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

“For that. Yep. And that one, that tier was, I believe our biggest tier. If it wasn't that one, it was the tier of just all the books in their editions, those two were the ones that just went gangbusters. Almost nobody bought the lower tiers.”
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, those were $40 each, I think, also. So it's the idea that it's $40 a month. For those months, you get a book, and then eight of those months you get a $40 box that has other cool stuff in it. And $40 was a high enough price point. We could make some really quality, cool things.”
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 like the idea of subscription boxes, but I have a problem with them in that there was the big subscription box craze of the late teens. And I feel like their incentive was misplaced. They wanted to keep you going as long as they could because of that. They will stretch out the cool objects. They'll run out of steam. And Adam, actually, in our company had pitched, why don't we do a subscription box? And I'd always been hesitant because I feel like you eventually end up with too much crap you don't want. But I went to the team and I said, what if we did eight boxes, four books and eight boxes? So across a year, you get a book every quarter, and then you get two boxes of swag. And we just make that swag awesome. We put all of our best ideas into it. We make eight really killer boxes, and we're done. We don't ask people to subscribe for longer. We just, you got your cool boxes of interesting stuff. And that just went great.”
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
“Combo was $15. $15. Yep. Which is about the price of an audible credit plus you get the ebook. We thought that was a, so for $60, you got all four books. On that. And then the high end, we did you get all four books in our nice editions. They're not leather bound, but they're like a $55 price point. We sold them at $40 on this plus a box every month of Brandon Sanderson swag of just magical swag”
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, it was the main tier, the buy everything tier. So we did it. Again, I like to have people be able to self select. And so there was a relatively inexpensive e-book and audiobook bundle that you got together. And I think it was $15 each for those.”
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
“Brandon Sanderson, my claim thing. My fans all tweeted me. This is way back in like 2009. It was 2007. It was right when the Wheel of Time happens.”
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 Stephen Colbert had a piece on Zeppelins because he was in character. This is Colbert's report about how much he hates Zeppelins or whatever. And he holds up because USA today had done a thing on Zeppelins and he holds up a USA today page. And there's my little picture because Doofus takes over Wheel of Time is like the bottom story on the page below the fold. And there's this giant Zeppelin story. And he holds it up and he points at Zeppelins. And then there's me. My face was on the Colbert report. It's pixelated. You can barely tell.”
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
“People are paying attention who are not in my circle of influence, who don't read epic fantasy. Suddenly, news stories are everywhere. Everyone's talking about it. I get interviewed by legit news media. And the closest I had ever gotten to that was the Wheel of Time way back when. And even then, no one really interviewed me.”
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
“If people read my books, you will tell I live for that ending where I've been distracting with something and then I pull out that surprise. I love the great twist. I love the really good complication that you're not expecting. I love when a story comes together right at the end and that video did it and it announced a Kickstarter for four secret books. We did not expect to go to 41 million dollars. We were hoping to get to around 7 to 10 like we'd done before, but that escape velocity attention, right? I suddenly, it's the first time in my life where suddenly”
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
“Knew this would go viral. I just knew it would. They were scared of it because they're like, this, you know, sounds like you have like cancer or something. And that's not something to make fun of. And I'm like, yes, it is not. I agree. But at the same time, I knew it would work. I am a storyteller, and that's a video with a story. Sure. Right. Like I live for the reveal.”
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
“Where I pretend that I'm coming out with some big scandal and I'm retiring from writing because I've secretly done something just horrible. That happens periodically. And it's probably, it may not be something really fun to make fun of. But, you know, you have a lot of writers like, you know, I have to admit that I plagiarized or I have to admit that anyway, all those apology videos that people, and I say, I'm going to make a fake apology video. And the reason being is everyone's going to get gotten by it and they're going to share it with their friends who'll get gotten by it. They'll just say, hey, watch this. And then you'll be, oh, no, Sanderson, what's up with him? And we'll tap into that sort of horror mentality that watch a train wreck, car wreck, people, you know, want to slow down. If they think something Brandon's going to announce something terrible, and then I hit them instead of it being another terrible COVID thing, it was there's four surprise books. You get this delightful thing in your life instead.”
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 they all talk on Discords and things, and we sent them each a different book. And then I watched the Discord as they all realized I had written four books in secret. And I spun this into the video that you watched. I went to my team and I said, I want to do something. And they were a little resistant because sometimes some of these big ideas that I have, I'm the big idea person and they can be really daunting, such as they're going to do our own leather bounds. We're going to start doing Kickstarters. I kind of have to. My job is to, we always talk, Emily and I, my job is to look and pull people toward that star future. And her job is to say, remember to be practical, remember to be practical. Can we actually accomplish this?”
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 have a pool of about a hundred of them, and we don't use them all for every book. We just kind of randomly decide. And I said, where I have, Brandon has an extra book, and we actually split like the 100 into droops of 25 and sent them all four different books. And they all talk on 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
“Kind of for the fans. And then I sprung them on my company, said, there's four books out of nowhere. Tell me what you think. And I watched their reaction to finding four unexpected books in the excitement that just moved through the company. And I said, all right, I've got something. I did it again with test audience. Some of my sworn to secrecy early readers.”
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's about 18 months of writing time that I squeezed in there between different things. And I wrote these four books and I realized, well, at about book three, I realized I had something. Something that I could spring on people. And COVID had been so miserable for so many people. It was delightful for me. I'm writing books. I'm watching movies with my kids. No one's asking me to go on tour anymore. And so in the midst of all this, I started to have a plan. And I started to have an idea. And I got that fourth one written. And I wrote the fourth one deliberately for the Kickstarter. I realized I wanted one that felt more like my classic novels so that fans who like Mistworn and Stormlight would get something because one in number one and number three of that were told from my storyteller voice. And then number two was something completely different. It's a science fiction novel unrelated to every Miler stuff. And so I wrote one.”
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, from his voice, this is the first time I'd done this, right? All my other books are in my voice. I said, what if a character told a story to someone else about this young woman? And it became the story Tress of the Emerald Sea that I wrote without any plans to publish it, without any contracts, without any expectations. I didn't tell the fans it was coming. I wrote it, just gave the chapters to my wife to read as I was writing it. And it was liberating with no deadlines, no contracts. It just, I wrote it because I had a little extra time. And I thought that was amazing. That's something I've been missing. And COVID gave me this chance across those like two or three years that we canceled everything that I used that extra time. I fulfilled all of my contractual obligations writing books, but I also ended up writing four novels that were just squeezed between. And I say, you know, these are each 100,000 words, right? So they're one Stormlight Archive.”
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
“Yes. So that stuck in my brain. I'm like, what if the princess bride? What if, you know, Princess Bride starts with guy goes off to seek his fortune, says, wait for me. I'm going to go find my fortune and come back. And then we can get married and I'll have money. He went off and he got captured by pirates. What if that story happened, but the princess said, well, I guess I have to go find him now and went to find him, right? No one's going to go find him. Well, it's down to me. She has no experience with this, but she's like, I'm the only one. So she goes off. And that, I wrote a story that was more fairy-ish. It's still in my Cosmere universe. All my connected things. So it's told by my storyteller character based a little bit off of some Shakespearean fool vibes from like 12th night and stuff 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
“Right, like that's the most she accomplishes that and marrying the bad guy almost. Yeah. And she's like, wouldn't it be nice if she did something”
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
“Everything. It's wonderful, wonderful book, wonderful, written by William Goldman, who's a great screenwriter. He's written a lot of classics. Butch casting a Sundance Kid was one of his. And just brilliant screenwriter who script Dr. Donnie your favorite movies as well as wrote multiple on his own of your favorite movies. And so I was watching this movie and I love just the feel of it. This sort of fantasy that is fun but doesn't quite take itself too seriously. And we got done with that. And my wife's like, I love that movie. And she said, isn't it funny that the princess doesn't do anything?”
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
“Really digging into one world, but doesn't overstay it's welcome. And I hadn't been able to do that in a while. I was writing series, all these series. Everything I wrote turned into a big series. And I didn't have a place for these wacky ideas. And I started to hit my mid-40s. And I started to realize I'm only really going to be able to do this probably till my 70s, if I'm lucky, right? Most authors really slow down when they hit their 70s. This is what people who are fans of Game of Thrones have found. You know, George was always a little on the slower side, and then he hit retirement age, and he slowed down. And a lot of authors that happened to. And I started to calculate out. And I'm like, I don't have room for any of these cool ideas. That makes me sad. But then suddenly I had a third of my time back. And I started watching movies with my kids. They were old enough that we could show them some of their favorites.”
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 all that gets canceled. No one can travel. And suddenly I have one third of my time back. In the meantime, I'd started to feel dissatisfied with something in my life. When I was early in my career, I could just have a random idea. And I would shove it until I was done with my current book, but I could have something that was really exciting to me. And when I finished my current book, I could go in and I could write that cool idea. Warbreaker that you mentioned was one of these, just a standalone book that I wrote, you know, Mistborn trilogy between the Mistborn trilogy, the Wheel of Time, and Stormlight on either side. I have this just little standalone book that was a cool idea I had. And I love that about fantasy. Some of my favorite fantasy novels are standalone books. Guy Gabriel Kaye is very good at them. Lions of Al-Rasan or Tygana are two highly recommended. They're 90s fantasy. They're a little slower than modern fantasy. Really just single volume.”
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
“Here's what's well is for books, right? If you go look at that top 10, everything else is some cool tech innovation. And we have it for novels. So COVID hits, right? COVID hits. I have gone through cycles in my life multiple times where I say yes to too many things. And then I'm traveling too much. In 2019 was one of those years as an author, you know this. People want you in person. And traveling is fun. I enjoy seeing the world. So you say yes to a bunch of things. And then you end up, as I did in 2019, with three different trips to Europe. Europe can be kind of exhausting three tours in Europe, multiple tours around here. And I calculated I've been on the road one-third of my days. COVID hits, and I had 2020 was set.”
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
“Actually, the points. I just have roughly 41. Roughly 41 million. And the previous highest Kickstarter had been 21. And we still have the record.”
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 was 41.something million official 45 when you do all the people, like you have people that can add on extra stuff. The behind the scenes was another four and a half or so. We ended right at 45 million. So if you go look at it right now, it's 41 point something. Do you have it there? What is it? 41.”
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
“That's only 10%. And that's all that effort to get to 10%. And I would say the big kickstarter was 30 to 40% new people. So we really only reached 5% of my audience. But regardless, it taught us that. Taught me about scape velocity of attention, how to break through, get into the sky, and start getting everyone's attention, maybe a little bit, or at least get high enough that your whole planet that follows you more of them can see 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
“And that stopped in the 20 teens. And so it depended on how many people liked to think. So if you even want to reach your own audience, you have to have an escape velocity of attention. You have to break through these barriers, preventing even your fan base from saying what's happening. I still get people who come to me like, wow, you did this big Kickstarter. I didn't even hear about this. We sold to only 10% of our audience with the big one that we're getting to, right?”
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
“Executed properly, and a lot of them flop, but executed, bringing all of your fan base together and making a lot of noise, suddenly more people pay attention to you. And with our way of Kings Kickstarter, it still only reached our audience, right? But even reaching your audience is really hard today. All of this social media platforms that we have learned to rely upon and use have found out that people can't pay attention to everything. They will click too many names. They will want to follow these names, but then there'll be too much spam of all these names on their feeds. And all of them use algorithms because number one, they need to monetize somehow. And number two, people follow too many things and it overwhelms most people. So they come and they bounce off of even their social media platforms. And so in the early days of social media, if someone followed you on Facebook and you did a post, it showed up on their feed.”
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 hard. Like launching new books for new authors today is much harder. You might notice, I've noticed, there are fewer people who break out now than used to. More authors are earning a living now than used to, but they're earning less because there are fewer breakouts. There are fewer movie stars than there used to be. There are fewer giant bands than there used to be. And this is all because our attention There's so many things vying for it that we'd like put up this barrier and we don't want to look up. And it's very natural. And so having a Kickstarter gets that momentum behind you, starts to make noise.”
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
“Have a gravitational pull to what they've already been paying attention to. And they love the things that they love and getting anything else to achieve that escape velocity, to go off and to make a splash, any idea to not just crash and burn, to get out into the universe and draw the attention of other people is just super difficult. And most things like sit on the planet and never get up into the universe where everyone can see it. They crash and burn. And it's like this layer keeping people's attention away from paying attention to this thing over here. And in order to make any sort of noise, any sort of attention outside of a very small group, you need a certain amount of attention being paid to it so that you achieve this escape loss and you blasted out. And then the rest of the planets pay attention to it, not just the one that is your little little planet of attention.”
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
“Cuts through the noise. There's a certain principle I've started calling like escape velocity of attention. Escape velocity of attention is in today's media environment, it's like people's attention are”
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 learned that it was true. A crowdfunding campaign where you bring all of the Might of Your fan base together for one event.”
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
“Deal. Knowing that you can already produce these things at scale, have them arrive. Like a lot of people who do Kickstarters don't understand the sheer fact of these big trucks coming in can only go to certain places and they can only offload in certain ways. And some of them have need to high dock and some of them will have a ramp and you have to find out like where can they deposit these things. If you don't have a warehouse with a high dock, you better then know that the trucks are coming in with a ramp and a pallet jack. Otherwise, they're going to arrive and be like, all right, move these. And you're like, what do we do? We actually had one of those where they'd all had ramps before and then run arrived without. And they're like, all right, how are you getting this out? And we had to have like a bunch of people go into the back of the book and move them off of the pallets by box. So these are all lessons learned. So there's all these logistical things. The second thing.”
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
“Yep, they implode because managing and shipping and keeping everyone happy. When you do a what we were doing, where we're sending out a few thousand every month or things like that, people get their books in a timely way. In a Kickstarter, suddenly you have to figure out how to send 50,000 books and keep everyone updated on it, right? And you have to figure out how to get merchandise and books shipped together or in separate packages. That's a really big one because what we found with our books is we could drop ship the books direct from the printer, but not the merchandise, which comes in on different boats from around the world because you're printing them all in different places. And so we had to figure out how are we doing all this shipping, the logistics do kill a lot of people. And we were able to build that. So that's all behind the scenes stuff. That's a lesson. Having your logistics in place, knowing how you're going to fulfill if you are successful is a very big.”
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
“Preorder system. He's like, no, crowdfunding hits publicity in a different way. And I realized he's right. I should have been doing these. One of the problems with the pre-orders is we never knew how many to order, right? And with a Kickstarter, you get all those orders come in. And you have to pay a chunk to Kickstarter, but they have a nice back-end structure. We investigated that. And Kara, my person who's in charge of fulfillment, is like, this would be so much easier than what we're doing because you can mail merge all these things and they keep all of this track of all of the stuff with the shipping and the prices. It just makes it so much easier. Then there's the publicity side where you can start adding all of these add-ons and things. And so we tried one out with the way of King's Leather Mountain. It was successful, $7 million, which is pretty good. And then COVID hit.”
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 have a couple of big level up moments in my life. The first one is when I pitched Mistborn going from a laundress to Mistborn, where I said, I'm not doing sequel to Laundress. I'm doing this whole new thing, and I've got big aspirations. The next one is in the Wheel of Time hit me. The next one's when we started doing our leather bounds. And the most recent one is our Kickstarter. Now, I say our Kickstarter because it's the famous one. We'd actually done one before that hit $7 million. That was for the way of King's Leatherbound when we moved our leatherbounds from. So we did Elantris and the Mistborn Books and Warbreaker just as pre-orders during the 20 teens. And then coming to the 2020s, we said, all right, we're moving to Kickstarter. This happened actually because of my friend Howard Taylor, who was, he was one of my models where he's the guy who did a web comic, comic book that he sold the print editions in order to subsidize the free thing online. And he came to me and said, Brandon, you should be doing crowdfunding. I'm like, we have a nice.”
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 that's when we said, all right, it's time to level up. And I said, everyone's going to build a department. I want a full team for each one because we're going to go somewhere with this now that I have this team.”
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
“Set, right? We have for me, I have an editorial person, I have a creative development, which art person, and I have a publicity person. And then Emily has a person for shipping and for merchandise together. And then she hired a facilities person to kind of are little office at the time to clean it up, to make sure people need to change light bulbs and things like that. And then she handled herself all of the HR and things like that. And that's where we began. And that's what we were for like 10 years until the first Kickstarter where things exploded. And slowly we've been adding people to shipping and we've been shipping out of the house next door that we bought.”
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, the merch at that point was looking at doing t shirts and stickers and take over the shipping from Becky to have like a full in-house thing. So that's when we let Becky go. So she was our first employee. I'm nodding. She's over here in the corner. She eventually got hired again. She'll come back into this story. But then we have like a full-time person who is shipping and to come up with merchandising. And then I hire her husband. We hired them as team for 20 hours each a week. as 140-hour employee. He was an artist. He'd done all my art for Elantris, or Mistborn, saying Elantris for Mistborn. And she's the person we had been offloading our merchandise to so far that it started doing. We're like, we're bringing this in house. So posters, art prints, all of that stuff. Then our next employee is right around the same time is publicity and marketing altogether. That's Adam, whom you've met. So then we have our structure.”
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 is going back early, way back early. Bottom all, put them in our garage, couldn't park our car anymore. Then we hired Becky, who's my sister in law, to take the orders, we put them up on my website signed. And, you know, it's a trickle, 10 a week or even that many. But she was shipping that. So first person is shipping. Second person is editorial. Executive assistant editorial. Soon there's enough editorial work for him that I need another assistant. So then we hire merchandising person.”
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
“Little bit. So they had too many remainders. They said, Brandon, you can have these. It's a dollar apiece. I'm like, Entrepreneur, what does my mom say? You buy those books at a dollar and you sign them and you sell them at cover price and you use that to supplement your income, right? You're making $2,500 a year. You need to supplement that somehow. So I bought them all.”
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
“You're good at reminding me. You've been reminding me. So, publishing, like Tom Doherty said, he wants 10 books on the shelf and you really want to sell seven of those, seven to eight. If you sell everyone, that means you didn't put enough on the shelf. Someone walked into that store and couldn't buy a book. If you sell two, you actually printed way too many. Tom would still want them for publicity reasons, but industry kind of common sense says you want to have remainders somewhere around. Remainders are left over at the end of a print run. You want to have around 20%. Anything between 30 to 10% is fine. 40% starts to look sketchy and less than 10% is bad also. So you end up getting thousands of bookshipped back, right? Elantris, they printed 10,000 and they had remainders on Elantris, or non Lantris, Mistborn. Elantris, they didn't have remainders. They didn't print enough of them. Mistborn, they did. They actually overprinted.”
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
“That was hard. Art. So art. And so we started 2007. I hired my first employee. I broke out in 2005. 2007, I hired an assistant editor whose job is to do executive assistant and editorial work for me. Well, very soon. Oh, wait, you're actually our first. Becky's like you, that wasn't. He was our first full-time employee. Our first one, we hired Becky to do shipping. So actually our first employee is shipping. You're going to love this. My second book, they have remainders. You know what remainders are. You should explain.”
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
“Yes. Everything it's manufacturing shipping, it's HR, it's facilities. Basically, she's over that. So if you look at my org chart, Emily and I are at the top, and I am over what we call creative development, which early on was one person. All of these were one person. Creative development and publicity are kind of under 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
“So me and Emily. So Emily runs the business and I run the creative, right? So she does HR, she does accounting. She does operations is what we call it and all of that stuff”
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 worked, right? We started to do all the things that the publishers weren't doing. And then that's when I said, all right, now we're going to actually build a team and grow. And we moved to doing crowdfunding. It's really a lot better. We did pre-orders on the initial ones. We moved to crowdfunding. And that's when we went, my team all through the teens was maybe 10 people, probably didn't even quite get there.”
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
“No, we were wrong. And part of that is because I don't feel like I'm $50,000 worth of speaking, right? They're a really good motivational speakers that are maybe worth that. I don't think I am. My time is worth that. They would probably disagree. They're like, whatever. We have this money set aside for a speaker. It's what speakers cost. But the other thing is that's what my writing time was. And I love writing. And if I'm going to spend two days writing, I want to spend it writing. And nowadays, like it would be ridiculous for me to go do one of these things. It would cost like 400 grand. It'd be even worse. And so I did have to stop thinking about the hour, whatever, but it is a helpful metric for where you spend your time. Put your time where you're happy and excited, but also if you can choose among different things you're having cyanide, you can do that. So anyway, that's beside the point. I gave this challenge to my team.”
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 was able to hold line, but barely. At one point, I started to get popular enough that people wanted me in on the speaking tour. And so I put a dollar amount on it. I'm like, well, at that point, a day of writing, and it took me two days, a day of writing is 25 grand. So two days, 50 grand. And we put it up there instantly, like 10 inquiries. And I'm like. I don't want to do 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
“But the most money I can earn per hour, I can sign a thousand of those in an hour, and that's $250 each, which is just an unreal. If you think about that, that's like, yeah. That is bananas. My normal writing time, I can put a different dollar amount. It depends on what I'm writing. Did you?”
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 wind in that because if I sign my name, that's 250 because a leather bum. But I don't want to spend my life signing my name. I want to write the books.”
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, it is a quality problem to have. It means that my time suddenly got a very strange monetary constraint on it, which is something that I try to pay attention to, but not too much. I don't know if you've had this, but do you ever try to put a dollar amount on your time? And is that just madness for you?”
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