Brandon Sanderson Talks Rhythm of War🥁 YouTube Success📸 & The Industry🛠️

welcome everybody to another author interview today i am extraordinarily excited to bring you once again brandon sanderson in anticipation for the release which is actually coming out today of rhythm of war how are you doing today sanderson i'm doing all right yeah feeling pretty good a lot of this stuff that normally i have to do on release week we've been doing leading up to release week because so much of it is digital which means normally when a release is coming i have like a sense of dread not because i don't think the book will do well um but because it usually means three weeks of furious frantic work for me traveling all around the world uh signing books staying up until 2 a.m uh i could talk for for hours about uh touring and stuff but this time i don't have to do any of that and we're doing so much of it up front that it's feeling really nice like i signed 7 000 copies of the book last week and this week and that's done like i don't have to do any more signing which is just bizarre to me that sounds like one of the few advantages of the state of things is you can just prep it from home um and rhythm of war has been so highly anticipated on my end of things it's the clear like most hyped book in the fantasy circles of the year how has that been reflected on your guys in are you just constantly inundated with fan questions and when's it coming out or has it been because of the change situation pretty mellow um i'd say it's right in the middle right i'm pretty communicative with people and so there's a general normal like i i communicate with people on reddit and we get the fan mail and things like that that's been hyping up a bit it's been ramping up we get a little bit more of it around this time of year but because i'm so steady with it it's a little less uh frantic like a lot of people want to contact me do it through the reddit threads where i've been posting um annotations of chapters of the book right and so that gives a chance for people who are in the know to go and chat with me a little bit or make comments and things like that and so because it's been structured it's actually been pretty easy uh we probably will do an ama and those are insane um but yeah it's it's been good pre-orders are way up towards like super happy um over last time um i don't focus a ton on that right but it is when the publisher's happy i'm happy so that's good that's fantastic to hear and in true sanderson fashion you've managed to do this on hard mode once again and now releasing don shard as well uh so yeah that was dumb you say hard mode that was just dumb i should have learned my lesson with edge dancer which we did kind of the same thing i got it ready uh really fast um and things but i knew i wanted to write this novella and i knew that the kickstarter would be the right time to present it to people um but i shouldn't have done it i should have i should have either written it last year and released it this year or i should have said i'll write this next year um and release it but yeah yeah uh it actually turned out really well i just the it leads to some frantic uh days particularly for my team um so as we're recording this i think don shard should be going out right now to people i'm very excited to read it and i have heard kind of the rumblings in the fan base that people are saying are wondering is this a must read before rhythm of war or is it something that's just a good complimentary how is the author would you label it i would label it as a complimentary if you read this later you will of course know a few things right you will know about you know people who survive i don't think anyone is expecting don shard to include major deaths of main characters in the stormlight archive there is a little scene uh in an interlude in rhythm of war which takes place after this that i wrote very deliberately to not spoil major plot points of don shard um so really i was trying hard to make sure that it wouldn't it wouldn't be ruined either way i would read it before if all things being equal um but at the same time i can imagine they're people who even get it who are like you know i'd rather just dive into don chart when i'm done with that and i want more i've got this morsel that i can read a year from now to kind of you know stagger things between stormlight releases it's really how you want to use it i don't think you will get spoiled majorly either way certainly don shaw doesn't have any spoilers for rhythm of war uh so you don't have to worry about that but there are minor things in rhythm of war you'll be like oh that must have happened in donshard fair enough and it's purely a digital release as of now correct yes uh there will be print additions to the kickstarter backers uh as soon as we can get those printed covid caused lots of random delays in lots of weird strange places and one of the things we've had trouble in publishing the street is getting paper and printer rhythm of war did not get affected but while rhythmically was coming up to being printed major books were just dropping like flies in the industry as they're like we can't get the the paper or the printing time it's pushed back till next year and we somehow navigated that with several near misses don shard is not high on any printer's list um and so we don't think we're going to get till january maybe february we're hoping january but uh for a print edition beyond that not sure uh we're i like kind of experimenting with hybrid publishing new york and indie publishing and the novellas are where we spend a lot of our indie publishing um time and we like to just try different things and see what works out the best so good to hear that you guys are still able to get rhythm wore out without any hiccups i know that would be a lot of fans very very affected well it is handy when um even if you're not the biggest book in the world you are definitely the biggest book at the publisher and so that's uh you know that helps get things through at tour uh when we want to do something at tour it just kind of happens um and they will move heaven and earth to make sure a storm light release happens on time i i figured that would be the case with a lot of the the flagship being stormlight over there and i actually have a lot of questions for fans because i put out for what do you guys want to ask sanderson for rhythm of war and i actually want to kick one off i thought was pretty interesting specifically for writing this one the fan wanted to know the development of every book has to have its own distinct challenges and growth for yourself as a writer what is rhythm of war for you in terms of where you felt you grew the most as a writer and what do you think was the hardest uh hurdle for writing this stage of the stormlight archive so the hardest hurdle i'll start with that one two hurdles for this one first was the way that the structure of the stormlight archive uh outline worked originally when you got here we wouldn't have seen a lot of parshendi culture um that was just a thing then the original outlines on like oh we'll release reveal that when we do eshinize flashback sequence and it'll be very new and interesting and evocative because we're exploring a new culture well as i started writing the books by working on words of radiance i knew that just was not going to fly i needed to start digging this culture way earlier than i'd planned it was a pretty easy change mentally to make i'm like no this this was wrong the outline was wrong but what it meant was when i got to ashenized flashback sequences some of the things i was intending to be the showpiece of an exciting part of it of learning about their culture we'd already talked about which left these flashbacks in an interesting position because i didn't have a lot of mystery left to them and kaladin shalon and dalinar's flashbacks had been driven by mystery right i was able to you know do paladins the book was fresh no one knew um and i had we had to spend a lot of time with the characters and shalon to an extent also with some of her psychological things and then of course dalinar i had done the forgotten his his past uh thing which just each gave me a chance to uh to keep that mystery but with ash and i and venli it was no longer there um and so this is why i split the viewpoints between ash and i and venly and i wrote the whole uh draft and i was pleased with it but beta readers were kind of noticing the thing that i had word they're like there's not a lot in these um the the sense of progress you know i always talk about this the thing that is we're learning or we're experiencing that is making the the story more interesting this was just uh the uh the flashbacks were um a letdown after dalinar and that was inevitable right deliner has the best flashbacks i think we'll have the best flashbacks through the first five um just because of how dynamically he changed and how i was able to use uh young dalinar being in a different kind of awesome uh than old dalinar with uh with even with calvin you've got kind of young calvin who's kind of a dopey kid and then grown-up calvin who's who's really cool to read about and there's only so much i could do with the dopey kid right and uh with download i could make it uh very dynamic on both ends and so what i had to do with ash and i and venli was try to soup it up how i could right in revisions one of the things that i made sure to do is to give more progress uh to actually get highlight venly's arc this is where splitting venli out proved very useful and i could also really dig into her in the modern day timeline uh to just better make a more interesting story that uh then kind of helped carry those flashback sequences a little bit more some readers i think will just be thinking wow this is awesome this is new this is different but the really hardcore readers know basically everything that happened in these flashbacks already they can piece it together through the timelines so for them i'm hoping that the arc that venly goes on the journey that she and nadesh and i has a little mini arc as well go on is going to um make up for the fact that you do already know about parshendi culture in ways that you know the book series just needed to do uh the other big challenge in this one in revision was uh getting um shalon's disassociative identity disorder uh to work authentically according to um the experience of people who have a similar psychology to her and also to work on page in a way that was dynamic and interesting and there there's a bit of a dance to do here um i thought that the second half of that would be harder than it ended up being because by changing it to be more authentic to my beta readers experiences it actually made the story better for everyone um a lot of the readers who weren't that dialed in on it were just really responding to these revisions um in ways that are it's very gratifying i'm glad that it worked so well but i had thought that i'd need to do do more balancing there but getting shalon right was a big uh revision effort it was it was probably the hardest thing to do in this book because i i talked i've talked about this other places originally when i started the stormlight archive i was going to kind of hand wave it a little bit i was going to be like this is a fantasy disease mental illness this is a fantasy and the solutions will be fantasy focused and i do this with a lot of things for instance the war on the shattered planes right i specifically made the tactics such that modern military uh experts wouldn't really be able to say what would work the best on the shattered planes because we haven't experienced anything quite like it which allows me to kind of control and say this is the tactics they've come up with without me being you know a four-star general with uh with 20 years of experience in military tactics right that's one of the advantages of fantasy and the big advantage of that is that people who do know military tactics can still read the books and enjoy them be like yeah i can see how you come up with that you know it's realistic enough to work but we don't know for sure how you would actually do things on the shattered planes them only having four years uh as well is another sort of way that we can make it so that you know they haven't reached optimal battlefield tactics yet so in case someone's worried like i don't know if they do this well they've only been there for four years it's okay this is what i i'm doing for instance with the heralds the herald psychology is very cosmere based what's happening to them is uh rooted in cosmere magic systems and things like this and i was to go that way with shalon and the more i wrote shalom the more i felt that that would be irresponsible because i really was drawing on the id um i you know the the symptoms and the effects and things from the dsm is what i was using to develop her character um and i realized last book i was going to need for this book i was going to need subject matter experts and i was going to need to do the hard thing which was actually be realistic because if i didn't it would be irresponsible because one of my mandates to myself is to authentically represent the life experience of people as best i can in these books and i also want to be offering the realism also helps because a lot of people with uh with different mental disorders are often depicted in fiction and stories very poorly right uh you can see this in schizophrenia the amount of times that schizophrenics and stories are these uh evil uh characters when statistically a person with schizophrenia is much less likely to commit a crime in the real world and it's just this sort of um thing that people have to deal with and did in particular gets very sensationalized um in the media and i realized if i went that direction i would be adding to that rather than trying to do what i could to add to the realistic depictions of of people's mental experiences and my stories and so um i i sat down and did the the hard thing but it meant a major revision after i got the uh it back from the subject matter experts because there's only so much i can learn i do spend a lot of time studying um psych because it's something really interesting to me but this is one of those cases where i got the feedback and i realized now i have to do a really big revision to make sure i'm incorporating this and the the the happy accident is that um everybody else liked it a lot better too things that it pushed me to do pushed me to take non-lazy paths in the narrative uh which turns out when you take the non-lazy path of the narrative it makes a stronger narrative which is what we're always kind of trying to do anyway so anyway those are my two big hurdles and challenges for this book very pleased with how they both turned out but that's where i was pulling my hair out in the early part of the year figuring how to make these revisions work well i can tell you from my experience of reading rhythm award it also comes across fantastically with the handling of anxiety and caledon something from i suffer from and it's probably one of the best representations of dealing with that i've ever seen so i appreciate the effort from my perspective as well but this kind of leads nicely into another question i had here where you're tackling so many lofty ideas themes world building how do you maintain like a strong firm narrative thrust while also making sure to complexly and cohesively explore all these ideas you want to yeah that's an excellent question um so i'll take this from two different directions first one is i make sure that my rough draft my first draft character and story are most important this is why i have to do all these revisions right uh for something like dad because working on the rough draft i am focused on character beats and narrative beats um and i'm making sure that this story works right like if i can't in the first draft make the book interesting and fun to read that's a big problem and theme is much less important and particularly in that first draft and even accuracy is much less important than making sure that there's a story here that people will want to read so draft one of a book is a proof of concept which is why i always talk about you know reading draft one and even draft two i usually only want industry professionals to read because it is a proof of concept it's a this story works what i want to do with it will work let's make sure and let's uh let's see have people read it and then i can fix a lot of the details and it's interesting because things that are difficult um to revise like my my editorial team sometimes will bring up something be like man this is gonna be a really terrible hard revision i'm sorry but you probably need to do this and i'll talk to them and they're right but it's actually not a hard revision because it's not fiddling with that core fundamental that i've laid down right like really hard revisions are when you get to the end of the book and you look back in the books boring right that's that's a hard revision that's a you have to take a long hard look at what you've done that's a 50 to 70 percent revision or throw the book away sort of thing or you get to the end of a big revision and one of the main characters just did not work dalinar from uh the first draft of way of kings right dalinar just did not work that's a hard revision and that's when i hit early and work hard on for those who don't know the solution to dalinar and uh way of kings was to split off part of his viewpoints to adeline and create aylin as a viewpoint character which had not been in the original draft in order to prevent dalinar from feeling too wishy-washy um we needed him as a strong character uh who you know knew what he wanted and was going for it and in the original draft that wasn't the case and so that's a hard revision a lot of the revision things that people will suggest um are not as hard as they sound for instance um medium hard and this one was adding some new scenes for venli in the present to really make her character arc work that's easier than having a you know if i can add something to expand easier than pulling everything out and starting over the did revision medium hard right not as fundamental to the structure as some other revisions but not as easy as something say can you cut 10 from this sequence to make it just zip a little bit more that's an easy revision i can do that uh that means things are working but we want to tighten it's hard to find exact examples without having my revision guide in front of me basically if i can lay down those fundamentals and then the the 2.0 draft that people read and when i come back to and read when i'm working on the 3.0 if that works for character arcs and the emotion this narrative then we're golden and that's that's how i make sure that happens the the second answer to this um kind of coming in from the back end is once that is laid down then i have something to play with to work with that rough draft is a proof of concept i often talk about writing a book for me being like creating a sculpture if you watch any great sculptors like they first get you know they're making a bust of a person it is just a blob that is only vaguely like it but they've got the eyes in the right place the nose in the right place in the mouth like the proportions are right so that's what they're working on in that first draft and when i've got something where the proportions are right then i can do all kinds of fine-tuning and chiseling and changing things and sculpting to really refine the experience and that's where i can bring out things like theme theme is something that i just enhance that should have already been there from what the characters are fascinated by where their character arcs are what's really working in the book i can enhance um at that point and during revisions there are places where i'm like no this proportion was wrong i'm gonna have to knock that part off and redo it you know the ear is just completely in the wrong place or whatever on the sculpture and this whole process is a slow refinement to getting to what hopefully looks like a really great depiction um of a person in uh in this metaphor so that that's really fascinating and it kind of makes me wonder back all the way to when you were first conceptualizing stormlight archive and you were really trying to get this idea forward what parts of that came first to you was it the characters was it the themes the world how did this baby come into existence and where were the actual like first ideas and sparks coming from so the first idea for stormlight was uh dalinar um the very first seed of an idea dalinar is something i came up with when i was a teenager uh this is one of the few ideas i came up with when i was a teenage writer at 17 or whatever that persisted um and i want to tell a story about um a kingdom where the king is assassinated the son of the king and this version way back then was too young to take the throne so the brother takes over and finds out he's a really good king and it's his struggle of whether he should let go for his nephew when his nephew comes of age or whether he should just keep being king uh that was an interesting conflict to me um and that seed that thread wove all the way through a lot of different books until finally uh it matured into dalinar in the stormlight archive the second seed of an idea for stormlight was the um high storms so when i was really developing the what we call way of kings prime back in the early 2000s i was noticing that one of the things i really enjoyed this was before i was published uh one things i really enjoyed was doing a little bit more science fiction style world building for fantasy worlds um i had grown up in an era where the fantasy worlds were very tolkien influence which meant um some sort of kind of medieval england uh taken and fantasized uh lots of forests lots of you know some race that lives in the forest another race that lives in the mountains these are these are great books uh there's no no no problem with them but as i matured as a writer and i started to read things that we're trying to kind of escape out of that from underneath that shadow uh george martin and robert jordan uh being examples um and and some other things like mel and iran and her use of magic in the uh the early 90s and stuff like that where we're going and i thought this is this is where i want to go i want to be telling fantasy stories that take place in worlds that don't feel anything like uh the fantasy worlds that i read growing up um and the high storm was my one of my i had several ideas back then and the high storm was the one that stuck out the most this is the one that really clicked with me um that i hadn't seen done before um it played into my strengths i really like weather as kind of um that per a character uh and antagonist and the stories you see this with the miss um you'll see this with things involving the aethers when i eventually write those stories this is a big thing for me and it was something i felt i could really expand upon it failed at something that hadn't been done and it led me to some interesting ecological developments where i was building the psychology and the flora and fauna and i just really loved the visuals and the style and things like that and so high storms really shaped a ton of it thematically i had been reading a lot of books in the kind of pulse token era which focus on the idea of magic leaving the world um this was uh this was a sub theme in tolkien and then kind of rippled through uh the very tolkien-esque stories that magic is getting weaker fewer people use magic uh basically in a lot of these worlds uh the fantasy worlds were becoming our world right uh uh terry brooks did some of this robert jordan did some of this the idea that world used to be full of myths and magic and now it's becoming technology and things and i um i felt a melancholy at that because the magic is things that i wanted and so i wanted to tell a story about the restoration of the magic the magic is coming back this is a world that's been without for a while and things are changing and um and the magic is returning obviously not the first one to do this this is the story of star wars so uh not uh not an uncommon theme it's just a lot of the books i had been reading had gone the other direction and i always found myself zigging when what i've read is zagged mostly because the authors i've read did a really good job zagging and i'm like well they've got that covered let's see where i can go a different direction and so those are my three things dalinar high storms uh restoration of a magic that has been gone for a while uh kind of coming again and kind of the one of the deeper dives into cosmere style magic systems with the bonds and things like that that's very fair so could we possibly see 30 years from now sanderson take a stab at writing a tolkien inspired with elves in goblins fantasy world or is that just not appealing to you it's not appealing to me right now i have no problem with these stories as i've said in my the early 2000s um i had a bigger problem i was less mature then i'm like why are all these books all the same these you know uh we got to stand up for not doing talk and stuff and then i matured a little and realized uh what people like to write and read is fine whatever it is right indeed there are still fantastic works being made that are very tolkien inspired you could argue that you know the whole black library is uh is a fantasy tolkien derivative with uh with all of the warhammer stuff and things and they do some really cool stuff with their storytelling there um and so yeah mature brandon uh says love what you love write what you love doesn't matter the all of the tropes all of the setting stuff this is just there to be a means to inject stories into people's brains and write what you find exciting and don't be offended when other people write something that's different uh because that's what we want people doing but it's not really exciting to me to write that um partially because again my youth was spent reading really great works that explored this um and i feel like fantasy did a really good job there's definitely more places to go but i i got my fill when i was younger um and one of the things that i felt um is that fantasy like this is the personal theory of mine token was very ahead of his time there's really nothing like tolkien before tolkien in a complete secondary world fantasy built the way that he built it uh you can find little hints here and there of people doing somewhat similar but this he really did invent the epic fantasy genre just out of nothing well out of classic um heroic epics um and things like that not out of nothing but you know what i mean um and uh the genres uh the genre of epic fantasy had one guidepost for a long time and so spent a lot of time playing with that if you don't know about the history of fantasy like thomas covenant and terry brooks and david eddings which were kind of three of the big um fantasy series that started in the late 70s early 80s all were directly trying to be tolkien um an exploration of tolkien uh thomas covenant more on the literary side and then uh the other two more on the high adventure um side but uh they drove fantasy for a long time i feel like it took us a long time to get out of tolkien's shadow and justifiably so i mean there was a lot of room in that shadow to explore and now that we're kind of stepping outside of it which really started late 90s um and things like that i'm excited by the places the genre has been going in the last 20 years and don't see myself returning even though i'm sure there's plenty more to explore completely acceptable how's that for a political answer to you i was going to say completely acceptable take right down the middle there but when it comes to uh specifically shifting quite a bit here you've had a tremendous success recently on youtube and i have to selfishly ask from my perspective how has that been for you to step into my turf and also congratulations on the massive success do you have a hundred thousand uh subscriber plaque yet yes we got it um i'm gonna let adam hang it up because adam my publicist in house bubble says he's done all the work all i do is sit in front of a camera and blab which is something i'm very very good at doing no it's been it's been really fun because um i watch a lot of youtube i really love video essays um i really enjoy the kind of off-the-cuff interview form that happens i probably watch more or at least equal youtube to traditional television anymore right um because i i like the takes that people are doing i like the uh you know the lindsay ellises of the world who are saying hey let's let's talk about this in an interesting way i hadn't really given serious thought to it for a long time but then um we came up with this doing signings on youtube uh idea uh because a lot of people were live streaming random stuff during the covid right we can't get out and do things anymore a lot of people are just randomly live streaming i'm like oh let's let's try it um and it seems like people enjoy it uh so anytime i can use my time in multiple ways then i'm excited i don't consider myself a real youtuber right um because this is a side hobby for me more it's a way for my fans to to interact with me just like a lot of my social media is um and so even when i do something a little more produced i don't really consider myself a true youtuber but i do like to uh i do do like to play in this world a little bit and i'm i'm very thankful for all those who make really great youtube content um kind of it's a it's it's a new media it really is when they've tried to do really produced things like i mean i watched cobra kai which was really well done and thanks but it doesn't feel like youtube youtube should be um you know this sort of indie publishing version of media and i really like that aspect of it and so anyway it's a good take and i just want to say again congratulations because you are you're saying it's not your full-time job but you're hidden levels most youtubers would dream of especially in terms of live streaming numbers so congrats there um but i wanted to tell you i cheat i cheat on a lot of things right a lot of things that i try are successful because i'm already successful which is unfortunately how things sometimes work well it's success begets success it's a it's a true thing in life um well i was very fortunate recently on the channel to have two authors on evan winter and rebecca kwong and they were on polar opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of how they planned their books evan was i have one draft because i plan so well i don't get rid of any words it's just done right away whereas rebecca kwong talked about how she can write a hundred thousand words that will just not make the book and disappear you've spoken quite a bit on how you develop as an author and how you kind of plot out your books and for something like rhythm of war versus starlight is that do you shift on where you fall in that spectrum at all or are you solidly one type one way like did the original really have a different structure in that sense i i am a little different uh for each book each book requires something different um for the the skyward books i've actually had to be very outline centric because of the way the publishing schedule and those work and with the the teen publisher they just wanted a really solid outline so i prepared that ahead of time i normally probably wouldn't have done that if there's a weakness to the steelheart trilogy it is that i didn't do as much of that right um and if there's a strength maybe that's it as well i tend to work better when i do have more of that structure though i am i'm definitely not as far on the the side of the one draft right if i have a good guidepost books tend to do better but it doesn't necessarily have to be really really strict there are books where as long as i know what the themes are for each character the arcs for each character and i know what the major storytelling points i'm trying to get that one draft proof of concept that first draft i mean proof of contrast concept stuff if i have that in hand i'm more likely i've found to create a strong novel than if i don't but the alcatraz books were all completely discovery written they are also my least successful books so um i don't know if that has to do with that actually the pro the reason that alcatraz books are the least successful i'm pretty sure comes down to two things total tangent sorry but one is they are books that make fun of the reader as you read them and some people just don't like a voice from a character who is kind of annoying right it's kind of irritating some people love it right um but it's got that that little sort of lemony snicket feel where the characters playing a joke on you the whole time and then the other uh aspect would be that they're targeted middle grade but my middle grade humor was not on point and it's more why a humor it's more sarcasm more what we would classically define is uh is why air older humor and it just did not hit the kids would read it because they enjoyed the story but wouldn't get the humor or older kids would get the humor but by then they were older than the characters and weren't bonding as strongly to the series in a lot of cases so that's why alcohol but i also did discovery write those completely most of my novellas are more discovery written the shorter the format the less strong the outline has to be in a lot of cases like when i do a stormlight book i just i do a lot more upfront work the outline is actually much less readable for a storm light book um as well because it's the more i work on an outline the more it targets toward what i need not what an editor needs to understand right and so there's a lot of just random pieces and thoughts and things that work for the way that i work in an outline for those who don't know i'm usually focused on a goal and then lots of bullet points explaining how to get there and things i want to try that are going to make the uh the story pop when we get to that and they're going to be exciting along the way um and that sort of stuff i don't think would make any sense uh to anyone um that said for rhythm of war i did a big long sort of explanation of what all the character arcs were and things uh that include did going into book five that i sent to my team and said what am i forgetting is there anything i am not fulfilling here that really ought to be in the books uh because we've only got one more book in this this arc of the stormlight and there's a lot of things to wrap up in that book and i wanted to make sure that i wasn't leaving myself with uh too much to do or too little to do um and it's looking really good i'm very excited by book five as well uh book four and book five aligned really well i love the confidence and there's another kind of left turn question here if you don't mind but you are someone who seems to be really pushing on the cutting edge of the exploration of where new media can take being an author putting up chapters on youtube the live streaming very engaged on reddit youtube from your perspective as sales shift to being more audiobook in kindle is there anything that authors starting out now should really keep in mind how they advertise themselves how they market their books as someone who has found great success in this area caveat asterix that has to go before all this i broke in in the previous industry i broke in in 2003 and 2005 is where the the the version of the world we live in for publishing started or 2010 2010 is when it started so when the kindle launched it's when the first e-books really took off and it's when audible really started to take off um and so we live in a different era than when i broke in so talking to people who broke who have broken in recently they're probably going to give you better advice than i will um i do try to watch these things because i try to as you say um be on the forefront of things and one of the things we've done that is very successful that i would recommend all authors moving forward doing is take more control over your career i don't think most authors should be straight up traditional straight up indie in this market i think they should be exploring both now more likely that you should be straight up indy then you should be straight up uh traditional i think that anyone who's straight traditional right now um either they're doing it because they just don't want to worry about all this stuff brandon which is valid right you don't want to have a whole business attached and have 20 employees totally understand that you don't need 20 to do it but even a couple employees you probably would need um and so totally understand that but number two if you are straight traditional you are probably um leaving a lot of business on the table and are not growing uh your fan base like you could and i think that's just straight up true i could be proven wrong but i don't think that there's anyone traditionally published maybe i don't know maybe some of the old guard but uh these days doing something just as simple as i'm gonna keep my own um premium volume rights the leather bound as we call them and doing your own leather bounds that you are selling at conventions or through your website leather bounds traditionally have been bad business for traditional publishings why they don't do them very often why you don't see very many because they have low print runs and high costs which means the margins are very bad we're getting very technical that now but when when tor did the wheel of time leather bounds they cost 250 a piece and tor lost money on them and this is because um if you're gonna sell through retail which the the main publishers all still do um what that means is uh oh you have the the recovers the wheel time sorry uh the the yeah i love those um but if you're going to be doing this um as a publisher 50 or so is going to the retailer and the retailers won't order many copies or they'll just order like a billion right the leather bounds you get through barnes and noble are a different story in their program but most of the time they're just not going to order many copies fans won't know where to get them they'll go to bookstores and say do you have these since there's only 250 and there's like 10 000 book stores then the chances of they're actually being one there very low the publisher doesn't want print more because the bookstores are all skeptical that they can sell them uh they lose money and everyone's sad right the fans who can't get copies are sad the bookstores are sad because they heard there's this thing that they maybe could have sold the publisher said because they lost money um and so the only person that's happy is the author who got to have a cool leather round of their book us doing it ourselves means that we do not have to have the margins right we we work with uh some some indie um some independent bookstores but we tell them straight up we're like we can't give you 50 of cover on these we just can't that's cost for us on a lot of these books and so they're fine because it's a high ticket item since 100 25 or whatever of cost is still more than they make off of another book and plus our my fans are really great and they just go buy them up so the stores are basically like yes it's you just giving us free money we love that but being able to directly sell them to the fans means that they can become some something that we can print like wave kings were printing 25 000 copies which tour could only sell 250 copies of a wheel of time book and um that's all through the fact that i'm doing it directly myself and so this is this is just a microcosm of uh of what you can be doing on your own indie publishing if you are publishing with the pub with the big publisher novellas generally don't make a lot of money with big publishers but fans do enjoy them and if you're like me i really like writing them the story of don shard is like a really big interlude and it could not fit in rhythm of war it just couldn't i couldn't do a 50 000 word interlude in the middle of that book it would completely destroy the pacing of that novel but it's a story i really wanted to tell doesn't fit anywhere else it's a bad deal for for traditional publishing because it's so short but the price has to be high because there's so many sunk costs in traditional publishing and so for them to do this novella it's like we have to charge a certain amount we have to make it a hardcover to justify to the fans that we're charging this and you know edge dancer work people like that it's because of the success of the stormlight series but at a slightly less successful level novellas just don't make any money for publishers but fans like them and authors like them and indeed if you self-publish them they can be great people can love them for many years emperor's soul was the highest earning dollar per word story that i'd ever written um and i was surprised by that i didn't expect it because you know novellas traditionally in the business just do not make money but in indie publishing they can be something really fun to do different and so at the very least you should be considering indie publishing your own novellas that are part of your stories if you have a cool story you want to go and see if it works for you i don't know if it will i can't guarantee it will but like i really think in this world you should have more control over your career you should not be just doing what is done before just because be you should be looking to be in charge of it um and that's a very different thing from when i broke in where there was one way to do it um and even self-publishing was just even after something like aragon was just so rare that it was successful that it was a bad idea um so anyway well that's a long answer to a very simple question uh but that's i could go on a long time about other differences you should talk to people who have recently broken in though i have been and it's you have a very similar perspective which is good to hear and i also imagine one advantage is you have more creative control as well over the look of the leather bound and things like that which you know it's your baby so i imagine you just like that it is really nice um a lot of authors feel very disconnected from the final look of their book the more control you have over your your business the more you learn about what makes a good cover and even if you're hiring people to do some of the covers if the publisher sees that your novella you're releasing has really great cover design a great uh cut you know cover illustration and is really connecting with fans they're going to listen to you more when you come to them and say i would really suggest these changes or this artist for the cover art of the books that you're publishing that's fantastic and so we are coming up on the time now i want to say thank you again so so much for willing to sit down and do this if you would like to check out rhythm of war of course there is a million links everywhere to find it but i will have them in the description down below as well thank you so much brandon

Channel: Daniel Greene

Views: 183,598

Keywords: brandon sanderson, brandon sanderson interview, rhythm of war, the stormlight archive, mistborn, daniel greene, the way of kings, author interview, writing advice

Id: viLSKpppa1A

Length: 43min 9sec (2589 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020