YouSaid · the spoken record

Brandon Sanderson

lines on the record: 270
first: 2025-02-05
most recent: 2025-02-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I couldn't speak because this is so unexpected, and I spent that night thinking, man, if I say yes to this and I screw it up, we have seen how major media properties have had someone take over for them and then maybe not do as quite as good a job as the fan bases wanted. And what that has done perhaps to reputations and things like that.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I turned into a sheep. I actually wrote her an email that night after not sleeping all night that said, Dear Harry, I promise I'm not an idiot. That was the first line.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She's like, what? What did she want? And I'm like, I don't know. So I finally call Tor. I reached an editor at Tor, who's one of the managing editors. And he says, oh, that. Yeah, it's what you think it is. I'll get her to call you back. What do I think it is? Well, I knew that I'd written a little thing about Robert Jordan on my website a few days earlier, just kind of talking about how much he'd meant to me. It's very short. It's like three paragraphs. So I'm like, maybe she wants to talk about that. Why would the widow call you? I'm looking for someone to finish my late husband's work. And I was wondering if you'd be interested. I literally responded I can talk. I'm a talker I could not talk.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is very professional, doesn't answer So I'm like freaking out. And my wife sees me and I am not a nervous person. I am not a person that emotions strike very powerfully. That's just my own weird neurodivergence. I don't generally feel strong emotions. But that day I'm like walking in a circle like babbling. And she's like, what's going on? I've never seen Brandon like this and I'm like Robert Jordan's wife just called me.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am Robert Jordan's widow, and I would like you to call me back. There's something I want to talk to you about. That by itself. So I get this voicemail and I'm like Robert Jordan's widow, Harriet McDougall, the editor. Okay, so I call her back and I don't get a response. She's out getting massaged by later fine. So I call my agent. No, I call my editor. He doesn't respond. He never responded. Moshe, he kept hours even weirder than mine when he's still around, but he was my editor. He's retired since then. But, you know, Moshe, great guy. I know this is something that you've talked about. Bipolar. So they're huge swaths of time where you just couldn't get a hold of him. He self-medicated with the history channel. And so sometimes you'd have to find out how to get a hold of Mosh. And so he didn't answer. Not a big deal. Call my agent. He always answers.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there is, but I didn't know it. I get this voice memo from someone I'd never met, but I knew by reputation, says, and I know every word in inflection. All right, all right, let's do it. I listened 200 times. Hello, Brandon Sanderson. This is Harriet McDougall, Rigney.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It puts that on her. She considered it a dying request. So 2007 happens. And one morning I get up and there's a voicemail on my phone. As we've talked about, I get up late and that's even later for New York, right? Like by the time I get up, it's 3 p.m. in New York.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having left his series unfinished. And I was a fan of this series. I had grown up reading it. It was one of my favorites. And I did not know him or his wife. His wife was his editor. It's actually really fun. She was his editor before she was his wife. And so I always joke that that's a good way to make sure your editorial direction gets taken. You marry your author. But she had discovered him in Charleston where she'd moved away from the big city. She was tours editorial director. She kind of helped Tom Doherty build tour. She's the editor. If you guys know your sci-fi fantasy, she was the editor of the book of Swords by Fred Saberhagen. She's the editor of the book Enders game. Really, really top-notch editor. And then she discovered Wheel of Time. And so he passes away in 2007. And before he passes away, he asks her to find someone to finish his series. He decides he does want it finished.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I talked about the three kind of genres of fantasy. For the 90s and early 2000s, the flag bearer of the best-selling epic fantasy was the Wheel of Time. It was eventually dethroned by Game of Thrones when the television show for Game of Thrones came out. Until the television show, Wheel of Time was the top. Beyond that, Robert Jordan got sick in the early 2000s with a rare blood disease. And because of this, his book releases slowed down quite a bit. And that's when Game of Thrones was taking off. But for most of, you know, for all of my childhood, Wheel of Time was the kind of flag bearer for Epic Fantasy, was the heir to Tolkien, so to speak, and selling millions of copies, doing really, really well. And he got sick. It was really positive. But then in 2007, he passed away.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if you can figure out how to control your platform, also, then that's king. But you as a content creator, I think, should be looking at the platforms and learning how to manipulate all the different platforms so that you can have the best world you can. So that's where we live right now.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's all so messy, right? This is all in the weeds. But here's the takeaway. The power is in two people's hands right now. It's in the creators and the platform controllers. It's not in New York's hand anymore. And that's in some ways bad because those are good people. I think most creatives in like the audio industry hate their business. Most authors are pretty, like you said, the people are good. Contract, sometimes you have to take a sledgehammer too, but I generally don't mind New York. They generally, I think, try to treat authors well. But in this New World, we control the content.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amazon and everyone else doing my best. Like, Amazon would pay us better if we put them only on Amazon, but I refuse. And that's one of the reasons the publishers deal. It's a little better. Amazon gives them the deal that they give if you're exclusive to Amazon as an indie. They will force you to be exclusive to get the good deal. They give that deal to the publishers, but they can be on everything. Trixie.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not trivial. So I could actually get those actual numbers. I should get them and see. But it's significant what we're making more with the profit share. But my best thing has been Tress. They took a print-only deal. I have e-book and audiobook. And I have a profit share on the print with them. And then the e-book and audiobook, the ebook straight up is better. The audiobook, we make more, but we would make almost the same with the publisher.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it depends. But e book, yes. I have found that my system that I have, which is a profit share, and we took a sledgehammer to that contract that you got offered and eventually got it to a place where it was good. It's really close to a straight up profit share. There's a few little Hollywood accounting things they do, but they have to account them very clearly. And we end up doing with our profit share 10 to 20% better than we used to do as much as 50% better in some cases.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it turns out that there's all this shenanigans. They get $15, and after all our work and things, we get on average like four bucks out of that $15. The publishers do have something where they're getting a little bit more. But at the end of the day, I earn more this way than I do with the publishers, even though the publishers can make up for it a little bit by having certain weird deals on what they get paid. At the end of the day, I really wish we could push audiobooks into that. Transparent You get 70% of that $15 is what should go to the author, or certain percentage of that to the author, certain percentage to the reader. Narrators don't get royalties, which is kind of a thing. And I just really wish we could pierce that and make it happen, but we haven't been able to.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's all sorts of lawsuits going on that them taking that much. But because of that, they do the subscription service. So you sign up for the subscription on their website. Google or Apple get none. You get a credit every month. You can spend a credit. None of that credit goes because it's by credit. But then that turns all the audience into subscribers to Audible. So if Audible stops carrying a book, people just stop buying it. Once again, he who controls the spice, he who controls the platform, controls everything, which means that they get to say, well, it's a credit. What is a credit? Well, accredit is divided this way. And we give out this many free books as part of the promotions with credits. And so that plays into it. And some of the credits go for books like this. And so they have this huge spreadsheet that to their credit, I'm saying credit too much, they have started being more open with how that spreadsheet works for us. And we can plug in the numbers and see. They only started doing that in the last year as we push that.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Getting out of Audible, how much you earn off of a credit is like pulling teeth because in their sense, and this is the big problem with audiobooks, I don't like that you are the customer of Audible, not the customer of the authors. When you sign up for Audible, and Audible is a great company, don't get me wrong. They made huge advances in audiobook, distribution, readability. They've improved that market quite a bit. They are a net positive for everyone. But they control so much of the market that they are able to do some of these practices that we talked about. But beyond that, people sign up for a subscription fee. This is partially Apple's fault. Apple and Google because if you buy an audiobook through Audible's app, Google and Apple want to take 30% of that. And the publishers don't want to do that. 30% is egregious. It's insane.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So if your book is priced at $9.99 as an ebook, there is almost no incentive to go to New York. Audiobooks, New York has negotiated all of their payments from Audible based on cover price of the book. So they can change the cover price of the book and get different things going on. But almost everything on Audible sells by credit. And getting out of the publishers how much they get off of a credit is like pulling teeth.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So on ebooks, basically the publisher is getting 70% of price. It's $10, they're getting $7 sent to them. As an Indie author, it's doing it yourself, you will get $7, but they will take out a tiny distribution fee at Amazon, which is super annoying if you have a lot of artwork, it can get higher. Usually it's only like $10, $15. But they will take that out where they don't for the New York publishers. So that's one of the big differences. The other thing is they'll let the New York publisher charge $14.99 for the book. You, they will only let charge $10. If you go over 10, they'll only give you 20% instead of a 70% royalty. They really need to bend that break.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This point in my life. So, what they're saying on audiobooks has some truth. Not true on ebooks. So I'll just say you there There is one thing that the New York publishers get away with e books that you can't get on your own. Even I have not been able to fight them down on this. They will let the New York publishers charge more than $10.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, stuff like that. And we link to it on my website. It's not like it's not there. So I don't have a big problem. We might have even double posted them on my website. I can't remember, but normally we just do them on Tour. But you said something on Ask You About Tell me if this is tread A, if we want to tread lightly, or if this is, but you'd still take advances.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those who control the platform control the world who controls the spice, he controls. Well, here it's you control the platform. That's why Amazon did what it did. That's why Amazon worked so hard to make Kindle a thing, even going so far as to pay out millions and millions and dollars in order to try to corner that market and gain that mindshare of going to Kindle. I don't mind Tor trying to turn their website into that. It helps other authors.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we found is, for instance, people will come to me to buy their print books. They will not come to me to buy their ebooks. We had an ebook store. Maybe we'll put it back up. We might even have a few that we're selling now. We sell in the tens of copies of my ebooks. People like their platform. They want to have a Kindle and buy the books on their Kindle, which makes perfect sense. They do not want to go somewhere else, buy an ebook, and load it to the Kindle, even if it's cheaper somewhere else.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Tor's website is a website that just has posts every day, things like shared blogs or places you go to that find a whole bunch of articles.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, good question. So, there's arguments for that. The thing about it is we've found over time, personal websites are important, but they're much less important than social media or aggregate websites in today's mind economy.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We released them on Tor's website, Tours Publicity website. Right now it's called Reactor. It used to be tour.com. And that's a good place for them.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Once per week is what we've been doing. I could see value in twice a week. But once a week, everyone gets together. The thread's on Reddit are really cool”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just kind of stay a little bit more with that fantasy feel. That one took me in by surprise my beta readers didn't spot that. Everything else in those threads were things. My beta reader spotted that I either, you know, that I left because I felt this was integral to the narrative I'm telling. If it's negative, it's all right for it to be negative. This is that piece of art, right? Like some people don't like Impressionists, but you can't make impressions and better by not being impressionist. Each piece of art is going to have things like that.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Arcane is mage punk. That's the straight up subgenre of that. So I was taken by surprise on that. People are kind of responding against that. And I think this could just be like people want more sincerity in their media nowadays. I think they're tired of media being cynical. And this is a sign maybe, I don't think it went cynical, but this is like a danger sign of that. So they're like, you know, they're like, they would like me to pull back. They want me to call it courting instead of dating.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've never heard that. That's great. Yeah. It's not my term. It's just what people kind of call when fantasy magic becomes technology. So, if you watch any sort of film or thing where you have ships powered by a magical technology, they'll call that major.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Epic fantasy. You walk this line in epic fantasy. Do you use okay, or do you use all right? And I've been moving the Stormlight Archive toward modern language across the course of the novels as we're preparing to kind of go a little bit more what we call mage punk, a little more modern for the next.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really interesting. There are a few things. This newest book surprised me. Only one thing surprised me. And that is in the newest book, people are responding to modernized language more than I expected them to.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It really was. But remember, we've got an insular audience of super fans at that point. That's the only people paying attention to me in 2007. Now it would probably be different. But I can get a little bit of that by watching. We do re-release one chapter a week or two chapters a week of new books leading up to launch to about a third of the book. And I can go read the threads on Reddit about that. And they actually mirror the beta readers really closely.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Creative Commons. No, I'm planning. I keep wanting to do another one, and I haven't found the right one to do, but I am planning to do that at some point.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Commercial edition. I wanted data on that. And the data says doesn't really impact it. It sells just as well as Elantras does, even a little bit better, and Elantrus wasn't released in the Creative Commons. So it doesn't sell as well as Stormlight or Mistborn, but those are my breakouts, you know, my stand-up successes. And I don't think that has anything to do with it.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their attention. If you can get their attention, you will eventually be able to, in some ways, get money from that audience to support yourself says start with detention. And this was really smart. He released all of his books in the Creative Commons, and he's a big advocate for that. I realized at the time I had missborn coming out, and this was right when Wheel of Time was being announced. It was way back when it's 2007. So I wrote a lot of the book, but there were parts I hadn't written. So the idea was I started releasing the chapters just on forums to let people give feedback to me trying a serialized version of a book with the main goal being see how an audience online gives feedback different from my beta readers, but also to have a chance to kind of bring my audience together into one place. And then when it was done, I released the book under the Creative Commons partially as an experiment. How does this impact giving away the book for free? How does this impact the sales of the...”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Warbreaker happened after I wrote the Mistborn trilogy, and I was chatting with Corey Doctorow, kind of a famous tech blogger and Creative Commons advocate. Every interaction with Corey has been really positive, like super class act. I was once at the Hugo Awards, and this is, you know, like the Academy Awards in sci-fi fantasy. I was nominated and you get a little pin if you're nominated to wear around in your lapel. And I didn't know that. It was in my basket. I didn't know it was there. He sighed and have mine. I'm like, oh, I don't have my pin. He took off because he had several. You wear any that you, any nominations you've had during that night. And so he took off one of his and he just pinned it on me. You know, that's kind of class act that Corey is. So I was talking to him and he really believes and believed that attention is people's most valuable commodity. Not their money.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it's over time. And I will star and say this is a good comment. This is one that I, you know, they, and they handle editorial. They'll see what I revise and what I don't. And they'll know in the future, watch for this. And do remember, I'm going and looking at the end apart and reading all of people's general comments.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that I see here's a big discussion that happened here's, and they. Only take like 10 to 20 percent of it and put it in.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I give all that to my team. I go read the end of part summaries and the end of book summaries. They take the rest, they distill it, and then they actually put it into a copy of the book, the manuscript, just interstitials. They said this at this point. They said this at this point.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of my beta readers, which is what we call these people, worked for the company and pitched it to us. And the name of it's escaping me right now. I can find out what it is.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spreadsheet. We use Google Sheets. And no, no. We started using an actual program. Peter, who's head of editorial, was like, we need an actual program that's a little secure and that can track people will write a line number where they have their comment now and stuff. So we actually use a program, but sometimes we still use Google Sheets for kind of what we call program.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. Or they'll say no, no, no, it was this. And the first member's like, oh, that made sense. I went back and read it. Like, you'll see emerging where the problems are and where they aren't. And nowadays, what we let you let people do is they just add a check mark next to it if they agree with it. And if they disagree, have them write out.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go to the chapters tab on the spreadsheet on like a Google sheet and go look and respond to what people are saying. You just make a comment say, I feel this about this chapter and then respond to what other people are saying. And then each chapter fills up with giant conversations about that chapter, almost like you have a book club out there reading the book and having people.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To focus it. So, what I want is just, I don't want people to fix the book. I want people to give their descriptive responses to the book. If you were just reading this as a professionally published thing, where are the places you're bored? Where are the places you're confused? Where are the places that you're standing up and sharing? Where are the places that, you know, where are you engaged? Where are you not engaged? Just what are you enjoying? Don't tell me what's wrong. Don't tell me what to fix. Tell me where you're bored and tell me where you're confused. Tell me where you're excited and tell me where you're turning the pages so fast you have to come back and write your feedback because you don't want to stop to write your feedback and that became really valuable to me and so when we moved beyond that and i was actually published i started making spreadsheets where i'm like you get the book go on this spreadsheet”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Before I sold, for I had an agent, for I had an editor. I actually sold to an editor before I got an agent. So I'm reverse. But back before I had any of that and I was ahead of that magazine, I started using those readers and passing out my books. And I would print off physical copies because this is the late 90s. And I would have a pack of gel pens of different colors. And I'd say, pick a color, write your name in that color so I know who's writing the comment, read through the book and write your feedback all in that color. Go ahead and respond to what other people have written. And they would pass around my friends and they would all take a different color and you'd have these conversations on the margins about what people thought of certain scenes. And I saw that and I'm like, this is really handy.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I pay my team, my editorial team, to condense it into the most relevant information. So this is a big difference between me and a lot of writers is I look at books a little bit like Hollywood looks at movies with test audiences. I want to know what my audience is going to say about a book before I release it. Sometimes it'll change what I write. Often it will. Sometimes it won't. I just want to know. I want to understand how it's going to perform, what people are going to think of it. And a lot of writers do this with a couple of early readers. I find that doesn't give me an actual test audience. It doesn't give me the pulse of an audience. I need like 20 to 30, if not 40 to 50 people reading it. Even that's just a tiny percentage of the audience, but it's been really key to me. It started when I was in nobody.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's because it's that escape philosophy of attention people hear about you, they want to try you out, but they don't know where to start or there's so many things and something cuts through people says a great place to start. Book talk really likes Tress. It talks about and says, great place to start on Sanderson, a little bit more romantic, a little bit more whimsical. It fits with what a lot of people like on book talk. So they buy it, even though it's really interesting. The starter books do sell the best. Anyway, we're going back to, we released this thing, and those are the ones that people want. They've heard of me. They say, well, I'll try this thing. And they become part of something. And so they all buy in. And then there's that thing we call it the Earth Sanderson. And we started shipping these boxes out. And people got their boxes and their books. And it was wonderful. The best year of my life, right?”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tress of the Emerald Sea, you would think I have plumbed the depths of my audience, right, doing this Kickstarter, $45 million, shipped out 150,000 copies of that book, right, with the Kickstarter and all said and done. That is my best-selling book through an edition from the publisher after Mistborn and Stormlight Archive, after the first books of those, not even the sequels, like after Mistborn One and Stormlight One, Tress the Emerald C, that book sells as much. It's really comparable. There are weeks where it kind of beats them. So this book that you would think we'd sold to everybody, the publisher releases in addition expecting, well, there's not much, but we'll have it on the shelves because.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think part of it is, I would guess, the majority of that 30 to 40 percent were people who had heard of me and had not tried me yet. I wasn't grabbing people who had never, you know, that didn't ever read, but it was people who friends would say, hey, Brandon Sanders did. And these four books were all starter books. They're all meant, even the fourth one, which is kind of tied into things to be books you could just pick up and read without knowing any of my other things. And to this day, Tress of the Emerald Sea. You want to hear weird stuff, another tangent.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT