that?" Or I read a book and thought, "Wow, that's a really interesting concept. I love
how this made me feel. Is there any other room to explore on this?" Mistborn came from
reading Harry Potter and being like, what if the Dark Lord won instead of lost? Spoiler,
I guess, for Harry Potter. And this is really just the start. And a book will grow in my
head for years. Way of Kings, I had the first ideas for Way of Kings when I was 15. I finally
wrote the book. I tend to look for— So if you go Google, what are the seven basic
plots, or the five basic plots, or the 30 basic plots? Everybody has different feelings
on how many plots there are. I don't find those terribly useful. They're too vague in
general. There are things like rags to riches. And I never sit down and say, "I'm going to
write a rags-to-riches story." But what I do do sometimes is take a much more fleshed-out
style of story, like a heist, which has certain things to it, or a story like— Skyward was based around the idea that there's
this kind of story where a kid finds a dragon egg and then learns to fly on the dragon and
things like that. It's not like you can find these online. It's not like there is a specific
plot you can secretly buy if you're an author. It's like, "Here is all of the points on the
kid-finds-a-dragon-egg story." But what I will notice, and if you become
a writer, you might find this method useful to you, is I notice trends. I'll see a couple
of books. I'll read a couple books over years that hit some of the same points. And I'll
be like, wow, How to Train Your Dragon, and Eragon, and Dragons Bloods by Jane Yolen,
the all kind of have this same sort of thing going on, even The White Dragon by Anne McCaffery,
and I really like it. There's something about this plot that is really fun. And so I'll
sit and try to figure out what is it about that plot that really works for me? And I'll
try to distill it, boil it down, take away the trappings and ask the why. What is it
specifically that's making me have an emotional reaction to this story? And I will then try
to take that and build a story out of it rather than just the trappings of the story. And
oftentimes I find that very handy. Did we get YouTube back up and running? ADAM: YouTube's back up. BRANDON: OK. Sorry, YouTube. I don't know
what happened there. My phone is weird. We're trying this on two-- ADAM: Probably band width issues. BRANDON: Oh, yeah. You think? ADAM: Yeah. Once I get another question I'm
going to go see if anybody's using the internet upstairs. BRANDON: Yeah. OK. ADAM: This next one is from the-- if you're
ready for the next one? BRANDON: Yeah. Go ahead. ADAM: It's from the YouTube chat, from King
Khan 17. They say, "Which content or subject do you believe is most essential for a fantasy
writer to learn prior to writing and why?" BRANDON: Which content or subject is required? BRANDON: I would say, there are no requirements.
Like, here's the thing. There are plenty of fantasy writers who didn't even read any fantasy
before they wrote their stories. And while I often find this bizarre, there is a certain
advantage to that. Like, you're not going to be unconsciously influenced. I feel like
most likely you're going to tread well-worn pathways in the genre if you aren't well experienced
with it. But who knows, right? Like, your vision may be utterly bizarre. I would say, most of the time the one thing
I would recommend is becoming part of the discussion and the discourse by reading in
the genre want to write in, becoming familiar with what makes fantasy a great genre, and
all the different things that can be done with it? But even that one is kind of out
the window in some cases. Terry Goodkind famously says he didn't read fantasy before he wrote
it. J.K. Rowling has said before that she doesn't really read a lot of fantasy, though
Terry Pratchett has an interesting rebuttal to that that he wrote before he passed away,
a kind of an open letter to her. So I would say read in the genre, but nothing's essential. And one of the great things about writing
is, you can take whatever it is that you are fascinated by and you can adapt that to become
part of a fantasy story. Whether you love soccer, or whether you love ancient Persian
history, either of those could turn into really interesting things to inform a fantasy story. When I changed my major to English as a young
college student, I thought that's what you get to become a writer. I later found out
that, not necessarily. There are advantages to being an English major. The main one being
you can often use your writing as your homework for your classes, which is kind of time efficient.
But other writers I know say never major an English. Major in whatever it is that fascinates you
and then use that to make your stories distinctive. This is the John Grisham theory, right? John
Grisham, in part, was able to make a name for himself because he was able to write legal
thrillers from the perspective of someone who was themselves an attorney and had practiced.
It lent a level of authenticity to his writing that's a lot of other people just couldn't
replicate. And so whatever you're fascinated in can become the thing that makes your story
stand out. So nothing's essential. Now, if you're asking me, "If I want to give
myself the best shot, what should I do?" I would recommend a wide field of study. Most
fantasy writers, in my experience, do best if they know a lot, a little about a lot of
different things. If they've had some psychology, some earth science, some physics, some chemistry,
some sociology, some history, good deal of history, these sorts of things are going to
be the best for making you into a writer. I actually tried, because I kind of figured
this out when I was at BYU. I tried going and saying, "Hey, do you guys have one of
those things where a student designs their own major." I thought I'd heard of this being
in places before. I don't even know what I was thinking, but like, "Could I do this thing
where I, like, take some classes from this major, and some classes from this major, and
I kind of create a fantasy novelist major?" And they looked at me and they're like, "We
don't do that here." That was my attempt at maybe wiggling out of the classes that I thought
were not as relevant to my future career and replacing them with things." Instead, I just
started going to classes where I was allowed to, where the professors didn't mind, with
my friends who were in different majors from myself, and they were really handy. ADAM: This next one is from Instagram, from
Udy Khumra. They say, "I'm halfway through The Way of Kings for the first time, and I
must say the pacing is delightful. What influences or processes led you to writing slower but
still excellently paced stories?” BRANDON: I have always loved epic fantasy.
It was my first love. It's what got me into the genre. And then the big long series, in
specific, is what held me in the genre, things like Dragonriders of Pern or The Wheel of
Time. I've always wanted to do something like that. One of the issues with epic fantasy is that
it has a slower burn. You are setting up a 10-book or whatever series. And so oftentimes
you need extra levels of worldbuilding, extra levels of-- lots larger cast. You need-- just
need a lot of work to set up a big epic fantasy series. And that often has the side effect
of making the book slower. The Way of Kings is my slowest paced book. So knowing that
and going into it and saying, all right, what have other authors done to make sure, even
though there's a steeper learning curve, and even though there's a lot more going on, to
make sure the pacing still works. And there are a lot of different methods for doing this. Robert Jordan had a great method, which is
really dynamic prologue, followed by a narrow single-character viewpoint. Then it brings
you into the world and expands slowly until later, I think Eye of the World, you're almost
halfway, or maybe even further than halfway, before we get a viewpoint other than Rand.
And this is the way that Robert Jordan did that, by making taking it big and then going
down narrow. I liked that method, but I knew it wasn't going to work for Way of Kings,
because I knew I had to have all three characters. Plus Szeth is kind of a B plot. Shallan, Kaladin,
and Dalinar all needed to kind of be going at the same time. So what I'd do is try to make every chapter
have its own sense of rising and falling action and make longer chapters. This kind of gets
in the nitty gritty of writing. But if I'm writing something like Stormlight, or even
like Mistborn, chapters are going to go between 2,000 and 4000 words, with around 3000 being
the average length. And I'm not going to make those chapters necessarily stand on their
own. They're going to be a part of an arc. It's going to be like here is an introduction
to what we're going to be doing and we're going to be faster pace by cutting the chapter
at a point that is easily leading you into another chapter. This is kind of what we call thriller pacing.
I'm not fully doing it. In fact, if you read Brent Weeks' epic fantasies, he uses thriller
pacing quite well in those, and that's part of what makes them work. Jim Butcher does
it also in Codex Alera, where you've got these kind of shorter chapters that really pull
you through by ending on notes that always are going to pull you into the next one. What I decided for Way of Kings instead was
longer, thicker, meatier chapters would each read like a short story. And so each chapter
you're going to read kind of has a beginning, middle, and end. And oftentimes, instead of
cutting at a really dramatic point, which I will still do sometimes, if you'll notice,
they instead cut kind of after a scene has happened and things have occurred, and then
you have a segue into the next chapter. And this method, what it does is it makes everything
feel a little more a little more cohesive in some ways, but also a little more isolated. Let me see if I can explain why. It means
like you have for each chapter, kind of a point where you put the book down. And what
this, I feel, does is instead of making you feel like you need to read the entire book
in one sitting, which thriller plotting really does. That's one of its goals, is saying,
you can read this all at once. You can rip through this. I didn't want you to feel that
in Way of Kings, because the book is simply too big. It would be too exhausting. Instead,
I wanted you to feel a sense of satisfaction that every chapter you read in this book,
though every chapter was long, we were giving you this story. You were always getting a
kind of a beginning, middle and end. And this is what I still look to do in Stormlight chapters. Now, it's not always. You will find that I'm
still using the "something dramatic happens, cut, new chapter." But usually I am coming
back to that character fairly quickly. Either we go right into next chapter with them or
there's only one chapter to wait most of the time. And so it feels like you're watching
a television show that has an arc for every episode and you're able to kind of modulate
your reading so that you read how many episodes you feel like at that time, rather than getting
yanked by the front of your shirt through the whole thing as fast as we possibly can.
It's just a different sort of feel that I'm looking for. I want you to enjoy being in
the Stormlight world. I want you to feel that it's very rich. But I also want you to feel
that something is happening. The other tool I use in the Stormlight books,
again, this is very technical, so I'm sorry if this is boring for some of you, is I know
that because of how many things are going on and how unusual structure-wise a lot of
the plots are, I always try to make sure that there is one central, very relatable plot
in a Stormlight book, that even if you're not sure what some of the characters are really
up to because you're reading instincts are like, wow, this is just odd. I've never really
read a story about someone who thinks he's going crazy or at least his son does, and
he's seeing visions, and I really don't know where this is going. I balance that with, in the first book, Kaladin's
plot, which is very much me using the, what I call the underdog sports story model, where
I've deconstructed a bunch of stories that I really like that used this concept, and
I built a fairly, what I think is kind of relatable, subplot for him and Bridge Four,
that's going to act as like a backbone for the entire book. So even if you're not quite
sure where all this stuff with Dalinar or Shallan is going, your instincts as a reader,
having seen stories like this, can give a real sense of progression to what Kaladin
is doing in the first book. In each of the Stormlight books, I embed a core story like
that to just act as our main structure, even if the rest of the book, we are only sometimes
seeing glimpses of what people are doing. ADAM: This next one from the chat from Brent
Mulvey. "Would you let Magic the Gathering do a Stormlight Archive series expansion?" BRANDON: Yes, absolutely. It is one of my
dreams. In fact, that I've been really excited to see them doing, now they're only Hasbro
properties, which Magic is owned by a company, Hasbro, but they're doing some of this. They
did some Transformers cards. They even have their own kind of new Transformers game that
is tied in with Magic. Like, it's compatible with Magic, but has its own rules and things,
which I think is really cool. And they did some My Little Pony cards, which we made sure
to get because we have some Ponies fans in house at Dragonsteel here, and they were for
charity. And so if they were ever interested at all, then I would jump at the chance. Now, I don't know how likely that is, because
in these days, kind of the philosophy for a lot of companies, which is pretty wise philosophy,
and Magic is one of them, is build your own IP rather than relying on someone else's IP.
Wizards of the Coast has experience with this. They have made, in the past, and lost the
rights to various different IPs, including the Pokémon card game. And I think they did
a Star Wars one for a while. And I can see how it would smart to have access to this,
to do all this work on something and then just have the license lapse and get pulled
from you. And how you would say, you know what, I would rather just make my own. And
they are pretty good at making their own. So if there were a chance to do this, I would
certainly jump at it. It would be one of my dreams to have it, because it is my favorite
game. But I'm also not holding my breath and not going to be offended if this is not something
they ever want to do. ADAM: This next one from Facebook, from Tim
O'Reilly, says, "My favorite sword fight writer is R. A. Salvatore. Who do you think writes
the best sword fights?" BRANDON: Bob Salvatore is up there, right?
Like, there aren't a lot of people in fantasy who can write a fight scene as well as he
does. Who else is really good at sword fights? You know, I'm not sure if there's anyone better
than him. I always found The Wheel of Time's fight scenes to be really interesting, because
they were written by Robert Jordan, who had served in Vietnam, and they were written like
somebody who had been in war. You read, I think it's in Shadow Rising where-- actually
it might be Fires of Heaven, where they come back and they have the big fight at Cairhien,
where Matt is acting as kind of general for the first time. And they don't even show you
his-- Jim doesn't even show you Mat's big fight with a main, kind of villainous character
we've been following for a while. The war kind of happens as a big chaotic jumble, and
then you see Matt afterward just kind of trying to decompress and deal with what's happened.
That felt very authentic to me. But it's certainly not a fight scene in the same way, or a sword
fight in the same way you might expect. Who's really good with specifically sword fights?
I'm drawing a blank of anyone who's better than Bob. So you guys want great fight scenes,
Bob Salvatore is fantastic. ADAM: This next one from the Twitter chat,
from @lupusstaris says, "Is there any specific instance where you hid something in one of
your books that only other Mormons would recognize? BRANDON: Stuff I've hidden in the books that
only other members of the Church would recognize. No, I don't really do this that much. Because
my heritage and my faith are both LDS, there are certain things that other people have
come to me and said, "Hey, was this influenced by your religion?" I'm like, "Huh. Yeah, it
probably was," but I didn't sit down and hide things in there. Most of those are, people
notice it and come to me and I'm like, yeah, that probably didn't come from that. I'm sure
there are some things I've said. Like this wouldn't be-- you asked specifically
for members of the Church, but I think there is a point in The Wheel of Time where Rand
says, basically quotes the-- there's a line in the Bible where God basically says, "Before
all these other people, I AM." Kind of this, "Before anyone else, before all these other
people, there is this I AM. I still exist. I exist to them. I still exist." And one of
the things that Jim liked to do was put references to Rand, a kind of echoing, or fulfilling,
or starting sort of mythological things that you can find in many different religions.
And I put this thing where he says, "Before Lews Therin was, I AM," basically into The
Wheel of Time. That was less to be an Easter egg and more because it's the sort of thing
that Robert Jordan did, and I thought I wanted a few of those. Of course, I also have Rand perform one of
the Buddha's famous miracle's, which is being able to release both fire and ice, you happy
you got on, from his body at the same time, which is one of the kind of famous things
of Siddhartha the Buddha. And so I was just kind of looking for things like that to put
into The Wheel of Time for Rand. But I'm drawing a blank on this. I'm sure there are some things
I've written that come from my heritage that as I wrote it I'm like, "Oh yeah, that's kind
of like this," and that other people would notice. But I don't, like, hide things like
that generally. Hey, don't eat my glasses, OK? You can eat
my hair, but you can't eat my glasses. ADAM: From Instagram, Dia Maria Scribe for
the King asks, "What books are your children really into right now, and what books do you
like to read with them?" BRANDON: They love Dav Pilkey's books and
I actually really like them, too. Dav Pilkey, if you don't know, wrote Captain Underpants,
and he has a series, which we like Captain Underpants, but I think his newer series,
Dog Man, is superior. It is just a really great read, particularly when I have a son
who's dyslexic but loves having stories read to him, and it's really hard for him to read.
But with Dog Man, you have really well-done graphic novel stuff as well as you have the
story. So we read a lot of Dog Man. Every time a new Dog Man comes out, we have to go
buy it on opening day. Right now, we're reading a book called Spy
Penguins that we just kind of picked up off the shelf, and they are really liking that
one. So I can recommend that. It's well written and fun. What else do we really like to read
together? We love The Bad Guys series. If you haven't discovered these, they are delightful.
It's about a wolf, and a shark, and a tarantula, and a snake, and a piranha, who are on a mission
to repair the reputation of so-called bad guy animals in an animal world. And they are
trying to go on missions to save and protect things. But, you know, they have some bad
guy instincts still. Like they go to rescue some chickens and then the snake ends up eating
a bunch of them on accident, and they have to get him to, like, throw the chickens up
and stuff. They're very funny. They're really fun. If you like this whole story of bumbling
heroes trying with hearts of gold, or in the snake's case maybe copper, but trying very
hard to reform people's opinion of them, those books are delightful to read with your children. My eldest, who is 12, prefers-- he's gotten
to the age where he's liking books that are a little more lengthy and complex. And so
he's rereading Fablehaven books because he never read Dragon Watch when it came out.
And so we got him the Dragon Watch books, but he has to get through all the Fablehaven
books, he decided, before he can read the sequel series. So he is reading those, by
my name buddy Brandon Mull, for whom I get mistaken at signings once in a while even
still. Happened way more earlier in our two careers. I still want to write a book with
Mull someday, and co-write it just so that we can write that the authors are— You're going to get on my head and you're
going to mess up my hair, and then Emily's going to be annoyed again. So we can just
have a book series that is written by "The Brandons." What? Which would be fun, right?
What do you want to do? You want to get the pen, don't you? Yeah. That's what you really
want. Yeah. You're on camera. Now go back up and play with your toys. Play with the
toys. Look, you love this toy. Yeah. This is your favorite toy. Play with that one.
I'll give you a pen when it runs out. All right, there we go. That was that that was
a fun question. Thanks for that one. ADAM: Another popular question through these
rooms is an inquiry regarding your pen. BRANDON: Oh, yeah. ADAM: What kind of pen you're using. BRANDON: Kara, do you want to come on and
explain? You're fine doing that? Like how we came up with these pens? Kara is going
to come maybe pull a chair over. Will she be visible if she sits right here? ADAM: On YouTube she will. BRANDON: Only on YouTube. OK. So you on Twitter
will simply have to listen to Kara. Kara is our CFO here at Dragonsteel. And what's your
other title? You're like Head of-- KARA: Events and Merchandise. BRANDON: Events and Merchandise. She runs
the warehouse, oversees it. Mem does the actual warehouse stuff now. Kara's kind of our fixer
in heist story parlance. She's the one where if we need something to happen, we need, like,
a physical object or something, we say, "Kara, can you make this happen?" And she goes and
makes it happen. I needed pens that I like that worked. And so what do we have? What
we're using? KARA: These are Uni-ball Signo Gel Bold. BRANDON: OK. KARA: It has to be Bold because of how fast
you write. We can't have any fine points. BRANDON: Right. KARA: Because the ink has to go through fast. BRANDON: Yep. This has been our biggest problem
is that-- there's two big problems with using a ballpoint, and this is why I normally use
a Sharpie, is that I have a vigorous signature. And so I will rip pages. We found, like if
I just have a regular Bic even, it's dangerous for me to sign with a Bic because I will rip
off the page when I do that, see, the end of my signature there. That one's a little
too long there. Someone's getting chopped. So we needed-- so that's what you found is,
like, the heavy-- what's it called? The bold. KARA: Bold pen. You have to have the Bold. BRANDON: And I was skipping a lot. Like, I
would do it, and then you wouldn't get the full signature. KARA: Yeah. So that's why it has to be the
gel, because it flows faster. BRANDON: Flows faster. We need the fastest
flowing pen that we can find. As you guys can see, my signature is very fast. KARA: But, yeah. BRANDON: Thanks, Kara. ADAM: And promotional consideration not brought
by Uni-ball. BRANDON: Yes, not brought by Uni-ball. KARA: Yeah. BRANDON: This is just the one we found. No
sponsorship there. My signature, if you're interested in my signature. It started out
much more legible. It used to be, in fact-- Kara, if you'd grab me a piece of paper, I'll
try and do one that we can hold up that people can see. I can try and do my old signature,
or my versions of my old signature. A piece of cardboard would work too, Kara. KARA: Oh, this is right here. BRANDON: OK. And so what happened is I got
some advice early in my career that said try to find a signature that moves your arm and
not your wrist to save your wrist, which turned out to be really good advice. Originally,
you can kind of read my signature. In fact, it was a little more legible than that even,
but you can kind of see the Brandon and the Sanderson. I can't even do it now as I used
to. But you could kind of read the Brandon. And then over time it became something more
like the second one down underneath, where you can see them melding together. You can
see that the Brandon had just become a scribble, and the Sanderson, the S is kind of looped
around. You can still find some old signatures from the first year of my career that look
a little more like that. And then for a while, the S got really big. I can't even really
do it right. But you'll find some like that occasionally. And then finally, it became
what it is now, where you can see that the Brandon has just become like a hint of the
B with a line and then the big S, the big cursive s, and that is the history of my signature.
And this took me only about a year or so to finally develop. My handwriting is sloppy.
In fact, I think I've referenced earlier. You already got down on me. You need to stay
on your perch. I'm going to move you just a little bit back, and then you're going to
hate it. But stay and play with your toys. So I referenced Mrs. Soukup, my second-grade
teacher, who tried very hard to get me to have better handwriting. If she knew I were
a famous author now she'd just be shaking her head and be like, "I tried, guys. I tried."
But my handwriting is just not good. It has never been good. In fact, I can still remember
the indignance with which my papers were graded in middle school, because I had a history
teacher who graded partially on penmanship for the history essays that you wrote, which
I still think was a little unfair. But I wanted a signature then that looked more like a symbol.
That is something that I could really make my own, but also wasn't intended to be legible.
I do envy Robert Jordan and Orson Scott Card and some of these kind of old school writers
who still have gorgeous signatures. Like Robert Jordan, I don't know if you've seen his signature,
but we printed in the ones I did, Harriet had his name printed in the front to kind
of give a stamp of authenticity to them. Did you wiggle this all the way over or did
I just not move it far enough? And just envy that, but not enough to actually
change my signature, because I totally could if I wanted to. You know, I could work on
it and make it end up working. I really do like the simple. KARA: We put it on our socks. BRANDON: We put it on our socks? That's right.
You have my signature. So if you buy my socks through my web store, you're going to have
my signature on your foot. ADAM: Well, It's on the packaging, right? KARA: The packaging, not the socks. BRANDON: It's on the packaging? Oh, it's not
on the--? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. KARA: It looks really good. BRANDON: Yeah. The socks are awesome. We had
no idea people were going to be interested in socks. ADAM: We can always show them. BRANDON: Yeah. ADAM: We could grab a-- KARA: I'll go grab some. BRANDON: Now we're going to be-- we're going
to show off how awesome Kara is. ADAM: Promotional consideration brought to
you by us. BRANDON: By us. This is just-- Kara and Isaac
just kind of come up with what things they want to have, and then we make them, and then
sometimes people actually want to buy them. So we made Doomslug socks, if you can see
these. Which, when Isaac said, "We're going to do socks," I'm like, "Is anyone going to
want socks?" He's like, "I want socks." So I'm like, "OK, I guess we'll do socks." And
then people actually like them. And there's Cosmere socks with all the Cosmere constellations
from Arcanum Unbounded and World Hopper on the bottom of the foot. These ones, what?
They have Doom and Slug. MAGELLAN: Hi. BRANDON: Hello. These are great. So if there
a cool swag ideas you want us to make, Kara or Isaac are the people to talk to, because
they make that sort of thing happen. KARA: And we have a website. BRANDON: We have a list. We keep lists. Like,
we do want to do plushies at some point. It's just plushies are hard. They're really hard.
Prototyping a plushy is a long and frustrating process. And then you have to print or make,
manufacture a certain number of them and things. And so it is in the back of our head. A lot
of people ask for plushies. They ask for Doomslug plushies and they asked for Soonie pups from
the Mistborn books, and things like that. And it's on our radar. But, yeah. KARA: No promises. BRANDON: Yeah, no promises. ADAM: Many people are inquiring about the
sequel to The Rithmatist. BRANDON: Sequel to The Rithmatist. Yeah, I
can talk about that for a minute. There's a couple things going on with The Rithmatist
that make it difficult. The first one is that The Rithmatist was the book series I was working
on when The Wheel of Time came along. And it is the biggest casualty of The Wheel of
Time, in that when The Wheel of Time came along, I dropped everything else. And a lot of authors have this this issue.
If you do a book and then your career changes dramatically, it can be sometimes very, very
hard to go back to that book and kind of recapture who you were back in that time. We need another
one Kara. You're OK. Don't panic. But it's sometimes really hard to go back and capture
who you were. When I tried to go back to The Rithmatist sequel, I had that problem. It
was the sense of I have to make sure that the sequel fits with the first one. Now, I'm
going to be doing this with Elantris sequels pretty soon, but pretty soon in Cosmere writing
terms, which means in five years or something, probably, after Stormlight 5. So I will have
to kind of learn how to do it. But it was when I went back, and I had a shot
to do Rithmatist 2 years later-- Rithmatist was written in 2007. And then we sat on it
for years because I knew getting to a sequel was going to be hard for me. And finally,
TOR was just like, "We need to release this book." And I said, "OK, we need to release
this book." and I wish I had the foresight to go back and change the ending a little
bit, so it didn't promise quite so much in a sequel. I do still intend to do one, but
it was just really hard to get back into it. And then there's some other things. Like any
time you're dealing with real world history, it requires a level of sensitivity that, particularly
in the first book, I was not as aware of when I was writing during that part of my career.
And I wrote some things that I now consider insensitive towards some Native American cultures.
They aren't a big part of The Rithmatist, but they are there. And so that puts The Rithmatist
in this place where, if I go back to it to be a little more aware of what I'm doing,
where when-- not quite-- It's rough because it's alternate history. And so there are things
that I am changing about our history. But there are also things that I can change about
our history that are insensitive to do. And like I said, I don't think it is a thing that
really ruins Rithmatist, but it's there when I see it now and I'm like, "Huh." I can do
a better job and I should. But that also means that I can't just rush into a sequel. And
so I want to be careful when I write that sequel and be aware of what I'm doing. And
so this this will happen. But I don't know when and I can't promise when. Because both
of those issues make it difficult for me to get back to it and have repeatedly made it
difficult for me to get back to it. ADAM: From the chat, Evelyn Bashette says,
"Hello, Brandon. Have you ever written something you regret because it misrepresented your
personal values and beliefs?" BRANDON: Ooo, what a great question. So here's
the thing. As a person, my personal values are changing and evolving over time. And a
book is generally a picture of who you were as a writer when you wrote it. And in some
ways, I wouldn't want to erase that. Partially because I've read too many books about time
travel where it never goes well for you. But also because it is a snapshot, like, as James
Joyce once wrote, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And that is what a book kind
of is, is a snapshot. I have several times written things that even soon after I thought,
you know what, that was me going further than I want to go. But in some ways, the book is--
writing the book is what teaches me that. Like exploring it. A good example of this is the beginning of
Steelheart. The prologue of Steelheart is more brutally violent than the rest of the
series. And I wrote the prologue and it was separated by a year or so, or even more, before
I wrote the rest of the book. And I had a vision of the book being darker than I ended
up doing as the characters evolved and things. And after the fact, nowadays, when I recommend
the book, I remember, you know, that prologue kind of it's over a line a little bit in the
level of specific violence that I would like to have in my books, particularly in a YA
book. And so the prologue of Steelheart is over the line for me. Another example of violence being over the
line actually got cut. This comes from Oathbringer and it's one during one Dalinar's flashback
sequences. And there is a sequence where, to not give too many spoilers, he ends up
trapped beneath an avalanche of stone. And I wrote a scene where he comes out, he is
consumed by the thrill, and he goes to town on the people who are trying to kill him in
some really graphic ways for me. Like nothing maybe compared to, what, like George will
write or something. But for me, man, there were heads being crushed and stuff like this.
I wrote this and it just, you know, it was the mindset I was getting into being Dalinar,
and I got done, and I actually didn't come back to it till I was in the writing group.
And the writing was like, "Whoa! We know Dalinar was brutal, but whoa! Do we have to see all
this?" And I thought, "Wow, no." MAGELLAN: Whoa. BRANDON: "We don't have to see all this. I'm
going to turn that down." I can still release it online if people want to see it. We'll
try to get Adam to get a deleted scene of that put up if you really want to see Dalinar
go to town on a bunch of people. But in this case, I'm like-- this just felt wrong when
I was going back to it. I went over a line I didn't want to cross in the level of brutality
in the book. And this is not to be a commentary on anyone else's lines. You may hear this
and be like, "Oh, man, I wish that were in the book." But the books are kind of a representation
of what I want them to be. So that's an example went over the line. I do think the initial painting of Ashe in
the front of Oathbringer ended up, her clothing ended up be more transparent than I had realized
when we were looking at the artwork. We asked a bunch of artists to paint for the Herald's
basically the version of the Sistine Chapel that might exist on Roshar, the Ten Heralds
kind of represented instead of the prophets at the sides of the Sistine Chapel. And Dan
Dos Santos is an amazing artist. And he painted an amazing picture of Ashe. And I saw it.
And Isaac's like, "Do you think this is a little too risqué to put in front of our
book?" And I said, "No, I don't think it is." Because I was looking at the slit on her dress.
I'm like, "Ah, it's fine." I wasn't realizing that he was saying, "Hey, this is transparent,
and you can kind of see more than perhaps you would want to be seeing." And then the
book came out and people were like, "Hey, why is there a naked woman in the front cover
of your book?" Now, again, some of you may be saying, "Really? Brandon, that is super
tame." And it's this all kind of depends on your own world view and things like that. I remember hearing a cool story once about
speeding, where a comedian said, isn't it funny that anyone going slower than you is
someone you're like, "Ah, such a slow person? How come they can't just go the right speed?
That person is terrible." But anyone who passes you, you're like, "That person's a maniac.
Look at how fast they're going." And it doesn't really matter how fast you're going, you're
still going to have this inclination of anyone going slower than you is obstructing the flow
of traffic, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac who is going to cause bodily harm
to everyone around them. Obviously not 100% true, but it rang true with me, and I feel
like that's how this sort of thing goes. And for me, Ashe's outfit was too transparent. And we talked to Dan, said, "Hey, can you
just make the dress a little less transparent? He was like, "Oh, yeah, sure. Absolutely."
Had no problem with it, and in the second printing, the dress was where we would like
it, which still, to some people, is probably too transparent, and to other people, you're
like, "You silly Mormon. Why do you even care about this?" But it is part of my moral compass.
And so I want to release the books where I feel comfortable. And so there's a couple examples for you for
things like that. But at the same time, like I said, it's a snapshot of who I am at the
time. And there's a value in that. Even, you know, I'm more, to be perfectly honest, embarrassed
by the fact that I've gotten much better at info dumps over the years, or that I've gotten
much better with dialog over the years, I feel. And so going back to those old books,
I cringe more about things like that. But anyway, there you go. Oh, here is here's Emily. Did you find it?
Ooo, here's some show and tell. Oh, you found the old signature pages. Oh! EMILY: Do you remember that? BRANDON: Great job! Wow, Em. I didn't even
realize we had these. EMILY: I kept them because I thought they
were so funny. BRANDON: All right. EMILY: That was the really early. BRANDON: This is really early. You can see
me trying to come up with what became my signature. And this is the first year I'm publishing
that I'm trying to come up it. EMILY: Just look what it's on the back of. BRANDON: Yeah. On the back of, so you guys
are going to love this, Orem, Utah, Cherry Hill Stake Conference. There's some Mormon
lingo for you. So this April 9, 2005. Elantris was launched in April. EMILY: In May. BRANDON: In May. In May of 2005. EMILY: And I didn't even meet you till November. BRANDON: Emily, how did you get these? EMILY: We saved them all. BRANDON: We saved them all? But you didn't
even know me back then. EMILY: Yeah. Actually I had Jane catalog them.
You filed them. BRANDON: Jane's my sister who-- you can see
me trying to develop my signature. And that's kind of what it looked like. My B is a lot
more B-ee than I remember. But that's how it looked like in Elantris, because I was
trying to develop this. And you can see me in this one, like, the B, trying to turn the
B in Brandon into a little bump. And things like this. Like these are-- that's pretty
awesome. Show and tell time. EMILY: Do you want me to take him back, put
him back? Or is he OK? BRANDON: Oh, he's probably OK. He's trying
to get to you now. He really likes it when Emily gives him scratches. You want some scritches?
No? You don't want them from me? All right. Here, show and tell time number
two. EMILY: I'm thinking that's the right one. BRANDON: This is the right one. So what is
this? A lot of you may know I served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints in Korea, in Seoul. And missionaries have one day off a week, basically. They call
it P Day. It's not a full day off, but it's basically a day off. EMILY: P Day for preparation day. BRANDON: Preparation day, yes. And it's very
common that missionaries will go play basketball or something. I'm not a sports fan. I appreciate
sports. But-- EMILY: On Mondays we played soccer. BRANDON: You played soccer. Yeah, because
you were in Bolivia. And so I bought this sketchbook because I wanted something that
I could write in while watching my companions play basketball. And this is White Sand, my
first novel, handwritten in '95 on these sheets of paper. You can see me crossing things out
and doing revisions and making my own parallel dotted line here to do a scene separation
and stuff like this. And I just filled these things, with these tiny things where-- I can
read it. "He wants you to visit him today?" Kent repeated. "Who?" "Regent, the tower scene."
I wanted you guys to see this. If there's ever a Brandon Sanderson museum, that needs
to go in it. And that's how I wrote my entire first novel that ever finished. Though I didn't
have a lot of time, one day a week. I didn't finish it those two years on my mission. I
came back and got a job. EMILY: Before I go, your children want to
come on. BRANDON: OK. We're not supposed to warn people
when the children come on. They get mad. EMILY: Well, your children, don't be warned,
but your children are going to come on. BRANDON: They got so mad at me last time,
guys, that I warned you. So be surprised when they show up. EMILY: Because they were totally mad. BRANDON: I finished that book when I got home.
My mom, who I've spoken about before, my mom is amazing. Like I said, she's an accountant.
She likes to plan things. And she already had a job waiting for me when I got back,
because I got back in the middle of a semester so I could go back to school. And the job
was selling ties at a kiosk in the mall in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Because while I was raised
in Lincoln, Nebraska, my parents moved to Idaho while I was away on my mission. So I
came back to a job selling ties. And it was actually a pretty good job because
it was during the holiday seasons when those kiosks they set up for the holiday season.
But the mall had a rule that you couldn't talk to people when they were walking through
the middle of the mall, to just keep people from being solicited by every kiosk. And so
you could only talk to people if they came up and started looking at your kiosk, which
was great. I'm not going to have to bother people. If they are interested, I can help
them. But that also left lots of downtime for me to work on the stories. I had that.
I also had a second job which was selling corn out of a truck by the side of the road. These are the great things my parents had
lined up for me when I when I got back. And both of those left me time to keep working
on the book. And then I eventually got it all done and typed it out and had my first
novel finished. I think I finished typing that out after I'd gone back to BYU and I
finished the book itself. Really it took me from about '95 until '98 to write my first
book. But part of that time was only one day a week. Thought you guys might find that cool. ADAM: The next one comes from Twitter. They
want some advice for blank page syndrome. BRANDON: Yeah, blank page syndrome. Blank
page syndrome is looking at-- opening and looking at the blank page and being intimidated
by it. Most of the time, blank page syndrome can be solved by one of two main things. Doesn't
work for everyone because all writers are different. But two pieces of advice. If you are naturally more of a discovery writer,
you don't like having an outline, and outline makes you feel like you're too constricted
and constrained, makes you feel like you've already written the book and so you're not
excited by it, if you are this, then writing sprints are your friend. Writing sprints are
where you basically are going to-- it's named a sprint for a reason. You're going to get
yourself into the writing mindset by picking a prompt that has nothing to do with your
story, and you are going to time yourself for 15 minutes, and you're just going to write
on that thing for 15 minutes straight, not caring about the content of what you're writing,
because it's not going in your book. And it can be something as simple as, write
about your favorite meal. Or, write a monologue from one of your main characters, talking
about an average day in the life of being this character. What's an average day look
like? And you're just going to sprint. You don't care about the content at all. You are
warming up, basically. And a writing sprint can be a great way to just get your brain
into this mindset of "I am writing now." You can reinforce that by always turning on the
same playlist when it's writing time, always writing in the same place, and doing it at
the same time of day to basically trick your brain into having this habit of "this is when
we write." You can also try doing the writing sprint longhand. Sometimes when people are
having trouble getting into something, writing longhand is easier. If you are an outline writer then you can
also-- MAGELLAN: Hello. BRANDON: Hello. Are you going to talk to us?
Usually we have to bring him a mirror and show him the bird in the mirror that he will
want to talk to. Or we have to have him in his aviary, wanting to get out, and then he
will go through his repertoire of things to say to draw our attention. You can work on your outline. Outline is a
great way to get past blank page syndrome. Now, don't work on your outline so much you
never get to writing. But what you can do is you can say, "I'm going to outline what
I have to do today. I'm going to look at what are my goals for this chapter? What is the
character going to learn? What does it feel like? What does it sound like? What does it
smell like in the place that the character is?" And you can build some bullet points
and just take a half hour, 15 minutes, and come up with some bullet points of things
you're trying to accomplish in this day's writing. And what this will do is, it'll offload some
of the tension for you to the page. Writing requires you to keep so many things in your
head. It can be very tense to be like, "I have to get all of these things right. There's
so much that I have to do." Where instead you can say, "OK, I don't have to focus on
the plot because I know what I'm achieving here. I don't focus on the character arc because
I have three bullet points telling me the things I need to achieve in this chapter so
that the character arc will fit in with the rest of what I'm doing with the book." And
it just kind of offloads some of that to your outline, and then you can just ask yourself,
"All right. What's a really interesting way to start?" And you can just go with that.
Try those two things and see if they help you. Is this stack number three, Kara, that we
have done? ADAM: I believe so. KARA: Yes. BRANDON: Stack number three. So we have 13
of these to do? So we have we are almost a quarter of the way through our stream for
the day. ADAM: So a few more hours left. BRANDON: Yes, a few more hours left. ADAM: I did see some complaints from previous
streams saying that we didn't celebrate piles being completed enough. They want a bell or
something. BRANDON: Oh, piles being completed. We should
come up with something for the future. This is the end of the way of things ones. But
didn't we just reorder two? KARA: We have Elantris and Mistborn sitting
in the garage, and we have the second printing of Warbreaker on its way. BRANDON: Wow. OK. So this is going to be a
monthly thing, at least. KARA: But not as many. BRANDON: Not as many, but you will see us
coming back and signing again in a couple of weeks doing this. It's more fun to do this
in front of-- Hurray! There you go. Celebration. We'll come up with something. We'll have a
button we can hit, and confetti will shoot out. KARA: Ooo, that would be fun. BRANDON: Yeah, that'd be fun, except then
you have to clean it up. Which, yeah. Well, she would have to clean it up. MEM: Yeah, I would have to clean it up. Kara's
not sweeping up. ADAM: Our friend, I can never pronounce his
name right, but Yvgeny. BRANDON: Oh, Yvgeny, yeah. ADAM: He says that we should get a gong for
every stack. KARA: Ooo, a gong would be fun. BRANDON: Gong's a good idea. ADAM: Just get a little 8-inch gong. BRANDON: Yeah. KARA: That would be fun. BRANDON: All right. ADAM: OK. This next one is from Facebook,
from Sarka Slobadova. BRANDON: OK, cool. ADAM: She says, "Greetings from the Czech
Republic." BRANDON: Greetings. ADAM: "I just finished The Reckoner series
and I am wondering, how did you come up with the story? And if you use some kind of database
like David [or Tia] did for all your Epics because of the many powers and weaknesses?" BRANDON: Yes. So first question, how did I
come up with it. This has a great story. I'm sorry for those who have heard the story.
But I came up with Reckoners because I got cut off in traffic. So the story is, you get
the long version because we're on the stream, story is, I, in the early days of my career,
the way I went on tour was by driving it up the West Coast. And this started because Dave Woolverton/Dave
Farland is his pen name, who is one of my writing mentors, when I sold a book, said,
"Hey, why don't we go on a tour together? That way, people who comes to see me will
find out about your books." Which is just-- Dave is a super generous person. He wanted
to go on tour with me because no one would show up because it was my early days writing.
So we went on tour for Mistborn. And what we did is we went to the publisher, and tours
can be kind of expensive. So when we said, "Send us on tour," they're like, "Well, we'll
send Dave on tour. We're not sure about Brandon. He's brand new." And oftentimes the rule of thumb back then,
it's probably more now, the rule of thumb back then was it was about $2,000 a day to
send an author on tour. And $2,000 is, by marketing budgets, maybe not that much, but
for a book like mine was quite a bit. A 10-day tour is costing quite a bit of money in that
case. And this is because they have to fly the author to a place, pay for their meals,
put them up. Usually they pick very nice hotels because that's just what they do. And usually
they pay for a media escort, which is someone who's an expert in all the local bookstore
spaces. Basically like a chauffeur who also knows how to help run a book signing, is what
a media escort is. And they can be expensive. And all of these things kind of come together
when your author is probably going to sell ten books as a new author, if they're lucky,
at each signing. So the publisher is making, you know, $100 and spending $2,000, which
is why they don't often send new authors on tour, unless they really think they can jump
start something. So Dave and I went to them and said, "How
about this? You give us $2,000 each for the whole tour and we will make it work." They're
like, "Really? OK." And so we drove it. We stayed in-- we split a hotel room and we did
not stay at the Ritz Carlton. We stayed at the Motel 6 and spent, like, $40 bucks on
a hotel room, split between the two of us. And we did a 10-city tour for, it ended up
being like $2,100 each. And the publisher thought this was awesome. And it was really
economical. It did a really good job. This is back when there were a lot more bookstores
than there are now. And so what I would do, this was my addition to the tour, Dave had
never done this before, is I said, "Let's just go visit all the bookstores in the cities
we go to and give them copies of our books, give the staff copies of our books to read."
And TOR was more than happy to give us boxes of paperbacks. I went around giving copies
of Elantris to all these booksellers. I still get some of them coming up to me at signings
these days saying, "Thanks for the free book 15 years ago." And I did this a lot in San
Diego and just all up the West Coast. We would go from Vegas to San Diego to L.A. to San
Francisco to Seattle and Portland. Probably not in that order. And then back through Idaho.
This is when I did signings in Boise, which they haven't ever sent me back to Boise. And
a lot of people in Boise complain. In Idaho Falls and Provo. I don't know if that's 10.
I'm probably forgetting one, but basically that was our loop. I did this, like, three
years in a row. We brought Lee Modesitt with us one year,
who is fantastic individual who has also been just really nice to me in my career when he
didn't need to be when I was nobody. So show Lee some love, a great fantasy writer, and
science fiction writer, he would have me remind. And did this three years. And it was becoming
quite the cool thing where people come out to see all three of us. And then The Wheel of Time happened. A couple
of things happened. First off, before The Wheel of Time happened, Mistborn took off.
And if you guys don't know this story, there's a story within the story. The closest my career
came to ever failing was with Mistborn. Because what happened is, when you're a brand new
offer, you have this certain shininess to you, because you are a brand new, unknown
quantity. And this was a much bigger back in the day when bookstores were a bigger force. One of the reasons why-- one of the things
that the loss of bookstores has hurt, that a lot of people don't know, is new authors,
because having the new arrival bay at bookstores was much better at selling brand new authors
than online distribution has been. It's been much harder to launch new authors nowadays.
But back then, people go to the new arrival bay. They would see a hardcover by a new author
from Tor, and they would give it a certain amount of interest just because TOR didn't
launch a lot of authors in hardcover who were brand new. Your first book was released in
hardcover by Tor, you were probably the only new author that they were doing that with
for that month and maybe a couple surrounding months. Elantris got a lot of attention. There's
a reason why you're most likely to win an award in sci-fi/fantasy with your first. Your
best chances of ever winning, statistically, are on your first novel. And this is just
because, you know, that shininess factor. It's a very natural kind of human thing. Adam is smiling because we're like embedded
in three stories in now, on this thing. This is what happens. This is what happens when
you're an epic fantasy writer. Occupational hazard. So Elantris did pretty well. It sold 10,000
copies in hardcover, which, you know, it's not breaking any sales records. But anyone
who can sell 10,000 copies in a hardcover is an author that, at least in the old days,
was someone who is, all right, fine, was always going to be publishable. You hit that threshold,
that that book is profitable. It's not paying for anyone else's books, which is what publishers
really want, which are the big sales by the big authors that can make it so you can take
risks on a lot of smaller authors. But it was it was good. Then Mistborn came out, and so I lost the
new author's shine, which, you know, everyone has to do. That's the thing. And I felt Mistborn
was a stronger novel than Elantris, but no longer new author shine, and it was not a
sequel to Elantris. Now, there's a lot to be said about sequels, and the genre that
we are part of, why there are such big long series. I only do a big, long series if I
feel like the story demands it and it's what I want to do. And very early on, my publisher
tried to get me to write a sequel to Elantris and I said, "Maybe someday, but that's not
what I want to do right now. I want to have Elantris be my calling card to the readership
of fantasy. I want to do a standalone. Some of my favorite epic fantasies are standalones.
And I really liked how a launch just worked. And I wanted to do this once a trilogy. But
because Elantris, it wasn't a sequel to Elantris, then people weren't necessarily-- Yeah. You really want that pen. You really
want that pen. Do you have the other pen? Why don't you get that one that ran out that
I gave you. You deserve a pen. You've been a very good bird. What's this? Oh. Yeah. ADAM: Unless you just want to keep it. BRANDON: There you are. There you are. OK.
Let's put you back up and you can have your pen. KARA: Do you want me to find something to
secure this a bit more? BRANDON: No. It's fine. KARA: All right. ADAM: He's a wiggler. BRANDON: He will just put it into his food.
Adam held up a thing saying that he probably wants to move, so that we do some of this
on Facebook as well. So we may, you know, at a break point, move the Twitter one over
to Facebook, just because there are people who want to watch it on Facebook. ADAM: It will still be on YouTube. BRANDON: It'll still be on YouTube. ADAM: So we can move it. BRANDON: Yeah. But we're trying to try to
balance. Maybe eventually we'll have four of these cameras here, because we hear those
of you who want us on Twitch also. But for now, we'll finish these stories. And then
maybe we will move the YouTube one to Facebook. ADAM: YouTube or Twitter? BRANDON: The YouTube one will stay, and the
Twitter one will go to Facebook. Yeah. So anyway, Mistborn came out and it was not
a sequel. And so people weren't rushing out to buy it in hardcover. Like this is a thing,
and I totally can understand it, but they were just not really excited to get it. They
were buying whatever new author was out or they were buying the sequels to things they
had wanted to read. So Mistborn in hardcover underperformed Elantris 20%. Did like 8,000
copies. And the publisher was like, "Hmm, maybe this guy is not going to make it." And they decided to do a new cover for Mistborn
going to paperback. And John Foster is an amazing artist. He did all the hard covers
for Mistborn and they commissioned him do the paperback. The paperback was one of those
covers that just did not work. Sometimes you have a great artist do a bad cover. This is
one of the worst covers I've ever had for this paperback. You can go find it online,
the original cover. John Foster is really great with monsters a lot of times and there's
a lot of kind of distortion on his figures stylized. And the way he drew Vin was really
weird on that cover. And he drew an inquisitor that looks just kind of like a grim reaper.
And the color palette was this, like, washed out brown. Like, it looked like a red that
had been sitting in the sun too long. It was a it was a rusty red brown that just was not
an appealing color palette. And that book in paperback sank like a rock,
sold almost nothing. It just vanished. And at the same time, the orders came in, were
coming in for Mistborn 2. And there's this thing during the bookstore era, this was a
bigger deal, that bookstore chains would model how much they order of a book based on your
trajectory. So if you had looked at your-- a book from two years ago had sold 10,000,
and then a book last year sold 8,000, they would order 6,000. Because they're like, "OK,
we can see the trajectory." If instead you're going up, they'll order a little bit more. So Mistborn 2 orders came in and they were
40% lower than what had been ordered for Mistborn, or even-- like, probably say, what? They'd
probably ordered around 10,000 because they didn't have data points, and then they sold
8,000, so they ordered 6,000. And so this is what was called the death spiral. And this
is the closest my career came to crashing because the Mistborn paperback did not sell
and the orders for Mistborn 2 just were really small. And so at that point, we were in some
serious trouble. My agent and I went to the publisher and said, "You need to put a new
cover on Mistborn. This book is really good. People are going to really like this book.
You need to do this." And they're like, "No." We were pushing kind of wrong. We wanted them
to put the hardcover cover on. And they're like, "No, no, this is not the cover." And
we're like, "This is the cover. Do something, please." They're like, "No. It just looks
like this book didn't connect with the market." And then the saving grace was you guys, because
it turns out that even though fewer people read Mistborn, the people who read Mistborn
loved it. And because of that, Mistborn 2 came out and everybody wanted it. And so by
ordering too few copies, what happened is they sold out week one. They were just gone.
The publisher sold out. All copies were gone. And we were getting flooded with e-mails of
people saying, "I wanted to buy this book. Where is this book? Why is it not here?" Because
they under-printed it. And that convinced TOR, "Well, maybe we should
release a new cover for Mistborn. Maybe there is some interest here.” So they had to reprint
on Mistborn 2 hardcover, and soon after they released the $5 edition of Mistborn. Some
of you may have this edition. It has the cover that is now the same cover, but had like a
big $5 banner on it. They're like, all right, we'll give this one more try. And they released
that $5 edition of Mistborn. And then one flew off of shelves. Just could not keep it
in print, and the book just really took off. Oh, you're doing a number on that, aren't
you? And so let's see. This would have been, Elantris
2005. This would have been 2006 for Mistborn. So this is 2007. And so this book just takes
off. And so on the last of our tours that I did with everybody together, which was also
in 2007, the last one I did with Dave, suddenly the crowds were growing big, by what I thought
was big back then. Like normally we'd been attracting about 50 people to the signings
and we started attracting 100, 150, which involved 100 to 120 people to see me and 20
people for each of the other authors. Which you may be like, "Oh!" feeling bad for them,
but that meant they had a larger audience to sell their books to. So they were actually
both very happy. Larger numbers at a signing like that is good for everyone. And I started
to really take off. And then I got to do The Wheel of Time, and
The Wheel of Time announcement came out late 2007 and that changed everything again, because
everyone's like, "Who is this guy?" And so the signings suddenly grew beyond what I could
do touring with someone else. It, at some point, becomes just too unwieldy. And this
is-- we're going to get to Steelheart, this is when I-- so my tour for Mistborn 3, I believe
it would be, at this point, 2008. At this point, the publisher's like, "OK, you can't
do this little tour thing you've been doing anymore. You have to move up to the 2,000
a day super tour that is for a headlining author." And I'm like, "I don't want to. I
like driving myself places. Can we do some sort of hybrid?" And I pushed and they finally relented and
allowed me to rent a car because they want me on the East Coast as well as the West Coast.
And I flew to see Harriet and talk over what we were doing on The Wheel of Time books.
And then the idea was that I would drive up the coast of the East Coast like I had done
on the West Coast earlier. And I would do a tour that way. Which, you know, for someone
from the West who thinks they are experienced with driving because they've been in L.A.,
L.A. is difficult to drive in, but it's a different kind of difficult than D.C. and
Boston. Let's just say that. It's not just about the traffic. L.A. is about the traffic.
D.C. and Boston and Manhattan are about something else entirely. So, number one, my eyes were open to driving
downtown D.C. and Boston, me saying, "Hmm, maybe I do want a chauffeur for these." And
the other big thing that happened is I got caught with a knife by TSA. Fun story. I told
you this is going be the long version. So I had gone on a picnic with my family and
we had brought meat and cheese as part of the picnic. And I had a steak knife in my
backpack that I forgot was there. And so I went through security and they found it. I'm
like, what can this be? They pulled me aside and the person went in and they pulled out
a knife. I'm like, "Ah! I just tried to sneak a knife on a plane." So I was quite flustered. MAGELLAN: Ah. BRANDON: Yes. Good imitation. And so I was
flustered. They were just, like, OK with it. They were like, "Oh yeah, it's a steak knife.
Can we throw this away?" I'm like, "Yes, throw it away." But what had happened is when I
gathered my things after going through security, I stacked the little bins, and I stacked one
on top of my laptop, one. And so I didn't get it out and I left my laptop in the bin
underneath, which meant I didn't, until I was on the plane, realize I had left my laptop.
This is pretty crushing when you're going to be going out on a tour for a while and
you're going to need your laptop and you're going to spend several days before taking
notes about Wheel of Time things. Fortunately, when I landed, they had the laptop,
TSA did, and I sent someone to get it. That wasn't the problem. But the problem was, the
phone cord I had brought at the time to charge my phone, back in the kind of dark ages before
standardization, and we have the USBs and stuff, connected to my computer, which meant
that I didn't have a phone cord. Or I did, but it wouldn't work with just outlets and
things like that. And I didn't realize how much a problem this would be until I started
driving from Harriet's to, I think I was heading to Pittsburgh. And I had my maps. This is
before-- I had physical maps. I thought I'd be OK, but I still got lost. Driving on the
East Coast is hard. And because of this, I was going to, I worried,
be late to my signing in Pittsburgh. And my agent was waiting there for me to help me
on this tour, but I couldn't call him and let him know. So this is a big, long story
to tell you my state of mind as I'm driving, watching the hours counts, not knowing how
far I had to go because I can't use GPS because my phone's out of batteries, and being extremely
stressed and thinking, "I am going to miss my book signing. This is a disaster." And then someone cut me off in traffic as
I was driving in this very stressful situation. And I am a very even-keeled person. Right?
But that time I got cut off, I said in my head, "I wish I could just blow your car up
right now. Like, if I had superpowers, this would be my supervillain moment where I cross
the line and I blow--" I imagined myself just completely destroying that car that had cut
me off. It was a very cool Michael Bay effect, lots of explosions, tires on smoke flying
through the air. Me kind of whizzing through the smoke in a very cool way. And of course,
immediately after that, I was horrified, because I really meant it. I really thought I would
do that if I had superpowers right then. So maybe simulcasting is not something that
we can actually-- ADAM: Yeah. BRANDON: Actually manage. ADAM: Unless we can get our Internet increased,
which I don't think we can do. BRANDON: Right. Well, my house-- we're at
the house next door, which is my business. My house is getting a line for the theater
that's going to be quite a bit of bandwidth. So that might also be something else. If you
can get a receiver over here that you can put one on the home network and one of the
work network for future. But we're back on YouTube, OK? ADAM: Well, it's showing on this. It's not
showing on my computer. BRANDON: OK. ADAM: We're good. BRANDON: We're good. OK, YouTube. We are back.
So I imagined destroying this car that had cut me off and I was horrified. And I thought,
I write about heroes. I write about people being given these powers and then doing good
with them. But I would go around blowing up people's cars because they mildly inconvenienced
me. And that was the start of Steelheart. The start of Steelheart, I spent the rest
of that drive, instead of stressing about my signing, which I did make, I thought about
what a world where people started getting superpowers, but there were no heroes and
it was just a supervillain apocalypse where people like me just started blowing up cars
because they felt like it and no one could do anything about it. And this is where the
book series came from. I basically had the whole book in my head by the time I arrived
for that signing. And I wrote the prologue on that tour. I didn't have a laptop, so I
can't remember how I did it, probably longhand. Or maybe I bought a new laptop. But either
way, I very soon had that prologue, though it took me several years to actually get back
and write the book. It was one of those great ideas that consumed me for hours as I was
driving. And that's where the book came from. We're going to hop over to Facebook now. So
Twitter, sorry. You can go to YouTube or you can head over to Facebook and we'll try to
do some more with you guys in the future. Thanks for watching the stream. ADAM: Let me get you another question while
I switch over. This one is from Instagram from Pablo Esco Baggins. BRANDON: OK. ADAM: What is your favorite character that
you have not written? And then we're going to be having Isaac come down in a few minutes. BRANDON: OK. Isaac will be here in a few minutes.
Favorite character I have not written. Jean Valjean, probably. I really like Les Mis.
I saw the play when I was in high school and it was my first experience with a really well
done Broadway style play and traveling cast was awesome. And I was on like the second
row because they had a showing just for students and they got us-- I just ended up in the really
nice seats just randomly. And it blew my mind. And it was one of my father's favorite books
because he served his mission in France and loved French literature. It was among my mother's
favorite books because she just loves the themes and story. So I had like a personal
connection in that way. And so I then went and read the book. And
it is one of the only classics, one of the first classics I can remember really loving.
I now have actually read lots and loved lots. But because of that, I love Les Mis for depicting
heroic characters who are also deeply flawed. And for that idea of, let's not paint someone
black or white. Let's paint them who they are and kind of at the same time show some
genuine nobility to humankind in some of the worst situations imaginable. And that really
that really struck a chord with me. My favorite Wheel of Time character is Perrin,
for those who are curious. All right. Now we're going to switch. We're going to start
up on Facebook, maybe. ADAM: You're good. BRANDON: Hey, Facebook. Welcome to the Brandon
Sanderson stream. I hope you guys find and enjoy this stream. I am telling stories, and
occasionally being climbed on by a bird, and signing a whole bunch of sheets of paper that
are going to end up becoming books eventually. And we are just taking questions from all
around. You can ask them here or you can ask them anywhere. And it may take a few minutes
for people to actually find the stream, but, all right. ADAM: OK. Next question for you. Sorry about
that. BRANDON: All right. Yeah. ADAM: This one's from Twitter, from Sean Dick.
He says, "New writer question. Would you recommend a new writer start by writing a full novel
or would it be better to focus on writing short stories, random chapters, particularly
if the goal is to write full-length novels?" BRANDON: If your goal is to write full length
novels, you should start with novels, would be my recommendation for most writers. Now
this was not the advice that was generally given back in the day. Once upon a time, there
were more short story markets in sci-fi/fantasy than there were novels markets. And you generally
got picked up for a novel by writing some short stories, gaining a reputation as a short
story writer, and then going on to get a novel contract. But then some things changed in the publishing
industry. Number one was sci fi and fantasy became mainstream genres step-by-step. A lot
of people see this happening in the 2000s because of the movie business, and certainly
it's accelerated nowadays because of that. But it really started way back when in the
'50s and '60s, when what was considered pulp or teenage fiction was becoming something
that adults wanted to read also, and that would have a wider audience base, and the
emergence of the hardcover as a form that you could sell. Basically, the way the publishing industry
worked for these years as this was growing was, hardcovers made the actual money, and
paperbacks were just around so that people could still continue to find authors. There
are-- I mean, a paperback still could make money and you could sell a lot of books and
even still you can sell a lot of books in paperback. But for a lot of the niche genres
like epic fantasy, when hardcover started to take off was when they could actually make
a profit, a good profit, selling fantasy novelists. And this didn't happen until the '80s and
'90s. Why this is so important is because sci-fi/fantasy
has a smaller but more dedicated fan base than a lot of other genres. For instance,
when we release a new Stormlight book, we can take on anyone and beat them for the number
one spot on the New York Times list. It's not guaranteed, but we can beat them, right?
Like I every released books that have unseated Dan Brown, or that have been the same week
as Grisham and we have taken the number one spot. And we can tangle with anyone and potentially
come out on top. It's not, like I said, a guaranteed. But we can we can do that. Second
week? No way. Like we will have an 80% drop off second week. This is because the fan base
is very interested and excited, but they want to get the new book. You dropped your pen. So now you're going
to come try to get the one in my hand. There you go. And that means that while we have a small
fan base, we can still be a force in the market because of the hard covers, which make just
a lot more money than a paperback makes for the publisher. And this transition meant that
novels became the dominant form for the genre through the '80s and '90s, until in the '90s,
that's when Wheel of Time, Game of Thrones, Sword of Truth, the Farseer books, and make
lots of major fantasy epics launched with big hardcover sales and kind of proved the
genre capable of being a headlining genre. Because of that, you started to see people
for the first time in sci-fi/fantasy who were naturally novelists rather than naturally
short stories writers getting published for the first time with their novels. And lo and
behold, over the last 20 years, this has become more and more the standard. When I did it, it was a still a little odd.
Like, I still, when I was trying to pitch books to people, had about half the editors
say, go write short stories, prove yourself there, and then write novels, which was the
wrong advice. But those were the old school editors who didn't realize the genre had changed
on them already. And so half the others are like, "Yeah, I'll look at your novel." And
I eventually sold a novel, Elantris, first, never having actually completed any short
stories. No, I'd written Defending Elysium by then. I'll take that back. I had written
one fairly-- one professional-level short story, but was still pretty long. So if you like short stories, they can still
be viable. Usually the shorter the story, the less viable it is for you to make a living.
If you wrote ten 2,000-word short stories, generally you would make more off of one 20,000
word novella than you would off of ten 2,000-word short stories. But it is still possible. There
are still excellent magazines out there publishing short fiction and things like this. It's just
that a novella, you can theoretically sell for $3.00 on Amazon where that gets into the
sweet spot of how their royalties work. I won't bore you with all of that. But the long and short of it is, you should
write what you love to write and try to break in that way. And if you have not read short
stories and studied that art form, you are not going to write good short stories. And
so you will be beating your head against the wall, trying to break in that way unless you
want to start reading a lot short stories, start practicing the form and getting good
at it. Then you can still break in that way. I would say more people break in with novels
than with short fiction these days. All right. We're going to move Jell-O. Yes,
you have to move away, because you are no longer my co-host. We are going to have Isaac.
We'll Jell-O be wheeled away over here for a little bit. ADAM: While Isaac is getting set up, we have
a question from our good friend, YouTuber Daniel Breen. For those for those of you like
fantasy, you should check out his channel. BRANDON: Yeah. ADAM: But he says, "Does Brandon have a favorite
Star Trek show? And if so, why is it The Next Generation?" BRANDON: Here's the thing. Next Generation
is, I do think, the best Star Trek show, but I like Deep Space Nine better. This is because
even though the best episodes of all time in Star Trek are all next generation, in my
opinion, the flute episode obviously being top of my list, like basically everyone else,
but there are plenty of other fantastic episodes of Next Generation, and in many ways it exemplifies
Star Trek better because it takes the really interesting science fiction premise and does
a self-contained story about it. I'm an epic fantasy writer and epic fantasy
reader, and Deep Space Nine has an epic plot to the later part of Deep Space Nine. And
I really liked how they handled having a continuing epic plot. I really liked Sisko. Like, obviously
Picard is Picard. Right? He's awesome. But I felt like I got to know Sisko better than
I got to know Picard. He was like more approachable. And I just really enjoyed the continuing storyline
that they did. And all the Worf stuff in Deep Space Nine just felt deeper and more interesting
than it was in Next Generation. While I will admits Next Generation is the best, I am more
fond of deep space nine. ADAM: Cool. BRANDON: Kara, we need another stack. And,
everybody, this is Isaac. ISAAC: Hello. BRANDON: Isaac is my art director. Isaac is
also Kara's husband. And I met Isaac in 2006? No, 2005. ISAAC: 2005 was really our-- BRANDON: 2005. 2005 when Isaac took my class. What's also interesting there, though, is
that we crossed paths at one point before that. It just didn't stick. BRANDON: Yeah. ISAAC: Because I was reading at the Leading
Edge, and so I knew Peter, and I knew Ben, and a couple of these other guys, because
I would go to that. But I never saw you and didn't really interact with you then. It took
a while later for us to-- But I knew there was this guy at the Leading Edge that everybody
talked about who was writing books. BRANDON: The Leading Edge is the science fiction
magazine on campus at BYU, where I gained my first audience. ISAAC: Yeah. BRANDON: And Isaac took my class. And you
were like-- you're like only like two years younger than me, Right? ISAAC: Yeah. I'm the same age as Jordo, I
think. BRANDON: OK. Yeah. ISAAC: Maybe a little older. BRANDON: Jordo's my brother. Isaac came into
class and I'm like-- everyone else, no one knew who I was then. So it was just another
class. ISAAC: Yeah. BRANDON: It's not like it is now where it's
hundreds of people and often taken by continuing education students and things like that. Back
then it was odd that there was somebody my age in the class. ISAAC: Yeah. There was like 20 people. Most
of them were undergrads. I had already graduated. I had come back to school to go into optometry.
And I wanted to take the science fiction writing class because I had-- I actually looked it
up because I'd taken it from Dave Woolverton two years in a row back when I was in school,
and I wondered, "Huh, I wonder if he's still teaching?" And he wasn't. This guy was. BRANDON: Yeah. And so we became friends over
the course of that class. And we were actually started going out to dinner. There was a group
of us. And we'd go out to dinner afterward and we were at the-- What's the restaurant? ISAAC: The Macaroni Grill. BRANDON: The Macaroni Grill. Because you were
drawing on the table. Yep. So they have the tablecloth there. And they give you crayons
and you can draw. I was just doodling. BRANDON: Isaac is a professional illustrator.
Why were you back college to do optometry? ISAAC: I didn't think-- I was looking at--
well, the job that I was at, a lot of the work was going overseas. At the time it was
in 3D animation video production. BRANDON: Yeah. ISAAC: For education. And so I thought, "Oh,
boy." I thought I saw my job kind of going overseas, and so I needed maybe a backup plan. BRANDON: Right. ISAAC: So I quit my job in animation and I
came back to school for optometry because I had done this once before, coming to school
into dentistry, and I had all these science credits. So I thought maybe I can do something
with them. BRANDON: Isaac has a family much like mine
that encouraged him toward a "real job," instead of pursuing the arts like was our true dream.
We both listened to them maybe a little too much at times. ISAAC: Yes. Yes. It was in-- I had come back--
the first time I went to school, I was doing a dental prep class where I had to go and
watch a dentist pull wisdom teeth for four hours or something like that. It was part
of the requisite for the class. When the dentist had stepped out, after I saw him sitting there
prying teeth out of somebody's mouth, the dental assistant said to me, "So you really
want to do this, huh?" I said, "Well, actually, I've been kind of thinking about animation."
And she says, "Do that. Do that." So that got me thinking. At the time, there wasn't
really an animation program at BYU, but they had industrial design, which allowed you to
work in 3-D. So I went and I looked into that and got into that program. BRANDON: And then I saw you drawing on the
table. ISAAC: Yeah. I was drawn to face or something.
And you said, "Oh, you're an artist." I don't know how this had never come up before, but
it hadn't. BRANDON: Yeah. ISAAC: I said, "Yeah." And Brandon said, "You
want to do the maps for my next book? It's called Mistborn." And you were in the process
of finishing up the writing on that. BRANDON: Yeah. ISAAC: So I said, "Sure." But what Brandon
didn't know was that all growing up I had done fantasy maps for me, I'd done fantasy
maps for my friends. It was kind of a good fit. So, yeah. BRANDON: Yeah. ISAAC: We went from there. BRANDON: So you started doing maps just kind
of freelance for me. ISAAC: Yeah. BRANDON: And then eventually I hired Kara
to run this, the warehouses and stuff like that. And you're like, "Oh man, I wish I could
do something like that full time." Because you were not enjoying your job at that point. ISAAC: No. I was working in video games with
great people. BRANDON: Yeah. ISAAC: But it was, yeah, it was-- BRANDON: You were animating sprites and people
walking all day and-- ISAAC: Things like that. Yeah. BRANDON: By the way, guys, ask questions for
Isaac. We're going to waste some time here, or not waste, we're going to chat a little
bit, and then we'll have Adam throw some questions at Isaac. I'm just giving you a chance to
start asking them questions. MAGELLAN: (squawking) BRANDON: Yes, Jell-O. Jell-O is mad that he
is no longer the co-host. You can hear him saying hello now. He might say Jell-O Bird
for you. And so I said, "Well, I think I can make that work. You want to come on full time?" ISAAC: And yes, I did. It worked out, worked
out well. ADAM: Oh, he's fine. He's fine, Adam. ADAM: We're getting people saying it's really
loud. BRANDON: Oh, is it really loud because the
microphones back there? Oh, I get it. I get it. Sorry Jell-O. You are going to be wheeled
away. We will listen to the audience on that one. ISAAC: So this was-- I feel like it was a
good fit for me, because even when I was working in animation, I had survived several layoffs
through that because I was really diverse. I wasn't the best animator, but I knew a lot
of different skills. And that's kind of what I do here. BRANDON: Right. ISAAC: I do a lot of-- it's art direction,
but I do a lot of different things. BRANDON: If you see in any of our books a
symbol of any sort, it's usually done by Isaac. All the writing of the Mistborn Mistborn symbols,
all the-- I don't know if we have any back here, but the Steel alphabet he did. If you
see a map, there's a decent chance it was Isaac. Sometimes he hires those out. ISAAC: Yeah. BRANDON: But a lot of the maps Isaac does.
He did Navani's sketchbook. ISAAC: In the early books. BRANDON: In the early books. ISAAC: Which is now done by Kelly Harris,
who is a fantastic artist. BRANDON: Yeah. He did our little Doom Slug.
If you see anything that's like a little Chibi art, probably Isaac. ISAAC: Me or maybe Sean Boyles, who's done
a few for us. BRANDON: That's true. But Isaac hires out
anything that he doesn't feel like meets his skillset and works with all the artists. And
he is in charge of the art direction for the leather bounds. So if you get a leather bound,
and you think, "Man, this is gorgeous." Well, that is Isaac's art direction and Peter's
kind of layout and proofreading and stuff. ISAAC: Peter and I work on those together.
A lot of the design is by me. Peter is very good at the layout and making sure that the
words themselves look really great. And then we have Christy Gilbert, who we've brought
on to help us with a lot of that stuff. She's been great as well to work with. BRANDON: Go ahead and throw some questions
at Isaac, guys. ADAM: The first one that I have is from Mark
Lindberg. ISAAC: Hey, Mark. ADAM: He wants to know when he gets to get
your book. So if you want to talk about that a little bit. BRANDON: Ah ha! ISAAC: All right. I have a book coming out.
It is not set in the Cosmere or anything, although I have thought about putting stars
in the sky that look like Cosmere constellations just to fool with people. But it is very cartoony.
It's a book called Monsters Don't Wear Underpants, A Lift the Flap Book. And it is going to be
published by Familius in August of this year. It follows the story of a little blue monster
who does not want to wear underpants. And he runs through the neighborhood telling his
mom which monsters do not wear underpants. And by the end of the story, he is convinced
to do the right thing, whatever that may be. It's been a lot of fun to work on. I'm almost
done with that. There's a lot of moving parts with a flip book-- lift the flap book. BRANDON: Lift the flap book. ISAAC: But it'll be about this big. It's 8
x 8, about 24 pages, board book. BRANDON: It's a board book. ISAAC: Yeah. They took one look at me and
they said, "Boy, if we're going to make this guy do a book, he needs one that's going to
be drool proof." The funny thing with that is there's this kind of running joke among
some of our friends that your sixth book gets published. And so I've written epic fantasy.
I wrote some middle grade fantasy books. I did a combination graphic novel/novel thing.
And none of these were getting picked up. And I didn't think about, "This is my sixth
book." I wrote this book-- BRANDON: It is your sixth book. ISAAC: It is. I wrote this book about underpants
and monsters. BRANDON: I sold my sixth book, Elantris, and
Dan sold his sixth book, which was I Am not a serial killer. And so now Isaac gets to
join the sold-your-sixth-book-club, except yours is about naked monsters. ISAAC: Yeah. It's not an epic fantasy technically. ADAM: Is there going to be a new rule called
the Rule of Six? It sounds like a Sherlock Holmes novel. ISAAC: The Rule of Six. BRANDON: The Rule of Six. Yeah, Isaac's actually
a pretty good writer. You could have sold some of those, don't you think? ISAAC: Yeah, there were there were two of
them that were so close, but they just-- it didn't happen. One of those-- or should I
wait? ADAM: Says you're good now. BRANDON: OK. Good job, Adam, keeping this
all-- keeping track of this. We will figure these bugs out as we do more streams. ADAM: Learning curve. BRANDON: Learning curve. Learning curve. But,
yeah. ISAAC: Yeah. The two a middle grade fantasies
were-- I mean, I wrote them basically because I think you and Kara about the same time came
to me and said, "Maybe you should try middle grade fantasy." So I did. BRANDON: And your humor really does match
middle grade pretty well. ISAAC: Yeah. And I thought that-- I was told
anyway, that the books had some fun parts. And one of the big problems I had early on,
and maybe I still do, is getting the tone right. I would go overboard on wacky, crazy,
funny tone and it just didn't quite work. And I think that I've figured out kind of
what my style of book is. And for me, when I sit down to work on a project or a book,
I say, "OK." I kind of center myself on this style, and that's the Avatar: The Last Airbender
style, which they can get into some serious things in those stories, but there's always
some kind of Sokka character who can say funny things or get into funny, funny situations.
But it's usually a side character. MAGELLAN: Hello. BRANDON: Oh, that was the Jell-O Bird back
there. Kathy, we should probably have Emily come pick him up, because there's not food
and water on that thing. So he's at least going to need a drink. Maybe we just have
Emily take him over to his aviary, if you guys can text her. Jell-O will go back. Everyone
can say goodbye. He did say Jell-O Bird, but you can barely hear it. He's barely learned
to say it. It's more like, "JrRr." Yes. Right now, than actual Jell-O Bird. Hopefully he'll
get better at that. So, other questions for Isaac? ADAM: Yeah. This next one is from Christopher
Hagans. He says, "How did you get involved with the Osten Ard novels?" BRANDON: Ooo. ISAAC: So, yeah. That's a fun story, because
when I was 13 or 14, my dad got a book in the mail. He got a package in the mail. And
I was the one who always was grabbing the mail at the time. And I wondered what this
was. It was from my aunt and it felt like a book. And I wasn't really a reader at this
point. I'd read a lot of books. The books I'd read were usually about husky's pulling
sleds, you know, or The Call of the Wild, that sort of a thing. I liked that sort of
book, but it didn't really catch me. I opened my dad's birthday package before
he did. And inside was a paperback of The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams and it had
gorgeous cover art by Michael Whelan. And there was that moment there with the angels
singing, and I just took the book and read it, even though it was thick. It had an author's
warning in the front. It had cool maps. It had amazing art, and it just hooked me. That's
what got me into fantasy at the time. And then I told my dad that I took his birthday
present. I still have that copy of the book, which is really awesome. When I heard that Tad Williams was going back
to the Osten Ard books, I thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if I could do the maps mouse for
that?" And so I randomly tweeted at him and said, "Hey, I do maps for Brandon Sanderson
and these other authors. If you ever need a map for the Osten Ard books, let me know."
And then I kind of forgot about it. Anyway, I was out on a pioneer trek re-creation
in the middle of nowhere with no cell service, and I climbed to the top of the mountain with
Kara, a hill, and I got cell service, and suddenly all these emails and tweets were
coming in saying, "We need you to do our maps for the Osten Ard books. That's how Tad says
them. And I said, yes, because that's the series that got me into the books, or got
me into reading. So that was pretty cool. That's how that happened. And I've enjoyed
doing that. That's one of the projects that I continue to right now do outside of work,
which I've had to kind of start limiting those quite a bit. BRANDON: I think one of the most beautiful
things you've ever done is the foil map for Osten Ard. ISAAC: Oh, thank you. BRANDON: I don't know if we have any of those. ISAAC: We do. Could you go grab-- KARA: Want me to go grab one? ISAAC: Could you grab one of those? BRANDON: You can't buy these any more, right? ISAAC: We still have a few hanging around. KARA: We have a few left. BRANDON: A few left for sale? ISAAC: Yeah. Yeah. So they're on our site. BRANDON: They're on our site. ISAAC: And we what we do is we split the proceeds
with Tad. BRANDON: Are we sold out of the Stormlight
ones? ISAAC: I believe we are. KARA: Kara would have to say. ISAAC: That's another thing that if people
want to give feedback on. We loved doing the Roshar foil map. If there's other foil maps,
we'd be interested in knowing what-- BRANDON: Man. Yeah. KARA: It's one of my favorites too. ISAAC: So you get this out in the sunlight,
which will melt it, but it also looks really cool before it melts. BRANDON: They used wax to keep that foil on. ISAAC: They use wax. It's pretty robust, but
if you were to take your fingernail and go across this, it leaves some interesting things.
Yeah. How's it how's it looking over there? Is it--? ADAM: I'm just getting a little bit different
reflection on it so you can see the map. BRANDON: It is spectacular in person. ISAAC: Oh, thank you. Thank you. BRANDON: The Stormlight one turned out really
well, but I think the Osten Ard one, like, it has like that red to it. ISAAC: Yeah. BRANDON: Something about it just really looks
gorgeous. ISAAC: Yeah. That one was made to look a little
more like the Middle Earth maps that they did in that same style. BRANDON: Yeah. ISAAC: So if anybody from The Wheel of Time
is watching, I would totally make one of those for The Wheel of Time. I would make time for
that. BRANDON: You know we know the people there.
We could-- ISAAC: Yeah, I know. BRANDON: But we should see if Harriet wants
to do a Wheel of Time. ISAAC: I would totally do that. BRANDON: You haven't done a Wheel of Time
map that you've done. ISAAC: No, I haven't. BRANDON: Yeah. We should talk to Harriet about
that. ISAAC: That is the second series that got
me into fantasy. BRANDON: I don't know if she has rights to
that stuff anymore with the television show also. ISAAC: I don't either. BRANDON: But, yeah, these foil maps, they
are, like Isaac said, they're a little-- persnickety? Is that the right word? ISAAC: Yeah. Yeah. We just have to put warnings
on them so that people don't hang them by their radiator. BRANDON: Yeah. If that wax melts they start
to ripple. ISAAC: They ripple off. BRANDON: Some of the ones we shipped out will
ripple even in the mail, so we have to have extras to send back. ISAAC: Actually, the shipping thing we figured
out. BRANDON: You figured out so it didn't happen
again? ISAAC: It works really well. BRANDON: They are so pretty in person. ISAAC: Thank you. ADAM: Some people are curious about the video
games you worked on. ISAAC: OK. So some of the video games I worked
on. I worked on many that were never made. I did a bunch of story stuff on one that was
called Space Station Tycoon. You can still look it up on YouTube. But we did like 13
episodes of cut scenes for that, Sean Boyles and I. And they were wacky and they were fun,
and we had a great time doing that. But that one didn't come out. But that was called Space
Station Tycoon. I did one called Cloning Clyde, that I did a lot of the level kind of layout
and the art for that. I didn't design the levels. I designed what they looked like in
the background using basic pieces that they gave me. That was when downloads for the X-Box
were really big. Kingdom for Keflings was a big one. What was that? BRANDON: Band of Bugs. Did you work on that? ISAAC: Band of Bugs. I did all the animations
on that. There was another one that I can't remember now that was very similar. There
were a few small ones like that. And then some big ones, I did the animation system
a couple of times on Twisted Metal for the PS3. That's the one where you've got clowns
and things hanging out of the sides of cars and shooting at each other. Yeah, but I-- BRANDON: Did you work on Saga? ISAAC: Oh, yeah. Saga was a videogame that
I worked on. I did animations for that and symbols. BRANDON: I don't know if that's still going,
but it was thing for a while. ISAAC: Yeah. Cool fantasy thing for a while.
And then I also did some stuff on Disney Infinity. The place I worked was contracted by Avalanche,
or Disney Interactive, whatever they were at the time. BRANDON: Your topiary. ISAAC: Yeah. So go and look up the Disney
Infinity trailer. Look at those. And there's one where they're going through all these
things that you can put in the game and then they pause on the moose topiary for comedic
effect. And I did the moose topiary. That was near the end when they were having us
model very simple things. But you know, it was really way below my pay grade. But yeah,
that was-- BRANDON: You were doing, like, particle effects
on something, weren't you at some point? No, no, it was-- ISAAC: After effects. Yeah, I was putting
together after effects things. Those are some of the games that I worked on. ADAM: Others have asked what the hardest decision
you've had to make as an art director is. ISAAC: Ooo, boy. The hardest decision. OK.
I'm just going to tell you one-- a hard decision that we had to make was with the Warbreaker
end papers. Dan Dos Santos gave us six different versions, six different sketches, and they
were all gorgeous. And we had to make a decision based on that. Some of them were better pieces
of art if you were just hanging it in an art gallery, and some of them worked better for
the book. You chose what worked better for the book, which are still gorgeous. But there
were some there that I think would have made really great just pieces of art on their own.
So that was a hard decision. I have to think-- BRANDON: That's always hard. Right? ISAAC: Yeah. BRANDON: When we get the sketches from the
artists saying, "Here are the five cool things I could do." And you're like, "I want you
to do all of these." ISAAC: Yeah. BRANDON: But we don't have space for all of
them. ISAAC: Most of the time, everything they send
us is great and it makes it really difficult to decide on that. I'd have to think about
if there was, like, a heavy, difficult decision. But usually it's the everyday. Good, good,
or better pieces of art, you know? ADAM: From Clarity Art One, they say, "Isaac,
how do you and Ben McSweeny collaborate on making illustrations for the Stormlight books?
Does Brandon give you the ideas first or do you both come up with your own concepts for
the art? ISAAC: We're starting to settle into a way
that this works with Ben, me, and Brandon. And it's usually that Brandon will say, "Hey,
Isaac, this is what I'm thinking about for the book. I want to have this many pieces
of plants, this many pieces of animals." Whatever it may be. And he'll oftentimes tell me what
those things are. I'll give descriptions to Ben McSweeny. If there aren't descriptions,
then we'll say, "Ben, we're kind of thinking we need something like this." And then he
has a lot more leeway on those particular items. Right now, we are-- I'm not going to
say specifically what we're working on. BRANDON: You can. It's fine. ISAAC: OK. We're working on some Spren pieces,
that Ben has been drawing different kinds of Spren. BRANDON: Basically how all the radiant Spren
look in Shadesmar and in the physical realm. ISAAC: And in the physical round. BRANDON: That's what Shallan's going to be
sketching for us in the next book. ISAAC: And there's been some things where
Brandon has told us this is what it's like, but he doesn't say what the clothing is like.
And so Ben will go on his experience of what he's read in the books and he'll come up with
something, and then we say yay or nay. And most of the times, we will go with some variation
of what Ben has done. On these latest ones, there's only been one that we've really had
to go back on and say, give us another concept. BRANDON: Yeah. ISAAC: But that just speaks to how good Ben
is, what he does. BRANDON: Yeah. He's really in tune with these
books. ISAAC: He is. BRANDON: I usually have an idea of what I
want Ben to do. And you usually have, like, just some leeway to do the things you want
to do. ISAAC: Yeah. BRANDON: Like if we go to Oathbringer, I would've
said, "Hey, here's the couple things I'm planning for Ben." He does the bulk of the art. He
does the Shallan sketchbook pages. ISAAC: Yeah. BRANDON: But then Isaac came back and said,
"I think I want to do the wines, this thing with the wines." Or, "I want to do this thing
with how you write glyphs." ISAAC: Right. That was in there because of
that Mythica, I think. I don't remember if you or I came up with that idea. But I read
the book, and then I just make notes. And then I come to Brandon and I say, “These
are the ones you want. Here's some other ideas. What do you think is good for fleshing things
out for this book?" BRANDON: We have never found a place for the
10 Fools, have we? ISAAC: No, we haven't. BRANDON: We've bumped that one from Words
or Radiance to Oathbringer, and still haven't done it. ISAAC: Yeah. We don't know if it'll even be
in this book either. Eventually we'll get there, maybe. But I'm at the beginning of
that process for Stormlight 4. BRANDON: Yep. ISAAC: I can tell you that we will have a
second page of glyphs from Nazh. BRANDON: Good old Nazh. ISAAC: From his time in the Ardentia. BRANDON: If you guys don't know who Nazh is,
Nazh is the person who annotates all the maps and pieces of art in the Stormlight books.
The affectation is that the Ars Arcanum for the books, and a lot of the illustrations,
are things that have been collected by, or put together by Khriss and-- how would you
describe Nazh as-- ISAAC: Well, he's grumpy James Bond. BRANDON: Grumpy James Bond, who's sent into
the world to grab artifacts for Khriss when she's putting together her guide to a world
in the Cosmere. ISAAC: Yeah, I've discovered a lot more about
Nazh in the last year, just because we're getting closer to including him in The Way
of Kings. Right now, his personality is grumpy James Bond, because he goes on missions. He's
kind of a grump. But he kind of likes that sort of thing. He likes going off on his own,
figuring out ways to do things. But he has a specific skill set that works really well
for this sort of thing. BRANDON: But things kind of go poorly for
him most of the time. ISAAC: Yeah. BRANDON: Yeah. ISAAC: I wouldn't say he's a Mr. Bean-type
character, but if you imagine the situations that he gets into, they're those sorts of
things, but usually not funny, though he may tell them in a grumpy funny way later on. BRANDON: Basically Nazh, as Hoid is to me,
Nazh is to Isaac. ISAAC: Yeah. BRANDON: And this is very fun because he can
write all these annotations on the artwork. And you'll see Nazh popping up in the books
now and then. Just as cameo references to this guy. The affectation is the text of the
book, like The Way of Kings, or one of these, is not something they have in world, but all
of the art in the Ars Arcanum they do. And those are produced by Khriss and Nazh. ISAAC: Right. BRANDON: We'll find someone to give this to.
If you're wondering why I do this, the pen runs out on a page at some point and I don't
get a full signature on that. So I give those to Kara and she finds someone to give those
to, somehow. We are thinking we might save them and give them away on one of these streams,
just by doing a giveaway or something, just like, you know, whatever. But we're not doing
it on this one, because we don't have it set up to do it on this one. But we'll save those.
We'll give those away eventually, though, Jell-O ate the last pen. ISAAC: Do I get a pen? BRANDON: Do you want a pen? ISAAC: I don't know, to eat. BRANDON: To eat? ADAM: What is the process for you to create
a symbol or map for a book? ISAAC: Both of those have kind of a different
process. If you look at the overview, the process is the same. It's the same process
that a lot of times is used for plotting a book, where you start macro and then you kind
of go down to the micro level. But so, I'll talk about each of those separately. For a
symbol, it's usually Brandon coming to me and saying, "We need a symbol for this series,"
or I realize we need a symbol for the series, let's say like the Nalthis one. We just came
up with that. We put it on the spine of the War Breaker leather-bound. There's one right
here. BRANDON: Yeah. Tears of Edgli. ISAAC: So we said, we don't have a symbol
for Nalthis. What do we want that to be? And I talked to Brandon and we said, well, maybe
a symbol of the Tears of, how do you say it? BRANDON: Edgli. ISAAC: Edgli? BRANDON: Yeah. ISAAC: So the Tears of Edgli. And so we talk
about, OK, what are the Tears of Edgli? What do we know that's canonical? What do you have
in your head? And we kind of came up with a story about them. And then I just start
drawing. BRANDON: If you don't know what these are,
the Tears of Edgli are flowers that they get a specific dye for that are briefly mentioned
in the books. But they are where the Shardpool is in Warbreaker. So it's actually pretty
relevant, even though in the first book it doesn't actually pop up that much. ISAAC: Yeah. I think it's mentioned that they
use them for particular dyes. BRANDON: But they are invested flowers, basically. ISAAC: Yeah, basically. We thought that would
be a good symbol for the world of Nalthis, is to take one of its investitures and make
that into a symbol. So I draw a bunch of flowers at this point. And you say, what looks cool?
What is going to be symbolic? On this you can see there's five-- I don't know if that's
clear, but that's right there. It's also on my Instagram. It might be on Brandon's Instagram
as well, if you want to see it up closer. But we have a two tone here. Five lobes, five
lobes sticking up, five lobes sticking down there. There are references to the number
five in this book that have different meanings, like the five-- were they called scholars?
The five scholars. And there was five something else. Anyway, so you'll see that one is sticking
up and one is sticking down, and there's more symbolism in that as well. But I do a bunch of symbols. I show them to
Brandon and I say, "OK, which ones of these do you like? What don't you like?" And then
we narrow it down and then I iterate on that. And I do another version where we get a little
bit closer. And once we get it close in the sketch realm, I take it in to Illustrator,
make some nice vectors, so that it can print up really well on the foil, or as we're doing
decals or different things like that. Another thing that I had in the back of my
mind when I'm making symbols is that I want them to be cool. Because we've noticed, and
this was not something I noticed early on, but I noticed people will want to get stickers
and put them on their laptops, or they'll want to get them tattooed. And if it's if
somebody is going to do something permanent like that, I want them to be cool. So that's
something that's always in the back of my head is, this has got to look cool in case
somebody wants to tattoo it on themselves. I don't want to be responsible for something
dumb looking. ADAM: That's a good rule of thumb. BRANDON: Someone's going to tattoo your monster
from Monster's Don't Wear Underpants on them. It will happen. ISAAC: I made him look happy. BRANDON: If you are really interested in how
these things iterate, the plan is for the tour for Stormlight, for Isaac to go along
with me and to bring a slideshow presentation of initial concepts and things like that,
and then final art as they ended up in the book and things like that. ISAAC: Yeah. I'll try to come up with something
that's intriguing and fun. I probably won't bring a guitar and sing about them. But who
knows? Maybe I will. BRANDON: Isaac was in a rock band when I met
him. ISAAC: Yep. Controls Zed. BRANDON: Yep. ISAAC: Anyway. ADAM: As everyone frantically YouTube's Control
Zed. ISAAC: With hits like Grandpa was a Ninja
and Robo Nerd. BRANDON: Those are two separate song. ISAAC: Two separate songs. BRANDON: Grandpa was not both a ninja and
a robo nerd. ISAAC: Right. We also have one about grandma,
which was Deathwish Grandma. BRANDON: I remember the betrayal song. What
was that one? ISAAC: The betrayal song? BRANDON: The song that you sang when your
girlfriend broke up with you and you were just really angry. ISAAC: No, so that that one was for-- we did
that for Space Station Tycoon. BRANDON: Oh, you did the song for that? OK. ISAAC: It was called-- and I don't know how
much trouble I would get in streaming it. BRANDON: Yeah. ISAAC: Because Namco Bandai owns the rights
to that. And so I wrote this song. We had some friends sing it and orchestrate it. But
it's called I Will Love You Forever with a Love that Knives Can't Sever. It just goes
on from there. But it's about the love between a space monkey and a squid. It's just really
bizarre. But yeah, it had kind of the-- BRANDON: That's the one. ISAAC: That's the one you were thinking of. BRANDON: That's the one I was thinking of. ISAAC: With the backstabber. BRANDON: Yep. ISAAC: Yeah. So we did these crazy songs.
Maybe someday we'll release them. Although I am on a podcast that'll come out here soon
where we did play some of the Control Zed songs. We played Barbequetion and Sidekick
Secretary. Sidekick Secretary is about Superman's secretary. And I wrote that a while ago. And
it's kind of funny because for a while I was Brandon's secretary and I was a sidekick secretary. BRANDON: He did Adam's job before we hired
Adam. So you're not-- you're executive assistants. ISAAC: Yeah, executive assistants. BRANDON: Though Adam's kind of morphed into
publicist and marketing manager, but he still has to do whatever. ADAM: I do whatever. BRANDON: Yeah. ISAAC: We wear a lot of hats here. ADAM: Yeah. BRANDON: Your-- I would say one of, just as
your friend, one thing I've seen is that one of the big challenges your life is, you are
multi-talented and multi-interested. You are an artist, a musician, a writer. And that's
not even scratching the surface of all the things you are interested in doing. ISAAC: I probably should have written musicals
or something like that. BRANDON: Well, you know, when we do, what
is that one that Ben came up with? In the-- ISAAC: Oh, A Hero for All Ages. BRANDON: A Hero for All Ages. ISAAC: Yeah. BRANDON: In this the Mistborn Era 2 broadsheets,
he came up with the idea of a musical based on Vin and Elend's experiences, and he put
that one in and came up with it all on his own. ISAAC: If we ever see the Nicki Savage stories,
one of the actors who played Vin shows up on stage. BRANDON: Right. ISAAC: Yeah. BRANDON: If you want to read some of Isaac's
writing, he wrote the Nicki Savage story in the broadsheets for the most-- ISAAC: Yeah. The broadsheets in Shadows of
Self. BRANDON: Yeah. ISAAC: And the broadsheets for Bands of Mourning
were probably 95% me. BRANDON: Yeah. I wrote the Allomancer Jak
one in the first one. ISAAC: In the first one. BRANDON: And then the second one is Allomancer
Jak also, but you wrote it. ISAAC: I wrote that one. BRANDON: And then you wrote Nicki Savage,
which is Allomancer Jak's protege. And we still kind of want to do a Nicki Savage novel
at some point. Isaac wants to do. You will eventually. And Isaac is one of the only people on the
planet-- Like, I'm happy doing collaborations on non-Cosmere stuff with my other writer
friends. But the Cosmere is so intricate that most people could not write in it, we don't
think. We even had trouble with the White Sand graphic novel. Just, we had a fantastic
writer on that, but they just weren't steeped in the Cosmere in the way they needed to be.
And so if there's ever writing to be done in the Cosmere that I can't do, it's probably
going to be Isaac if he wants to. ISAAC: It'll go through all the same processes
to make sure that it's canonical. BRANDON: Right. ISAAC: We'll make sure that it's good. BRANDON: You'll know. We actually-- have we
talked about the children's book? ISAAC: I think we can talk about it a little
bit. BRANDON: Yeah. ISAAC: Yeah, I mean we announced it. Wait,
did we? BRANDON: If we did or not, we can talk about
it. I'm not big on secrets. The publisher who is doing Isaac's Monsters Don't Wear Underpants
book came to us and said, "Hey, we really like this story in Oathbringer of the Girl
Who Looked Up." They said, "We think this would make a nice children's book." Isaac
knows way more about children's books than I do, and he suggested, like, it needs some
revisions to actually work as a children's book. I suggested some revisions, and he's
like, "These probably aren't actually going to work for the children's book." And he suggested
some revisions, which did work. So I just said, "Isaac, you just take it over." So it's going to be co-authored by us, the
first thing that's officially co-authored, except we did get the Nicki Savage story and
the other thing. But theoretically, we will sometime in-- it's still years away, but we'll
have a picture book of The Girl Who Looked Up that takes my writing from the book, Isaac
adapts it so it works as a children's book, and then art directs Familius hiring out to
get the artwork done. So that'll be the first thing you can actually buy from the both of
us. ISAAC: Probably, yeah. I think we're looking,
and it may have been in the State of the Sanderson, something in 2021. It really depends on when
the art and when the writing comes together, but we're in the middle of that process right
now. BRANDON: I've warned Isaac that Book 4 has
a really good one that'll work pretty well as well. ISAAC: Yeah. BRANDON: You haven't read that one yet. ISAAC: I haven't, but I'm excited to. ADAM: We're prepping it. ISAAC: My other question is, how many people
want a board book about the Stick. ADAM: I've seen many people wonder if Stick
is going to get its own book. I think it would be a very boring book. BRANDON: See? I could see a-- I love the Terry
Pratchett Where's My Cow book. If you guys don't know, it's Terry Pratchett children's
book that they talk about in world. They made them, and fans made a version of that that
is a riff on it that's Where's My Chull. ISAAC: Oh, that's right. Yeah, I've seen that. BRANDON: Fans gave that to us. ISAAC: I did not realize that was based on
a Terry Pratchett [2:14:18] BRANDON: It's based on a Terry Pratchett thing.
It would be fun to do a-- like, you get the little animal books that's got, like, chickens
and things. A little board book of all the creatures that Hoid is fond of calling gross
and disgusting. ISAAC: A is for Axehound, C is for Chull? BRANDON: Yeah, mm-hmm. Yeah, something like
that. The audience for that would be so small that everyone watching is like, "Yes, please!"
But you're the only people who would buy it, and probably only a few of you. I can see
us doing that for fun at some point, but that would-- ISAAC: Right, yeah. BRANDON: That would be one of the more goofy
products that we've come up with. ISAAC: Maybe that's like a-- maybe something
like that is a kickstarter goodie at some point way down the road. BRANDON: Maybe for the Oathbringer-- ADAM: A digital book. BRANDON: Well, I mean, if we're going to make
it, we want to have it. ISAAC: Yeah, like, the Words of Radiance,
we could have the Stick board book. I got the look. BRANDON: I don't think-- yeah, you're going
to-- you convince them that it's cool, I suppose. ISAAC: Sometimes I totally get off tone. It
still happens. I've got people to rein me in, so that's good. ADAM: This one from Soul Sniper Productions
regarding your multi-talentedness. ISAAC: OK. ADAM: It says, "Do you ever feel the struggle
of wanting to make a project, and due to the fact that you are multi-talented you want
to do all of it, or at least be involved in all aspects of the project?" ISAAC: Yeah. There's a tendency, like there's
feature creep that you hear about in software. There's a tendency that I will creep into
whatever I have opinions on, and I have to let myself go back on that. Like this kickstarter
that we have coming up, I want to take it over and organize it. BRANDON: And do all the art yourself? ISAAC: And do all the art and stuff, and I
can't. I need to lean on the people who are better at that than I am. I'm getting better
at just letting other people do their things on stuff and letting them be creative in it
and letting me be OK with that, because people are specialized and can do way better. You
know what I mean? So I'm happy to give feedback on those sorts of things. One of the things
that got me to the idea that it's okay to just let go is that I have a bunch of my own
projects that I want to do. These are things like the Nicki Savage stories, and comics
and stuff that Brandon and I have talked about, that just really sing to me. If I am spending
all of my time, I don't know, creating this or that thing that I think is cool, but maybe
not as cool as the stories, then I'm never going to get to the stories. So I've been
getting to a point where I'm trying to bring more people in and share the love on projects.
At some point, and I don't know if this is the time for that, but at some point I may--
I love working with fans who are also professionals. BRANDON: Mm-hmm. ISAAC: At some point we may, say, send out
a tweet or something that says, "Hey, who are the professionals who love Brandon's books,
who work in comics?" Or whatever it may be. BRANDON: Yeah. ISAAC: Please get ahold of us. I'm not doing
that right now, because I don't know if my in box can handle that. But at some point
down the road we may have things like that, because we like collaborating with talented
people who know Brandon's works. We get really good work from them. BRANDON: Speaking on this whole, the things
that you want to do or whatnot, I remember freshman year in college, something that has
always stuck with me that changed the way I see the world. It was an economic principle.
This is, and I'm going to get this wrong. Economists, I'm sorry. I'm going to give the
layman's version of it. There's a principle of opportunity cost that I didn't understand.
I thought I understood opportunity costs. It makes a lot of sense. You're like, I can
do this or this. Doing this costs this. But what they showed in this class was that
they have this metaphor, this system, where they said, let's say there are two products
that you can make, that you're really good at making. You can make straw hats, or you
can make straw baskets. And you are pretty good at both of them. And you can make 10
straw hats in an hour, or you can make seven straw baskets. There is someone else you could
hire, and they can only make three straw hats in an hour, or they can make six straw baskets.
So they are worse at both than you are, less efficient at both of them than you are. And this is where I'm not sure if I'll get
right the numbers. But if you run the numbers, you would think that, well, what I should
do then is I should spend half my time making straw hats and half my time making straw baskets,
because I'm better than both of them, or more efficient at both of them, than this other
person. But if you actually run the numbers, it is because you are so much better at making
straw hats than baskets than someone else, and you have an exceptional skill in this,
even though you're really good at this other one, hiring someone who is less efficient
to do it, and trading for theirs, and spending your time only on the thing at which you are
the most efficient, actually ends up with both of you doing better. You end up making
more hats and having more baskets after trading than you would have if you did half and half. Maybe someone can actually find the real numbers
on that. I'm not sure if the numbers I just spitballed work. But it is a real economic
principle where you realize that even if you're better at both things, or at least more efficient
at both things than someone else, spending your time on the thing that is most valuable
to you, and not spending half of it on this other thing that is still valuable but not
as valuable, you end up in the end being better off by doing that. It gets really complicated
when it's more about your desire. ISAAC: Right. BRANDON: Than about your efficiency. But I
think the same sort of thing applies. ISAAC: Right. BRANDON: That even if someone is less efficient,
like it's harder for someone-- I would say you are the best person to make any given
piece of Cosmere art because you just know the Cosmere better. It's going to take more
work for someone else than it would take for you, but-- ISAAC: From the lore side of things. BRANDON: From the lore side of things and
continuity side of things. But we can give them a continuity guide, and they can spend
a little more time than you would have to spend, because they have to bring themselves
up to speed, and we will still be better off if you do the things you are most passionate
and interested in, than if we had you divide your time and do half and half. ISAAC: That's an interesting thing. ADAM: One of our viewers has a PhD in economics.
Taylor Smith, thank you. He says, "You're talking about the difference in absolute advantage
and comparative advantage." He said your explanation was great. ISAAC: Oh, there you go. BRANDON: Really? Thank you. I love economics,
just love it. I think it's so fascinating and so interesting. It's one of those things
that, I love when there's a math or a science that has some real interesting layman principles
behind it. ISAAC: Right. BRANDON: Rather than just the numbers. You
can tell the things that I love out of history and physics are not the numbers, but they
are what those numbers mean. ISAAC: Conceptual stuff. BRANDON: This has stuck with me all the years.
it's kind of been a guiding principle for me, as spend my time on the thing that is
most valuable, even if-- it's hard for me because I am also one of these people, I know
the Cosmere better than anyone else. ISAAC: Than anyone, right? BRANDON: With the exception of maybe Karen,
who keeps the Wiki. But I know what I want the Cosmere to be better than anyone else. ISAAC: Right, yeah. BRANDON: I know what I want every book to
be better than anyone else. But if I can take the thing which I'm the best at, which-- or
the most valuable to me, which is the Cosmere, and some of these other ideas, work with someone
else. Like, Mary Robinette and I have a story coming out very soon. Should be end of the
month, I think, is what Max was saying, for the audiobook launch of that. Where I could
bring Mary in. It would've been very hard to bring her in on a Cosmere, and less hard
to bring her in on this other wacky story that was really cool that was kind of distracting
me. She has done just an amazing job on that story. ISAAC: She is an incredible write. BRANDON: We are better off, everyone's better
off, that I was able to work on Stormlight 4, and the story that I really wanted to have
written that I had itching at me is now written. And I feel like it's actually better than
it would have been if I would have written it on my own, because it was a story where
I could find somebody who could add something that I couldn't have added to that particular
thing. It's just-- that one's been a slam dunk. You guys are going to love that story.
Even though Will Smith made a movie basically that had the same premise. ISAAC: Very similar. BRANDON: His movie was apparently bad. I didn't
see it. But it got bad reviews. How about that? And ours is good. ISAAC: This is a similar process that I go
through in art direction, actually, now that you mention it. You know your stories and
things, right? You've got this-- you're kind of being a writing director in that way. You're
collaborating with them, right? That's what I do with, like when we're doing the Heralds
or something. I bring in your knowledge of the Cosmere. I bring in my knowledge of the
Cosmere and the lore, and my knowledge of art, and then I work with somebody who is
a way better painter than me. But we get something that all together working on it is better
than the sum of its parts, if that makes any sense at all. I don't know if-- it's kind
of like that. I'm seeing a little bit of a correlation there. BRANDON: Have we shown people Taln yet? Do
you want to go grab Taln and show them? is Do you want this to be the reveal for Taln? BRANDON: I mean, it's just going to be on
YouTube, so it's not like an actual reveal. We'll be able to have that sometime. ISAAC: Yeah, I can go get Taln. BRANDON: Go get Taln. ISAAC: I can go get Taln. BRANDON: Taln is-- so the Heralds, like I
said, we want these kind of Sistine Chapel-type paintings of the Ten Heralds for in world
to make as our end pages. You got four of them in Oathbringer. But there's 10 Heralds.
We've been working slowly over time, just collecting pictures from people we really
want to work with, that we think would do really good jobs. We started on these pretty
early, because we wanted to find when people had openings in their schedule of just artists
we wanted to work with. It's been, it was earlier last year, it was
almost a year now, I think, that we got Taln in, and it is gorgeous. We've got the actual
physical painting. With these, we're buying them all, the physical painting, if they'll
sell them. Dan Dos Santos won't sell us his yet. He likes them too much, which we will
not push him on that. But we have Jezrien, and we have Vev upstairs. We've got the Taln
painting that Isaac is going to grab for you, and he'll do the reveal of who did that and
things like that. But it is one of the best science fiction/fantasy artists of all time. ADAM: Nick Cheese wants to know if Taln dress
is transparent too? BRANDON: Taln's dress? Taln's dress is not
as transparent as Ashe's dress was. But good question. Very good question. ADAM: So, yeah, that was funny. A lot of people
are saying, "Get your screen shots ready." BRANDON: Yeah, get your screen shots ready.
We'll post the high-res version eventually. But this will be for Rhythm of War, if indeed
that is title, because we haven't officially announced it yet. (whispers) But it's the
title. You want to throw anything short, any short
little questions while we're waiting? ADAM: Let's see if I can get you-- Well, I
guess that will depend on you. BRANDON: Yes. ADAM: I will try and get you one. BRANDON: Oh, yes. ADAM: This one from Instagram, from Aspeny
Rose, says, "Which order of the Radiants would you be in?" BRANDON: I would most likely be, just who
I am, is bondsmith. But that is hard to say because there's only three bondsmiths. I guess
I get to say, because I am the creator of it all. But that is very much my personality.
That's a good match for me. ADAM: I hear Isaac coming, so I won't ask
you another one. Well, here's a quick one from Twitter, from
T. Kate Thorp. "Would you like to one day own a Black Lotus?" BRANDON: I do own a Black Lotus. So, yes,
I actually, I need to get Beta, because I only have an Unlimited, or an Alpha. I want
a Black [inaudible] Lotus. I'm going to have to shell out for that eventually. I just haven't
gotten around to it. ADAM: You do have a nice little hand-painted
one, too. BRANDON: I do have a hand-painted Lotus that
Christopher Rush made for me before he passed away. He was a fan, and he hand painted one
on a collector's edition Lotus for me. All right, so here we go. ISAAC: All right. BRANDON: Tell us about this. ISAAC: How much of that is in there? How far
back do I need to go. KARA: I'll hold it. ADAM: We're getting a lot of reflection on
it, so maybe tilt it up. Yep, just like that. ISAAC: I can hold it. KARA: You good? ISAAC: This is Taln. This will be one of our
end papers at some point for one of the books. BRANDON: Probably the next one. ISAAC: Probably this one. BRANDON: But it might not be. I've hired out
for the rest of them, and so it just depends on what fits the tone of the book in the end.
But this is by Donato, and Donato has been amazing to work with. You've probably seen
his stuff from the Lord of the Rings. He's done stuff for George Martin. He's done space
stuff. I have always wanted to own a Donato. He actually
did an art piece for us very early in my career for a short story, but it was digital only,
so I couldn't buy it. ISAAC: The process on this was, I have these
briefs that I-- not those kind of briefs. We have these briefs that I write up about
each of the Heralds. I go into our Wiki. I pull out the lore, things that haven't been
revealed. I put it all together and I send out what I'm allowed to, to the artist, which
is usually most of it. Then I say the whole thing about, these are kind of like the Sistine
Chapel paintings of all the Apostles, or things like that. These are something from the renaissance
of this world, where they have done Vorin representations of the Ten Heralds. On this one I sent him Taln. We know that
Taln, especially we know this from Oathbringer, Taln is the one who held the darkness back.
He held the Desolations at bay for, how long? Thousands of years? Something like that? What
we have here, Donato interpreted that as a Taln stepping forth out of Damnation with
this kind of representation of Damnation in the background. I don't know, what else can
I say about this? Some of the themes that he incorporated in here, he used our symbols
for the Stonewards. Is he the Stoneward one? BRANDON: Yeah. ISAAC: We've got some of those in this. There
are numbers. So the Stoneward's a number 9, so we've got the Vorin numeral 9 in there.
The sword, he took that from descriptions of the sword where it's kind of this molten
nail, this large, molten nail. Anyway, we're just happy with how this turned out. He only
did one revision for us, because we didn't need more. BRANDON: Yeah, it was right off. ADAM: Can we get a closeup of you setting
it on the table. Because there are people who would like to-- ISAAC: How close? Do you want me to--? ADAM: Probably in the middle of the sheet.
Nope, that's going to be-- well. ISAAC: How's that? ADAM: Yep, just like that. It's a little-- ISAAC: Well, We'll do an official reveal at
some point. BRANDON: We'll do an official reveal. ADAM: There it is. This was just a little
far back for detail. BRANDON: This is your teaser. ADAM: Very cool. BRANDON: We were so happy when that came in.
Maybe eventually we'll have all 10, once Dan decides that he can let go. ISAAC: Yeah. Yep. It's all good. KARA: I think we asked him to put it in his
will if all else fails. ISAAC: Right. BRANDON: There you go. At least Joel will
have it. Dan Dos Santos is like a super healthy guy who eats really well and exercises a lot. ISAAC: He's going to outlast all of us. BRANDON: He's going to outlast all of us.
He's, like, very in tune with himself, and he meditates and stuff. He is just the man. ISAAC: The man is great. BRANDON: The world would be a better place
if all people were like Dan Dos Santos. ISAAC: I completely agree. I completely agree.
So, yeah, anyway, that's kind of the process there, where it's we bring in our lore knowledge
and knowledge of art direction and all these things, and we try to come up with something
all together. But in the end, really, the artist just-- somebody like Donato. BRANDON: You got sketches in the one just
recently. ISAAC: I just got sketches for Herald Pailiah,
who-- I don't know what we've said about her in the past. But she's the Herald who is over
the Order of the Truthwatchers. Her symbol is the one on the chart at the front of The
Way of Kings that is green. It's emerald. It looks like flowing grass. The Herald, there's
some beautiful things going on with nature in the background with this one. BRANDON: If you're like, "Who are all these
people, Brandon?" They are mostly going to be in the back five Stormlight books. ISAAC: So, yeah, anyway. Art direction and
stuff. ADAM: Another question for Isaac, if you're
good to go. ISAAC: I could go for a little while longer,
yeah. BRANDON: Whenever you want to take off, you
can. ISAAC: I'm actually, just like Brandon's working
on this book, I'm working on the book upstairs right now, trying to get things ready. BRANDON: Because we have to submit it basically
today. ISAAC: So maybe I'll stick around until 4:00
or something like that. BRANDON: OK. ADAM: Cool. ISAAC: That's another 14 minutes. ADAM: This one is from Z3DT. The question
is, "What is a piece of art that you've made for the Cosmere that you like, but that was
never used, and likely never will?" ISAAC: Do we have something like that? KARA: That you do? ISAAC: That we haven't used. I have tons of
little sketches and things of symbols that we didn't do. BRANDON: Yeah, there are a lot. That would
count. ISAAC: That would count. And I don't know
if I have a favorite in there. But I can tell a story about when we were doing the Cosmere
symbol, because we did a ton of different ideas with that. For a while there I think
I was-- when we do symbols I will sometimes, I have these books full of symbols. I want
to find something iconic. So I will immerse myself in symbology for a while. I was kind
of thinking, wouldn't it be cool if, we haven't used something with a hand. So I was coming
up with these stylized hands for a while that had different things on them. But the logo,
it was just getting too complex and it didn't really, it wasn't falling together all that
well. But I have these cool drawings of symbolic hands. Like the Hamza, I think, is one of
the things in our world that is very similar to that. Kind of drawing on that sort of iconography
the way that Robert Jordan drew on the Wheel and the [___] and things like that. BRANDON: So how many of these do we have left,
counting that one? Where are we? KARA: Four over there. BRANDON: There's four over there, so this
is five? KARA: Yeah, this is number five. BRANDON: All right, so we've passed-- KARA: More than halfway. BRANDON: Yeah, we're more than halfway. ISAAC: Halfway of what's left? KARA: Of the left, yeah. ISAAC: Cool. BRANDON: Yeah. We have less than a third left,
right? ISAAC: Cool.
But I can't think of anything else. BRANDON: Those notebooks are cool. Haven't
you auctioned one of those off before? ISAAC: I had a private collector-- BRANDON: Oh, a private collector bought them. ISAAC: Buy my old, like, all the stuff that
I did for the Mistborn books and things like that. BRANDON: With all the Inquisitor specs. ADAM: Including the very first Vin fan art. ISAAC: The very first Vin fan art, and Inquisitor
fan art, and Kelsior fan art was done by me, I think. BRANDON: I think you have to have been. ISAAC: Yeah, I have to have been. BRANDON: Because you got the book before. ISAAC: What's cool is the other day I was
going through some of this. It was on the Crafty Dice stream. They wanted me to come
on and talk about the symbols. I brought up some of these old drawings. My Vin, while
it's not as good as a lot of people's Vins, you can just tell that it's Vin. There's something
to be said for how iconic of a hero she is. The description is very clear, and this is
what you get when you draw Vin. So even mine looks like a Vin from back then. I did find
in my books, too, I found Chibi Inquisitors that I thought would be funny if we did this
Hello Kitty style Inquisitor. BRANDON: Oh, yeah, that was a while ago that
you wanted Hello Inquisitor. ISAAC: It said, like, Yo Inquisitor, or something
like that, with this little-- yeah. We never did that. ADAM: McKenzie Bits, this is a question for
both of you, they're just looking for what your average day looks like. ISAAC: Want to start with mine? ADAM: Yeah. ISAAC: My average day is-- I wish I had more
of a schedule. It's like get up with the kids and with Kara, and we get them all ready for
school, and we take them for school, and I get in to work about 9:20. BRANDON: Because they go to the school across
the street. ISAAC: They go to the school that's near work,
which is really nice and convenient for us. Then I take a look at what is most pressing.
I usually know this before I get to work, because there's rarely any fires that need
to be put out immediately. Right now would be The Way of Kings leather bound. I look
at what I need to do, and I jump into it. Sometimes it's doing email, though. There's a lot of projects that I have going
up in the air, like when you're juggling. I have to throw one ball up in the air while
I'm catching the other one. I try to get feedback to artists as soon as I can during the day,
but I have to balance that with do I need to get this book out the door, for example.
Well, then the artist can wait another day for the feedback. But I try to keep the--
each artist is a ball. I'm trying to get feedback back to them as quickly as I can, or to the
comic letterer, or the comic colorist, or the one who's doing the pencils or whatever.
All of these people, I'm just trying to keep them going to keep the machine going toward
getting the books done. I'm part-- I am art director, but I'm part project manager on
a lot of things, too, because I have to figure out deadlines and try to just move everything
toward completion. I do that. I normally, if I have to do any artwork, where
it's just grinding, like, just drawing or inking, or things that they take just the
creative part of the brain but I've already made a lot of the decisions earlier on, I
save that for the afternoon when I'm a little more fatigued. Because I can sit and draw
and listen to an audiobook or music a lot easier than if I need to actually come up
with the design itself, and I'm researching things, and the wheels are cranking. That
works-- my wheels cranking work a lot better right after I have woken up, in like the four
or five hours after I've woken up. Then I stop 5:30-6:00, theoretically. Kara is over
here probably thinking, "Yeah, when does he really?" But I do stop 5:30-6:00, and then
I just go hang out with my family, and oftentimes fall asleep somewhere that is not my bed. KARA: Yep. ISAAC: So that's my day. BRANDON: I get up at noon-ish. I talked about
this on the previous stream. And I, two days a week, go to the gym. four days of the week
I am writing. One day a week I'm doing all the stuff that is not writing. So on the writing
days I will write from 1:00 until 5:00. I will go take a shower at 5:00, hang out with
family from 5:00 until 9:00 or 10:00, go back to work at around 10:00, work until 2:00,
and then have from 2:00 until 4:00 off to do whatever I feel like doing. Last night
I was watching Ellis V. draft some power cubed from his Twitch stream, from now like a month
and a half ago, or something like that. I am not-- don't have a lot of time to keep
up on those things. But on Thursdays, Thursdays are different for me. Thursdays are my, now
everybody else gets to make me do stuff that I've been putting off. And so it involves
loads of phone calls with various people who need-- Adam, do we think that this is bandwidth stuff?
Or is it just that my phone is--? ADAM: It's probably just your phone, because
yours is the only one that's dropping. BRANDON: We probably just have to use a different
phone next time. For whatever reason, my phone is not great for streaming to YouTube. Sorry,
YouTube. It's my phone. So we'll steal someone else's phone next time. ADAM: Probably the last question for you,
Isaac. ISAAC: Great. ADAM: If you're gone at 4:00. Many people
are wondering if we're ever going to see a Cosmere coloring book. ISAAC: We've talked about this. I think that
it's within the realm of possibility, but I don't want to promise anything at this point.
Because, again, it comes down to this whole opportunity cost thing, and where do we want
to spend our time. But I could see it happening. I just don't know when. BRANDON: Yeah. I mean, we want to eventually
do a worlds-- some world books for some of the series, like a nice world guide for Roshar.
But those take a lot of effort, and we have seen some of those turn out very poorly for
other worlds and book series. So we're not sure when and if we will do that. ISAAC: We would have to be-- we've learned,
especially in Cosmere things, that we need to be heavily involved on those sorts of things,
or things can kind of move away from where we want it. So we would have to be involved
with this, so it would need to be during a time when we're not preparing for a Stormlight
book, because that takes our-- that's highest priority. ADAM: I guess a related question is, maybe
not a coloring book, but how about a Cosmere art book? ISAAC: Yeah. BRANDON: That's what I was just talking about. ADAM: Oh, sorry, I was reading. ISAAC: Yeah, same kind of deal on that. BRANDON: I would imagine that we will, if
we release a Cosmere art book, it will be after Book 5. ISAAC: That's what we've been telling people,
is that we're probably not even going to think about it until after Book 5 is out the door. All right, anything else for me? ADAM: Nope, I don't think so. ISAAC: Thank you. BRANDON: Off you go. Thanks for stopping by. ISAAC: No problem. Thank you all. BRANDON: Now you're back to just me and my
long-winded stories. ADAM: Yeah, and we're getting spammed in the
comments again. BRANDON: Oh, yeah? ADAM: A bot. BRANDON: By a bot? ADAM: I have Mark Limburg on it. BRANDON: Mark. Thank you, Mark. Good job. ADAM: Since I am too busy doing other things.
This one is from Facebook, from Lucas Coffey, and it's a two-part question, one from a person
named Phil and one for himself. But Phil wants to know why the UK gets cool different book
covers than the US. Who decides that, and what goes into that process? BRANDON: We tend to be very heavily involved
in all of the US releases. But that keeps us so busy that we do not have a ton of time
for all the other releases. We can generally-- the UK kind of takes the number two slot.
But mostly it's, we let the UK publisher do their thing, because they know their market,
and we will offer feedback on the covers that they send, and things like that. Obviously,
the text between the books is the same, and we will decide if they say, "We need to split
a book because of publishing realities," we will decide in house where we split them.
But it comes down to different philosophies at the various publishers. TOR, as a publisher, has a philosophy that
they like to brand each series separately by having one artist do all the work for a
given series, but then if you have a different series, use a different artist so that it's
easy to tell on the shelf that this is a different series with its own kind of identity. That's
just been their long-standing practice. My publisher Gallant in the UK instead feels
like they like to have an author be branded as having the same illustrator for the covers
for all of their books and so they try to pick an illustrator who can do a wide variety
of different books, but all make them feel cohesive as the same author's thing. So that's
the big division. If you like the UK covers better, it is because
the UK audience tends to prefer a less illustrated and more symbolic cover for their fantasy
novels. This is just something that is a difference between the two markets. That's not to say
every US reader instead wants the heavily illustrated painting of something happening
from the books. That just tends to be what more people like in the US. My experience
has been that it's a pretty narrow margin, like 40% of US people would prefer to have
the more symbolic cover like the UK, and a percentage of the UK audience would rather
have the heavily illustrated kind of beautiful painting cover that is more common in the
US. That said, George moved very quickly away
from the US-style cover to a UK-style cover. Game of Thrones, the first one had a very
traditional American fantasy cover, and then they quickly started doing UK-style symbol
covers instead. He has been the trend setter for the bulk of the 2000s when it comes to
epic fantasy. So you do see more reach of the UK style because that's what George did.
That's why the new Mistborn covers, for instance, are taking a more symbolic approach than an
illustrative approach. And really, we're wanting to see what people's reaction to those are,
if they would rather have them be illustrated, or if they would rather have them be symbolic
or something like that. Anyway. ADAM: The other half of the question from
Lucas was for himself, and they'd like to know how you unwind from a high-stress day
to "take care of yourself, or does your level 75 mood you mentioned last time keep a lot
of that stress from affecting you?" BRANDON: It does. I am not a high-stress person
because of that. I do get tired. So a high-stress day is actually a tiring day. There are very
few days for me that I would count as high stress. Working on a book is never high stress.
Working on a book is always very even for me. High stress, the only kind of high stress
things I do, like if I have an important meeting for movie things, where if I have to sit down.
Like, this wasn't for one of my things, but the first time I went to Bad Robot and did
a brainstorming session with J. J. Abrams, that's stressful, because J. J.'s a very good
filmmaker who knows his stuff, and I don't want to come off as an idiot during the brainstorming
session. That is very high stress for me. The other thing that can be high stress for
me is performing in a way that I am not comfortable doing. Like Dan would really like me to appear
on his-- Dan Wells does a live role playing game, which you guys should all check out,
because Dan and Howard and Charlie, who are friends of mine, Charlie Holmberg, are on
it as well as some other people, and they are all very funny, high-energy people who
like to role play. And they've invited me, and I do want to go on at some point. But
that's the sort of thing that would be very high stress for me. Having to perform as a
role player instead of in a format where I'm comfortable, such as talking about writing,
would probably be pretty high stress, just because I've never done that before and I'm
not sure if I would do a good job. So that's why I haven't gone on yet, is just because
it sounds very stressful. Most things do not phase me. Public speaking
does not phase me. Going on tour does not phase me. Doing a live stream does not phase
me. I am pretty even keel, as we talked about last time. But I do get exhausted. And the
times I'm likely to get exhausted are after a long book signing. This won't be as bad as a book signing, because
book signing, number one, would be longer. This would be a short book signing. But also,
the rapid-fire questions, like I can't sit and tell a story for 10 minutes when it's
a book signing, because I have to answer questions of people who are coming through the line.
Doing that, keeping track of all the names so I'm writing the right person's name in,
while I'm answering really-- and the detailed Cosmere questions are the ones that fry my
brain a little bit, because I'm trying to balance remembering someone's name, having
a good conversation with them, making sure they feel like they had a good time, because
they might have waited for seven hours to see me, and then they're going to get 30 seconds,
and I want to make sure that those 30 seconds, that at least I'm not ruining the experience
by not engaging them. I don't want to be ignoring them. So that's all on my brain. Then they
will often have a very detailed lore question, which requires me to turn on a very different
part of my brain, which is a more exhausting part of my brain, and try to off-the-cuff
answer questions that oftentimes, if I need to answer for myself in my writing, I have
a huge wiki that I'm going through to remind myself of the decisions that I've made and
things like that. Mix that with the grueling nature of seven
hours or eight hours in a chair, and then writing, and then I'm doing fine motor writing.
I'm writing names instead of just the signature, and quotes from the books. So my hand will
start to ache. I don't want to make it sound like this is a terrible job, because you compare
that to what someone has to go through working construction, and my job is easy. But it is
really mentally taxing to be doing all of these things at once. It's very hard, for
instance, at the end of that, to go to my hotel room and write. It's actually, the worst part is often I will
have had to get up earlier than I want to, because maintaining my sleep schedule while
on tour doesn't often align with flights and things. So I'm often sleep deprived as well.
Then what do I do then? That's when you see me go back to the hotel room, and I will just
want to watch someone play a game of Magic on Twitch. If I am totally brain fried, that's
what I'm going to do. I can't even really watch a movie or something like that, because
the way my brain works is, I will need to be analyzing the story structure and the characterization
and things, and it will be extra taxing. Normally, that's not very taxing, but after an eight-hour
signing, I'm brain dead. I've been talking the whole time, so my voice probably hurts.
And that's when I just want something that I can just watch like that. That's why you
Twitch people do a great service, because sometimes what we just need is something relaxing. I will, on tour sometimes, bring a game to
play myself instead. But that becomes harder because then I have to have a game system,
or I have to make sure I've got a mouse for my computer, and stuff like that. I can't
afford to get too engaged by the game, because if I do I will stay up too much later than
I should, and then that will add to the sleep-deprived nature, even if I stay up like an extra half
hour because I'm like, "Oh, I need to finish this part of the game." When Brandon is brain
fried, you can ask Emily this if she's ever on this stream again, you can ask her what
it's like when I call her after a signing to say goodnight. Often I am being driven by the chauffer, because
now I let the publisher give me chauffeurs. There's an addendum to the story I told earlier.
If you didn't hear it, you can go watch it on YouTube, where we will have this whole
thing up. But after that big tour where I was worried about being late and left my computer
at the airport and all of this stuff, the publisher said, "Are you sure you don't want
to just do this the way that other big authors do it, where you get flown to each stop instead
of driving there yourself, and someone picks you up and drives you around and takes you
where you need to go?" And I said, "You know what? We will do that from now on. You were
right and I was wrong, and I'm just going to let you do it." Though I still won't let them put me in the
really nice hotels, because while I like staying at the Ritz Carlton, which Harriet loves the
Ritz, so she would always have them put her in the Ritz, and so they're like, "Brandon
must love the Ritz too." Which the Ritz, don't get me wrong, the Ritz is great. But oftentimes,
the really nice hotels are not convenient to where we're going. Let's say I land in
Chicago or whatnot. Well, I am most likely going to be signing somewhere in the suburbs.
So I land at O'Hare, and the nice hotels are always downtown. So the publisher will be like, "We're going
to put him in the nicest hotel we can find. He is our biggest author. We want him to be
happy, and so we find the most expensive, most wonderful hotel." Then I get to sit in
traffic for two hours after I land, to be driven to the hotel to drop off my bags, and
then sit in traffic for two more hours being driven back to the suburbs to go to the book
signing, and then be driven-- by then there's no traffic, because by then it's 2:00 AM,
but be driven back to the hotel after the signing, and then the next day be driven to
the airport through traffic again. The publicists who set this up just don't
understand that when I'm on tour, I would rather not be spending six hours in a car,
particularly since timing can be tight. So I have them put me in an airport hotel, usually
a nice airport hotel. But then I land at the airport, get driven to the book signing. If
there's time I get to go to the hotel and actually relax and things like that, and then
get driven back, and the next morning I can either walk or take a shuttle directly to
the airport and not sit in traffic. There's a life hack. If you ever become a best-selling
author that they want to put you in the Ritz Carlton when you go on tour, don't let them. ADAM: This one from Ash. It says, "Brandon,
what did you think about the lack of a story for the latest Magic: The Gathering set?" BRANDON: I am afraid I can't speak to this
because I have insider information, and anything I say would risk giving you guys hints about
things that are covered by my NDA. I can just say, it is a shame that there is not a story
to read for the latest Magic: The Gathering extension. And I'll leave it there. ADAM: This next one from Twitter says, "Hi,
Brandon. Would love to hear you talk about the relationship between authors and publishers.
What are some trends you are seeing in your revenue breakdown, or maybe just trends you're
seeing?" BRANDON: Right. OK. Let me see what I can
talk about here. I don't know how much this will be of interest to the general public
of you, talking about deep business stuff and things. But the biggest trend, I've mentioned
on a previous stream, is the increasing push toward digital, not a push by the publisher,
but a push by audiences. This is a bigger deal for authors whose books are longer, like
mine, in epic fantasy. But we are, on Starsight, which is one of my shorter books, was only
17% print. So of course, audiobook is the big game changer
of the last five years. The five years before that it was the shift to e-book. And now,
because Audible has done such a great job becoming a service, that a lot of people converted
to audiobooks. It's the only real big growth segment of the market right now. If you are
publishing right now, make sure you are paying attention to your audiobook rights. Know that
there are a lot of people who will buy those audiobook rights if you withhold them from
the publisher, which is getting harder and harder to do, because the publishers are seeing
this shift. Most of the time, someone else will give you
a better deal than the publisher will for your audiobook rights. There is Recorded Books,
who do Audiobooks.com, who are trying very hard to be an Audible competitor, and they
are fantastic people. I actually like the people at Audible as well. All of my contacts
there have been great. But Recorded Books and Audiobooks.com are giving it a go of making
sure it's not an Audiobook monopoly, which is something that I really appreciate, as
someone who would really rather there be a market rather than a monopoly for audiobooks.
So, you know, if you haven't checked them out, they're good. If you are indie publishing,
make sure that you are considering doing an audiobook yourself by hiring it out, rather
than by recording it yourself. But you can record it yourself. So big trend number one,
audiobooks. Something to keep your eyes on. What other big trends are there happening
in publishing. New authors are harder to launch than they used to be. It is just kind of a
fact of the market now that it has become more crowded because of indie publishing and
Amazon entering as a publisher as well as a book distributor means that a more crowded
market and less of a drive toward the smaller books in marketing materials. Like I said
earlier in the stream, a new writer before could kind of count on a certain number of
sales, simply by the fact that people who are browsing bookstore shelves would see a
brand new author in the new author bay and one book and say, "Oh, I'm going to give this
person a try." The traditional publishing world has become
more best-seller driven than it used to be, even though it's always been somewhat best-seller
driven, and the marketing material and things like this, what Amazon wants to show on its
front page, what the other e-book publishers, Apple, and Google, and Kobo, and people like
that want to show on the front page is generally more best-seller driven, and it makes it much
harder, therefore, to get noticed. The other name of the game these days, that
I don't like very much, is that you have to pay Amazon to market your book. It doesn't
matter who you are. Most book sales now in advertising is coming by actually buying ads
on Amazon on specific authors' books pages. Like, my pages on Amazon, if you go to The
Way of Kings page, is a prime marketing spot for other authors, and you will be able to
count four or five paid, different books being paid to be shown on that page, if you go there.
I don't blame these authors at all. It's not about the authors. But they are forced to
do this, because if you are a smaller author, or an indie author, or an author that a publisher
is launching, the only way to get any eyeballs on your page these days is to pay Amazon to
put advertisements for your book on other people's book pages, which just rubs me the
wrong way, for a lot of different reasons. And it is kind of an unfortunate era of the
market we've entered in where your ability to pay for ads for your books is basically
paying the person who is selling your books. There's always been some of this, right? Like,
if you go into a Barnes & Noble, all the books at the front of the store are there because
of something we call co-op. Co-op is where the Barnes & Noble has come to the publisher
and said, "Hey, we've got this cool space at the front of the store that people see
when they come in. If you give us $0.50 more of each book you sell, you can be on there."
Which, ideally, we would love all that space to be going to the books that-- for non-necessarily
market-driven reasons. But I can accept co-op. It's actually kind of a nicer form of an advertisement,
because then Barnes & Noble then has the incentive to make sure that that's an attractive space,
that it's selling well. Because if they pick a book that doesn't sell well for their co-op
space, they've wasted their co-op space, because it's a partnership. The advertising that's going on Amazon, they
don't care if your book sells or not. They're making more money from most of these indie
authors, probably, off of the advertising, than they are from selling the books. So the
incentives are misaligned now for Amazon, for many of these books. Not all of them.
Like the people who really know what they're doing are definitely making more from the
ads than they are spending on them, and that's when ads are worth it. But a lot of these
people are newer authors who are forced to spend the amount of money on ads that someone
else would spend, and not get recouped on those sales because they are newer in their
career. And so suddenly you have this thing where
Amazon is now an advertising company, not a book publishing company, when it comes to
books, and that just makes me very uncomfortable. So there's another direction for you. But
it is, at the same time, it's really hard to launch a new author now, because the traditional
methods that were used are drying up, and there's a lot more crowding, and there are
a lot more people who are going toward familiar favorites, which benefits me quite a bit,
than are going toward new authors. If you want to help the genre, looking out
for new authors whose debut books are coming out is certainly, I think, one of the best
things that we can do as a genre. At least give them some consideration. At least read
the sample chapters that you can get for free. Because the digital revolution has really
helped with that. It's so much easier to just be like, "Hey, I wonder what this book is
about," and go read five chapters of it, which I love. Like that's helped us a ton. And I
don't want to sound like I'm all doom and gloom, because some of this has been really
good. Like, one of the things the digital revolution
has done is it has made niche books way more viable than they used to be, which doesn't
benefit people like me, which is a nice counter-balancing factor. What this means is, once upon a time,
because if you were a traditional publisher you had to print a certain number of copies
of a book if you were going to actually publish this book, because you couldn't be profitable
paying all of your staff off of printing, say, a thousand copies of a book and selling
it most of the time for the big publishers. They have expensive things like attorneys.
They have very expensive rent for these big buildings in New York. They have all of these
people they're paying. And they need to make sure that the books they're selling are each
at least reaching a certain threshold of sales. Because of that, let's say that you really
wanted to read-- the book that would be perfect for you would be mysteries about people who
love cats, who are also staring LGBTQ characters. Right? Like, that's what you want to read.
Well, for traditional publishing, in the past in particular, they'd be like, "We can do
cat books. We can do LGBTQ-friendly books. We can do mysteries. But we can't intersect
these because the interest gets so narrow that suddenly--" It's like a Venn diagram
where the people who really want that are a smaller audience. What this meant was kind
of a marginalization of smaller interests in publishing, because every book needed to
try to hit the widest audience that was possible. But now, if you can, as an independent author,
sell a thousand copies of a book, because you do not have all the overhead of the publishers,
and you can write a really great book that sells a thousand copies at a fairly reasonable
price point, and you can maybe write them kind of quick so what you're selling is more
of a 50,000-word book, and you're going to do a series, and you're going to have four
of those come out a year, and those thousand people who love these books, because it's
like, "Wow, this is totally where my interests are!", you can have people doing that and
making a living, and have a really kind of spectacular thing. Where a small book that may in the past have
failed-- Like I've got a friend, John Henry, who wrote a really great series of science
fiction books that were basically Jag in Space. Jag is not a series that's on anymore, but
it was military lawyers. So it was a science fiction series about military lawyers. And
they released the books, they were really good, and they did not sell. What they found
is that people who like lawyer books did not want to read the science fiction thing, and
the people who wanted to read science fiction did not want so much lawyering in the books.
They were too niche. Which is, you might say, odd, because sometimes some books hit that
will grab both of those audiences. There's some times they'll have a book be
out, and instead of Venn diagram where the overlap is what happens, is you get both circles.
And that does happen. But it's hard to judge, in fiction, when that's going to happen, or
when you're just going to get the overlap. So those books just flopped, unfortunately.
He came back with a new name and did the Lost Fleet novels, which are also spectacular,
and if you like military science fiction I would highly recommend them. They are great
books. And those were big successes. Because they didn't do the narrow thing. They were
like, we're just going to do the best military science fiction-type story that we can. In the new world, this was all before that,
it's possible that since there was no one else doing Jag in Space, that the narrow people
in the middle would love that series to the point that they would support it, and it's
sales would actually be really good for that audience, because they buy every one that
comes out. You can have that in the current industry, where you just couldn't for most
of publishing. That's a really good thing about the change to digital that has been
happening. It has diversified the genres. But it's so much harder to get attention than
it used to be. That was way more than you guys wanted, wasn't
it? This is the fun side of publishing. I actually really like talking about this stuff,
but I know it gets a little boring when I start to talk about the background stuff in
the publishing industry. ADAM: This next one is from Alicia Grouse.
She says, "Do you read other modern fantasy books?" And specifically wondering about The
First Law or Lightbringer. Or maybe you can just talk about what other modern ones? BRANDON: Yeah. I mean, Lightbringer is fantastic.
Anybody who likes my style of writing fantasy books with kind of the hard magic systems
and a large cast of characters and things like this, like Brent Weeks and I must have
just grown up reading the same books and have the same mindset, because we tend to write
very similar books naturally. And I really like his books. They work really well for
me. Joe Abercrombie, I think, is awesome, and
is a genius, and he is really a cool person to hang out with. First Law is a little too
brutal for me. I'm maybe a little bit more of a prude, maybe too much of one, I don't
know. But, like for instance, Game of Thrones was too much for me, specifically Daenerys'
plot line in Game of Thrones, in the first book. I read that book and I'm like, "Wow,
this is genius." I just can't take any more of this. I just can't read another book where
a-- is she 14 in that book? Is treated like she was treated in that book. That's not value
judgement against Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones is really well written. It just was
not for me. Joe's books tend to be over that line for
me, but not all of them. And Joe Abercrombie is just a great guy. If you ever get to go
to a convention and see Joe on a panel, he's one of those people that I could just watch
for hours talk about stuff, because he's entertaining, he's engaging, but he's also just fun. It's
like the person that you would love to hang out with. But I do like to try to keep track
of what people are doing, and what other writers are writing. I do like Nora's books quite
a bit. N. K. Jemisin is a very good writer. Very good is probably under-selling how good
a writer that Nora is. Those do have to come with a content warning as well, not necessarily
the level of the others, but there is some content in Nora's books. But I also like reading the old masters. Like
last stream, I think it was, I talked about how criminal I think it is that Jane Yolen
is under-read in sci-fi/fantasy. I don't know what her sales numbers are. But whatever they
are, she's under-read. She should be read on the level that J. K. Rowling is read, because
Jane Yolen is amazing. So read some Jane Yolen, guys.
But yeah, I like keeping track of what people are doing. I like reading new books. Joshua
sent me a book by a guy named Nick Martell to read, and it was quite good. It's not coming
out until later this year. ADAM: Kingdom of Liars? BRANDON: Kingdom of Liars. Kingdom of Liars
is a pretty good book. It's another one of those debuts where it's like good to watch
what new authors are doing. Here's another one of these for you, Kara. KARA: Oh, thanks. BRANDON: But, yeah. I am currently reading
Victoria Schwab's A Darker Shade of Magic, which is really good. ADAM: This next one is from Radiant Mistborn.
Wonder where they got that from? "How do you write an over-powered or powerful character
in a way that makes them relatable. I always end up making them the tortured hero trope,
and they don't seem realistic." BRANDON: OK. That is very common. In some
of my early books before I got published, that was my go-to as well. Certainly, it is
a place you can go, but it does feel old if you do it too much. there are lots of ways
to do this. One of the best ways is to make sure that there is conflict for the character
that their powers cannot solve. This is the old Superman thing. If you want
to tell a great Superman story, you do want his powers to be able to solve some of the
problems and him to be able to use those powers. But you also want him to have deep conflict
in his story that his powers just don't touch upon. So when Superman is working, it's often
things like "I'm faster than a speeding bullet, but that doesn't help me interface with human
relations and make this woman that I'm falling in love with think that I'm-- it doesn't help
me on a date that much, to be able to leap a building in a single bound." Those sorts
of things are part of the relatable things. The idea that you are really, really strong
in a certain realm, but in other realms and other situations you feel like you are completely
powerless, is a very, very human and natural emotion. I talked about it earlier. You get me on a
live stream talking about books and my life and I can go for hours and tell lots of fun
stories. But if I have to role play in front of people, I'm going to get stressed, because
that's just not something I've done. Always in the past, role playing was a way to blow
off steam and to not have to worry about whether I'm being entertaining or not, because most
of my life is about me trying to create things that are going to be entertaining. And so
the concept of doing something like that, that suddenly I have to move from the realm
of, this is just me relaxing, to the realm of, now people are watching and need to be
entertained, I'm suddenly not great in that situation. Not a situation I want to put myself
in. Taking people out of their realm of expertise
and forcing them to have to interact in places where they are not an expert, is a great way
to make an "over-powered character" really sympathetic. Terry Pratchett can make Death
very interesting and sympathetic in the books about Death by removing him from some of those
situations. Death is probably, in the Discworld, among the most powerful entities that exist. But of course, you also come back to the great
magic systems are ones that have great limitations. Sanderson's Second Law. A character who is
very, very powerful, but limited in excruciatingly emotional ways, is also a great way to have
a very powerful character have to be unable to do everything that they want to do. ADAM: This next one is from Robert, because
he asked me so nicely. He said, "Brandon, if you were unpublished right now, would you
go traditional or self-publishing?" BRANDON: I would go hybrid, because of the
way I would want to do things. And let me explain what I mean by that. I would want
to go hybrid because I know that I want to write big epic fantasies with large budgets
and lots of artwork, and the sort of things that I'm just very ambitious about. Not to
say you can't be ambitious, because Worm is self-published, and it is a quite ambitious
work. But generally, self-publishing, indie publishing these days has fallen into this
trend of, the slower you are, the worse indie publishing tends to be for you. Not that you
can't do it, but the worse it tends to be. If you are somebody who-- if you are Connie
Willis, for instance, another great writer whose books I would recommend, if you are
Connie Willis, and you spend four years researching a book because it's going to be a time travel
historical, and you end up writing a 400,000-word, took you four years to write, historical epic,
that is generally not going to be as good a match for self-publishing. Again, not to
say you can't do it, but not as good a match. Since I want to do Stormlight books, and they're
going to be every three years, as long as I stay on the ball, that is a fairly poor
match for what indie publishing tends to be really good at. I'll add the asterisk to this that I'm not
an expert in indie publishing. I know more than the average person, but not more than
the average indie published author. So you should talk to them. But, indie publishing also has a lot of advantages,
in that you get lots more control, and the ability to target a niche audience, like I
talked about. But also, even if your books are not niche, if they have wide appeal, there
still indie publishing can be very good for you, particularly if what you are writing
can either be split into smaller installments, or you are naturally writing shorter, faster-paced
books, the type of books that when someone reads one, their immediate thought is, "I
need the next one right now," and you have 20 more of them for them to do that on. Those
tend to be the really big successes in indie publishing, where you get to the end of the
book and you can just immediately buy the next one. Friends I have who are indie published
tend to like the method where you spend a few years writing a whole bunch of books,
and then you release them all in one year with a big marketing blitz, and like one a
month for 12 months, is one of the ways. It's not the only way. What I would do, if I were writing what I
write, is I would start with my big epic fantasies, and I would sell them to the top tier publishers
only. I would probably not send to the second-string publishers, even though there are some very
good second-string publishers. But I would send to the big five basically only. I would
send to major agents. If I get a bite, I would go with it and see if it works. If I do not
and I have sent that book around, I would set that book aside and I would save it for
a few years, as the next year I'm sending out another one. Once I have three or four
of those that then have not sold, then I would take matters into my own hands, and I would
release them in quick succession, as epic fantasies probably not one a month, but one
every four months, with marketing blitzes on each of them, and I would then, because
I have that backlog, I would see if I'm able to get things to take off with indie publishing. My next steps would depend on how that year
goes with releasing those books. If I start to gain traction in indie publishing, if it's
working, then I would probably just double down on that and stick with it. If it's okay
but not great, I would then start gathering another round of books to send to New York,
and I would probably maintain the indie career by writing novellas in those worlds that I
self-publish so that people can continue to have something new from those worlds and continue
to build that fan base, with the chance that something would start on fire and really take
off, and then I can go that direction. If I do sell something with a big publisher,
and if you do, then I don't know that I would take the small deals that used to be a good
idea to take in the old days. For instance, I was offered $5,000 per book for two books
when TOR bought Elantris. Joshua, my intrepid agent, managed to convince them to give me
$10,000 a book for two books instead. Back then, $10,000, that was an above-average advance.
$5,000 tends to be around the average, but I don't know if that's been updated in a while.
It was Tobias Buckell that used to do polls to find out what advances were. Nowadays,
I don't know if I would take that, because of the chance you're going to get lost being
much higher. I probably still would, but I would think really hard about it, unless I
could get into that contract some serious promotional and marketing push from the publisher. Because getting an advance from the publisher
is not necessarily just about how much money is going in your pocket. It is a vote of confidence
from the publisher. The amount of money they are paying in advance is the amount of money
they expect you to earn off of that book. If they pay you $100,000 as an advance, then
they are priced into trying to make that book sell like a best seller. If they are paying
you $5,000 for an advance, then they are not. The book that they pay $100,000 for, they
went to a bidding we're, or the agent was really stingy, and it just ended up working
out that way, is the one that will get all the marketing money, and it will become self-fulfilling. It is always hard. Your biggest hurdle to
becoming an author is finishing your first book. I still maintain that as true. If you
have finished a novel, you are in a very select crowd, and you have become my colleague by
doing that. Selling it is the next hurdle. But actually then making a career is an almost
equally large hurdle, unfortunately. ADAM: This next one is from Sarshare Gaming.
I'm kind of adapting it to a question. BRANDON: OK. ADAM: Would you ever consider writing a cyberpunk
Era 4 for Mistborn, or are you going to be doing just the four eras? BRANDON: I would consider, and I've talked
about before, liking that idea. Once I did the Wax and Wayne novels, it became a natural
thing to ask if there is a step between eras, the 1980s and the science fiction era. A cyberpunk-type
era would make a lot of sense. The caveat to that is, I have a lot on my plate in finishing
the Cosmere already, and so I can't make any promises. But it does seem like it would be
a natural fit to do some. The original Mistborn series was each between 200,000 and 250,000
words. For a frame of reference, Way of Kings books tend to be between 400,000 and 450,000,
and the Wax and Wayne books tend to be between 100,000 and 110,000. Having another 100,000-110,000
word faster-paced shorter series, shorter in total word count, would make a lot of sense,
because the Era 3, the 1980s era, is going to go back to the 200,000 to 250,000-word
size books. ADAM: This next one is from Facebook, from
Cody Brower. They say, "Nowadays, it seems like fantasy is replete with filth. I have
a hard time finding quality fantasy. So thank you, Brandon. What are your thoughts on the
trajectory fantasy is heading, where it seems authors are clamoring over each other to each
be edgier than the next?" BRANDON: This obviously plays into your own
personal preferences. I do think George opened the doors for grittier fantasy to become more
mainstream. It has always been a part of the genres, but George's success is part of what
opened that door, and it was the new trend for a while. I don't know that I would take
the same perspective you do. I don't want to say it's wrong. But I think it is a good
thing that fantasy is open to a wide variety of different types of stories. I think we
are, on the whole, better off because of that. But what it does mean is if what you want
is something that has mature themes without detailed descriptions of mature content, then
it is more difficult. I don't know if myself making it big is an indication that there
is still an audience for mature themes without mature content in fantasy, but I would like
to hope that it is, and that I think the umbrella for fantasy being larger is better, and I
certainly hope that people continue to like that. But, I don't know. We don't have Terry Pratchett any longer as
one of the, also, fantasy authors who liked mature themes without mature content in his
books, since he has tragically passed away. That leaves us in a situation where there
is more. But I will say this. It doesn't ever feel to me like publishers are demanding more.
I've never had a publisher ask me to include anything more than my personal threshold for
content would allow. They've never even come close to that. They want to publish good books
that are the vision of the author who is writing them, regardless of-- the content is secondary
to is this book something that the author loves and that we love? Oh, this is on the wrong page. Just one of
them. They're just flipped around. There we are. I didn't know what to do for a second. Do I see this going further than it is? My
instincts, though I don't read everything, is that we have kind of the grimdark movement
pushed very hard into fantasy, and then drew back a little bit, and you saw myself and
Name of the Wind get published. And it's feeling like it's hitting an equilibrium right now.
But I honestly am not sure that I am good at tracking this, because about half of what
I read is YA. And while YA is not edited for content, it does tend to be less content heavy.
And so not sure where we stand in regards to that. It is honestly not something I've
paid a ton of attention to. I know Terry Brooks has spoken about this a lot, because it is
something Terry Brooks finds that he does not like about how the genre has gone, because
Terry very much likes his books and things to be family friendly, and he prefers that
format of fantasy. But it's not something I've tracked nearly as much. I just kind of
do my thing and hope that my thing continues to be something that people enjoy reading. ADAM: The next one is from Nadja Wen. "So
you said you play Esper in Magic: The Gathering, the central color of which is blue. All the
Shards show in black/blue. Is this intentional, saving the Shards you identify with for the
latter bits of the Cosmere?" BRANDON: If you were going to say blue, who
is blue? I would say that definitely we do have some blue Shards. But it didn't just
naturally fit to do the stories the blue way. It just didn't happen. So there are some--
it wasn't that I was saving back the traditionally sneaky or conniving Shards, or at least the
powers that are related to that. It's just how it played out. It is very natural for
Mistborn to play around with black-aligned and white-aligned as if you are giving a single
color to the various Shards. Then on Roshar, it just made a lot of sense for what I was
building to have a red-aligned, and white-aligned, and a green-aligned. I don't really think
of the Shards that way. I can retrofit a magic color identity to them when thinking about
it. But White Sands, there's some blue going on with what is happening there. You have
seen some, but you're right. ADAM: Covert Rabbit asks if you tend to like
the audiobooks of your work? BRANDON: I do tend to. I tend to either pick
a specific audiobook reader myself or have my team do it. I think they are all good.
We did replace Warbreaker. Lightsong just sounded wrong. ADAM: Too surfer-y? BRANDON: Too surfer dude-ish. Though I do
know some people who preferred that version. But I just happen to love Michael and Kate
because of the Wheel of Time audiobooks, and they do the majority of my books. Everybody
else we've gotten is really good also. ADAM: Andrew Berenson wants to know what your
favorite flavor of ice cream is. BRANDON: Favorite flavor of ice cream is,
Baskin Robbins has the pralines and cream. I tend to really like some version of vanilla
with suspended inclusions, particularly if they are caramelly in nature. Any sort of
Moose Tracks or things like that I do tend to like quite a bit also. If I'm at an ice
cream place, I'm probably going to get the closest thing to pralines and cream. Though
my secondary love is like a cheesecake-flavored ice cream. I do think those are pretty good.
If I'm doing more of a gelato, I'm generally going to go for the fruit flavors, because
I think gelato just tastes really good with the fruit flavors, like a lemon gelato is
probably my favorite gelato. ADAM: Stubble McShave says, "You say that
fantasy can be any genre with dragons. However, you've never had dragons in your book. Can
you see yourself putting some classical fantasy monsters into your fiction?" BRANDON: Yeah, there are dragons in the Cosmere.
The very second Cosmere book I wrote was called Dragonsteel. Dragons are the one classical
fantasy thing that will make an appearance in the Cosmere. You haven't seen any dragons
that actually look like dragons in any of the books yet, because dragons in the Cosmere
are shape shifters. In kind of the classic D&D trope style of thing, they can all become
human. ADAM: Shad Aversity just jumped on. BRANDON: Oh, hey, Shad. How you doing? ADAM: This next one is from Cosmere.es. They're
your people in Spain. They're a group. They want to know how Perfect State was born, and
asking if you will come back to develop the idea? BRANDON: Perfect State grew out of me wanting
to-- A lot of the classic sort of cyberpunk idea of, Matrix sort of idea, is that we live
in a simulation, and this is just a terrible thing. That's a pretty cool story. I don't
know that I would want to discover that I'm in a simulation. But as often is the origin
of some of my stories, I am thinking about, well, can I reverse that trope? What if living
in a simulation were actually a really, there was really good reason for us to do it, and
it actually turned out pretty well. Like the idea of being, we solve overpopulation by
giving everybody their own perfect place to live, in which they get to be some sort of
cool hero and/or political figure. That felt like it was a cool thing to explore, where
the story was not talking about how terrible this was but was instead talking about the
natural problems that arise. I consider those two different things. Like,
if I espouse a specific political philosophy, not to make this political, it is not me saying
that political philosophy is without problems, because it probably is. It is just that I
feel like the problems that philosophy has are ones that I would rather deal with, and
I think are easier to deal with than the problem another political philosophy might have. So
like with Perfect State, the point of the story was not, hey, this would be perfect,
even though it's called Perfect State. That's kind of the irony of the title, right? It's
that this is going to have some problems. Let's explore what those problems would be
and how the people who live in this system deal with it. I could see myself coming back.
Like the two main characters of the story definitely have different goals and philosophies,
and that is not resolved at the end of the story, even though the story itself is resolved.
So I can see coming back even to those same characters. But there's a lot on my plate,
so I can't promise when or if. I do know where the story would go. but that's very common
for me. ADAM: Kenwick wants to know if there are any
nonfiction military books that you've read to give you ideas to write battle sequences
or strategies for your books? BRANDON: I am fond of John Keegan's History
of Warfare. I know a lot of people think that Keegan is overly reductive in his discussions
of things. But I found that book to be very handy. So if you want a nice nonfiction book,
History of Warfare is a good one. Guns, Germs, and Steel is also the classic I go back to.
I enjoyed that not as much, and it has also received some complaints from people for the
same reason, over-reductive. But Guns, Germs, and Steel is the classic go to, and it is
recommended for a reason. It does give you a pretty good picture. You just have to realize
that the author is espousing-- you know, I mean, he is trying to set a certain concept,
trying to prop it up, and explain it, and makes a good argument, but it is not the only
argument to be made. ADAM: Many people are wondering what are your
thoughts on Malazan? BRANDON: Malazan? Malazan's great. KARA: This is your last one. BRANDON: Last one, guys! Last one! Malazan
is great. Malazan, really steep learning curve. I love actually how steep his learning curve
is, because it kind of becomes a really good case study for learning curves in fantasy
books. But I do think Steven Erikson is an excellent writer. His imagery, in particular,
is just spectacular. Man, can that guy write a scene. So yeah, Malazan's great stuff. Malazan
deserved to sell better than it did. And it's interesting for some kind of hobbyist history
of the fantasy genre sort of things. Malazan was not a flop. Let me indicate that.
It wasn't. But it didn't take off, I know, as much, particularly in America, as people
thought that it should, and I agree with that. But it had some interesting things happening,
because it was launched-- it's the only kind of major fantasy that I can think of that
was launched between Assassin's Apprentice and Elantris. There's a real kind of dry area
in epic fantasy. There were several big launches, but none of them took off. How about that?
Malazan's probably the only thing we can look at during that period that even managed to
make some sort of sales. But if you remember what was happening in
the late'90s into the early 2000s, you will recognize two enormous publishing forces in
Harry Potter and Twilight, basically sucking the air out of the room when it came to a
lot of the discussions about fantasy. I don't know if those things are simple correlations
or if there's a cause and effect there. But I also do think the fantasy genre had some
growing pains in the late '90s, which is when-- the '90s are when fantasy really became a
major force, with Robert Jordan leading that charge. The Wheel of Time, there had never
been anything in fantasy, sales-wise, like The Wheel of Time. Even like, you know, Tolkien
is its own weird thing. So Tolkien, but there had just never been something that was as
large, with mainstream appeal, published in hardcover first thing in epic fantasy. It was followed by several successive big
hits, such as, I've mentioned on this stream, Game of Thrones came out in '96, and '95 or
'94, you guys have to look it up, somewhere right around there was Sword of Truth, and
then Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb was like '97. These were all major series that
came out and sold really well and made a lot of mainstream publishing outside sci-fi/fantasy
pay more attention to sci-fi/fantasy. Then there were a string of high-profile flops,
the most infamous of which is The Fifth Sorceress, which you can go read the history of, and
why it flopped as a series and some of those things. Then there's Malazan. Malazan feels like it
was fighting an uphill battle in that time period to launch as a new fantasy series.
Then there was also the problem that the books were generally out in the UK before they were
out in the US, even though Erickson, I believe, is Canadian. I could be wrong on that. But
sold first in the UK. They had real trouble, because this was back in the bookstore era,
not the e-book era, which means that if you bought Malazan, the first book, at the bookstore,
and TOR hadn't gotten around to finishing the series yet, because they were releasing
them on kind of a slower rollout, you could just order the UK editions, which you did.
Right? Of course. You'd read the first two books and you're like, "Wow, there's two more
out in the UK? I'll just order those and have them shipped in." But what this ended up doing is then the death
spiral that I mentioned way earlier in this stream, where the books were not selling as
well in the US. Then the bookstores weren't ordering as many, so they weren't on the shelves.
So then people couldn't buy them. And all the fans kept going to the UK editions. And
I think that may have had something to do with it. I am arm chairing this, though, because
I am not privy to the actual conversations that were happening with Steven Erickson and
his publisher at the time. ADAM: Breakfast Cake wants to know what children's
book you'd recommend as an introduction to deeper reading? BRANDON: Children's book to recommend as an
introduction to deeper reading? I would recommend finding out what that kid really wants to
read, whatever it is, and be excited about it and read it with them. Doesn't matter.
If you want people to read deeper reading, which generally means, generally said by an
older person who wants a child to grow up to love the books that they loved, which is
a very natural thing to want. I would recommend you start with making sure
they love reading, and don't see books as a chore, and don't see your influence forcing
them to-- you don't want to imply in any way, even accidentally, that a child's taste is
wrong, that the books they love are the wrong books to be reading. If they come to love
reading, they will find their way to a lot of different books. If when they are young,
they learn that their taste is wrong, or that books are boring because they are given books
that don't appeal to them, repeatedly, then what you're going to do is you're going to
have a child who does not grow up loving reading and they will never find their way to the
books that you want them to read. So let people enjoy what they enjoy and try to understand
why they enjoy what they enjoy. For my children, this has been, for Dalin
it has been Dog Man. Joel, who is older now, loves the Wings of Fire books. Those seem
like great books to get people to like fantasy there. He just loves talking about them. His
other favorite series is The Janitors series by Tyler Whiteside, which is a very fun middle
grade series. But find out what they want and match a book to them, rather than trying
to get them to read something that may not appeal to them. ADAM: Kansas Claire says, "Hey, Brandon, which
book required the most drafts and for what reason? Or rather, which was the most frustrating
for you to write?" BRANDON: Memory of Light. DALIN: Aaaugh! BRANDON: Oh, no! You have to come around here
so they can see, if you want. I am sorry for anyone who is listening on headphones. Don't
bang these, OK? You can bang the table. You can bang the table. DALIN: They're all gone. BRANDON: They all left? They all left because
you screamed so loud? DALIN: No, these things are all gone. BRANDON: Oh, they're all gone? Oh, do you
mind them? DALIN: And I have a weird mask that makes
me look weird. BRANDON: Yep. Hey, Dalin, do you want to answer
a question? DALIN: What? BRANDON: What is your favorite books to read
right now? If someone has a 10-year-old who wants to read a book, what is the favorite
one? DALIN: That's for any books? BRANDON: Yeah, just give me books. What would
you recommend? OLIVER: I love Dog Man. BRANDON: Come around to this side. DALIN: Oliver loves Dog Man. BRANDON: Dog Man, yeah. DALIN: I don't really know, because I can't
really, I have ADHD. I don't really read. BRANDON: Well, we read to you. DALIN: Yeah. I like Spy Penguins. BRANDON: Spy Penguins is pretty good. You
loved Swamp Kid, didn't you? DALIN: Yeah, I loved Swamp Kid. BRANDON: Swamp Kid was a great book for you.
That is a DC riff on Swamp Thing done as a kind of kid's journal book. You love Diary
of a Wimpy Kid books too, don't you? DALIN: Yeah. BRANDON: You like the journal-style books
quite a bit. DALIN: Yeah. I don't really read them. BRANDON: Yeah, well, we read them to you. DALIN: Ooo, the sword. Fight swords. ADAM: Dalin, you will be happy to hear you
scared many people when you screamed. BRANDON: I do apologize for that. Next time
try not to scream quite so loud, because people might be listening. OLIVER: Remember this from the last one? BRANDON: Em, do you want to come on and show
that you are matchy matchy? EMILY: Sure. OLIVER: Do you remember this from the last
one? BRANDON: Yes, I do remember. KARA: Oh, that's really cute. BRANDON: Yeah, aww! DALIN: Dad, I want this sword. BRANDON: You do want this sword? DALIN: Can I have one of these swords? BRANDON: We'll talk about it later. I think
that you-- EMILY: Did you want to ask Ollie for book
recommendations? BRANDON: Ollie already said-- Do you guys
have any questions for Oliver or Dalin? How about for Oliver? Oliver is seven years old.
Does anyone have a question for Oliver? ADAM: We just need to wait for it to catch
up. BRANDON: Yeah, we need to wait for it to catch
up. We will say Emperor's New Groove is a favorite of Emily and Mine, and my children
hate it. Right? DALIN: No, I love it. It's hilarious. BRANDON: You used to hate it, though. You'd
groan when we put it on. DALIN: Yeah, because we've seen it way too
much. BRANDON: OK. DALIN: That's why. BRANDON: That's why. DALIN: I think it's funny, but we've seen
it a lot of times because you guys always turn it on, and we're like, "Ohhh." BRANDON: It became a joke, right? Where we'd
be like, "Llama Face!" And you'd be like, "No! Not Llama Face!" ADAM: So Dalin, what is your favorite Minecraft
monster? DALIN: Mob? BRANDON: Favorite mob. DALIN: I really-- my favorite animal is a
turtle, but it's a monster. So I would do-- huh. I really wanted Enderman. BRANDON: Enderman. DALIN: And I like the Ender Dragons. I like
the End stuff. I also like the Nether stuff. And I also really like the Bees that are coming
up. But my favorite would probably be the Pickle and Bees, the upcoming mob. BRANDON: There you go. ADAM: Very nice. And Ollie, what's your favorite
TV show? OLIVER: I don't have one. BRANDON: What YouTuber do you watch most?
What's your-- do you like-- OLIVER: A lot. BRANDON: What's that? You don't have a favorite? OLIVER: There's a lot of YouTubers. BRANDON: Who are some of the YouTubers you
watch? DALIN: He watches Finplay. He watches [___].
Not that much. BRANDON: Do you watch Unspeakable? OLIVER: No. DALIN: He watches Unspeakable. He likes Garfield
the show. BRANDON: Oh, yeah. You do like Garfield, don't
you? No? You're just wrinkling your nose? There you are. Answers from my children. ADAM: I'm sorry. One other question for both
of them. Does your dad have an easy or hard job? DALIN: It's kind of hard, kind of easy. Right,
Dad? OLIVER: Kind of hard and kind of easy writing
books. BRANDON: Why would you say that? DALIN: Because some books are hard to write,
and some books are just like, "Oh, this is going to be easy." OLIVER: You just do hard ones. DALIN: Some of them you just have to like,
two paragraphs. That would be a very short book. BRANDON: That would be a very short book. DALIN: Two paragraphs? BRANDON: I bet there are two paragraph books
out there, because there are some books with no words even. All right, guys. ADAM: Thanks, boys. BRANDON: I am close to wrapping up here, so
off you go. DALIN: Wait! They have any more? Can we do
it in the next one, answering questions? BRANDON: Next one, yes. You can answer those
questions next time. DALIN: Awesome. Can I have this sword? BRANDON: We'll talk about it later. DALIN: Do they make a red sword, or a green
sword, or another colored sword? BRANDON: There you go. My children decided
to invade. ADAM: You were talking about-- BRANDON: I was talking about most revisions
on a book. OLIVER: I'm a weirdo. DALIN: I'm a weirdo, too. I'm a weirdo. ADAM: Emily. BRANDON: The most revisions I've ever done
a book on is Memory of Light. Memory of Light, being the last Wheel of Time book, there were
an extra-large number of editorial passes by different members of TOR or Harriet's team.
It was a lot more stressful to all of them than the previous two, though I was pretty
confident in it, and it was not-- by then I was not very-- I was a little bit stressed
with Gathering Storm, but again, not very much, because my normal temperament. But also, I feel like I have a really good
instinct for if a book is good or not, particularly because of my extensive beta reading program
and things like that. I know what the response to a book is going to be. It doesn't mean
that sometimes-- like, I knew Legion 3, even as I was writing it, would be a different
sort of book, and different sort of books tend to have a more divisive reaction among
people. But I have not released a book and been surprised by the reaction yet. I'm usually
well aware of it, and that was the same on the Wheel of Time books. But everyone wanted to make sure Memory of
Light was just right. So lots of revisions were requested, and a few more on my part
also, were things that I wanted to revise. Otherwise, the hardest book that got released
was probably Mistborn 2. Writing a sequel was not something I had as much experience
with back then, and I had a lot of problems with it in the initial draft. The biggest
problem child recently has been The Apocalypse Guard, but that's not released. I did it,
and then I did two drafts on it, and it wasn't working. I gave it to Dan Wells, who did a
draft on it, who made it better, but it's still not right. And so don't know if that
one will ever get released. ADAM: D. J. Sooth asks, "Which fantasy universe
would your children want to visit the most?" BRANDON: Which fantasy universe? It's going
to be Minecraft. There's just no chance it's not Minecraft. My family very much was part
of this generation that was very, very invested into Minecraft, and the kids keep coming back
to it time and time again. ADAM: A related question. "Which universe
would you want to introduce them to the most? Or maybe have them enjoy the most?" BRANDON: Have them enjoy the most? Boy. Probably
Pratchett when they're old enough. I would like to read them the Tiffany Aching books.
I don't know if I can do the Wee Three Men's accent any justice, however. But Pratchett
is my favorite author, and it would be very cool to me if my children shared my appreciation
of his works. ADAM: "Are any of your characters based off
real people? If so, can you tell us who?" BRANDON: Characters based off of real people
tend to have two caveats to it. One is that generally I am picking one aspect of the personality
of someone I know that I find would make an interesting conflict and/or character, and
then I build a character around that, but they aren't-- they started as a seed from
someone I know, the most famous one being Sarene is based on my friend Annie, who shares
some attributes with Sarene, but Sarene is not Annie. If you met Annie you'd be like,
"Oh, maybe I can see it, but definitely not Sarene." There are characters like that, that
have been. And then the other thing is, character cameos.
There are a lot of cameos based on people I know, where I just kind of wrote my friends
into the books. The most famous of this being the guys of Bridge Four are friends and family
of mine, the most notable of which is being Skar, which Skar is an actual character, where
the rest of them are kind of background characters, like Leyten, whose based off of Alan Leyten,
who is a good friend of mine. Skar is an actual character in the books,
because he's the only person I knew who actually fit into Bridge Four. He's a military man.
He's out on orders right now, so we haven't had him for two years in writing group. But
he's coming back in February, which we're excited by. And a good writer. I did a short
story with him once that we co-authored it, and I thought it turned out really well. It's
the first time I ever co-authored anything, and he just knocked that one out of the park.
So Skar from Bridge Four is based off of Ethan Skarstat, and basically is that person. Once in a while, with the people from Bridge
Four, like Drehy is based on my friend Ryan Drehyer, whose last name is different now
when he got married. I always forget, Scott, Ryan Scott. When he and Drew got married they
picked a name that they could both take, rather than taking one of each other's names. There
are times when I'll be like, "Hey, Ryan, what would Drehy say in this situation? Can you
read over this paragraph and tell me if I'm doing it right?" And I will do that with Skar
now and then. Most of the time I only do that with cameo characters like that. And there we are. ADAM: Big gong. BRANDON: Yeah, big gong. This is the pen that
ended it. Do you want to take this pen as the last of the pens, and we'll give that
to somebody. That is the pen that ended the 10,000 copies. We'll be doing this as a kickstarter
in June or July. If you guys buy too many copies of this, I will have to do this more.
So I guess if you want more streams, make sure that we sell out of copies of the leather-bound
Way of Kings, because then I'll have to be here doing it more. But thank you guys for
watching. Thanks for keeping me company as I do this, because it is mind-numbingly boring
if I don't have some company. And telling stories makes the time pass. We probably won't
do one of these next week. It'll probably be a couple weeks, sometime probably late--
How long can you wait on those? Do they need to be sooner? KARA: It just depends on how fast we sell
books? BRANDON: So some time in February. ADAM: To be determined. BRANDON: To be determined. We'll do another
one of these. Thank you guys for putting up on YouTube with all of the problems. We'll
try to fix that next time. Goodbye.
