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

“Everyone signed that is in stock will just instantly sell. And so there's obviously a very big market. In fact, such a big market, I cannot physically produce enough of them to sell the signed ones. We have the unsigned ones that people still buy, but the signed ones go instantly.”
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
“Nowadays, yeah, leather bound. Leatherbound. Leather bounds at 100 to 250. Nowadays, our initial print runs are 50,000. Back then, it was 10,000 and then 5,000 more than 5,000 more, and then things like that, right? They will, everyone we get in stock will sell”
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
“In retrospect, they couldn't have done it. They couldn't have done it because it had to be direct to consumer. Part of the reason is the fans running out to buy the special edition of the bookstore. It's just that it's a bad methodology. So I said to my team, we're going to build these. We're going to do leatherbounds. They sold 250 copies. I want to sell 10,000, right? Well, we started five. I want to sell 5,000. We ended up selling 50,000”
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 our consumer. And I started with the leather bounce. My decision was this was something the market wanted. I kept hearing from fans they wanted them. I heard from the publisher they can't sell them. So I went to the publisher and said, can you give me those rights back? And he's like, sure, they're just free. We can't do anything with them. Maybe you can. And that's, again, to their credit, right? The publishers are that I've had.”
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 just can't figure out how to make them work. The bookstores can't sell merch. The bookstores can't sell the leather bounce because we printed 250 copies of the Wheel of Time leatherbounds and we had so much trouble selling them because fans didn't know where to get them. The bookstores didn't want to carry something that expensive that they weren't sure if they were going to sell. It was just all a big mess. And after a few years of this, I had numerous phone calls with the CEO of McMillan above even Tom Doherty, like the head dude. And I could not make any inroads. And that's when, you know, the voice of my mother whispered, well, Brandon, I trained you better than that. Do it yourself. And I said, I just have to. And so I got my team together. And I said, we are going to try to Amazon proof ourselves. That means we are going to direct sale. We are going to start building our own direct.”
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
“Different pricing tiers, letting people buy in to what they want. And I realized if people are buying into the expensive one, you can go lower on the cheap one. And the people who can't afford this or don't want it are happy. The people who want this are happy, everyone is more happy. And I went to the publisher. I'm like, we should be upselling to merchandise Lord of the Rings released these cool DVDs that came with bookends, Gollum bookends, right? Said we should be doing things like that for big books. We should be bundling ebook and audiobook with a hardcover. We should be selling leather bounce, really high-end nice ones, but we shouldn't be charging what you're charging. They were charging $250 for the leather bounce. I'm like, that's too high a price point. We should be doing $100 price point. And the publisher said to me, we can't do this. And they had some good reasons. I think they're not in surmountable, but their reasons were, look, the bookstores can't carry these special editions.”
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 buying merch there, whether it be buying the book online that is free, but you want to have a copy to show off. All the way down the really cheap product and in a lot of ways, if you have the really expensive thing, that subsidizes the really cheap product so that everybody can get the books. Everyone's served better by a variety of offerings.”
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 publishing blessed their hearts. They're still trapped in a lot of ways in the 1900s. Maybe the 1800s. They do not change very quickly. And I looked at other markets and I said, what is music doing? What is movies doing? What were music and movies? What were my friends who were independent comic publishers doing? You know Howard Taylor, who was on writing excuses with me. I'm like, what's he doing? He gives it away for free. If Amazon decides that my books are essentially free, how do I make a living? How's he making a living? He gives it away for free and he still makes a living. And I started to see some trends. And they involved having a variety of product prices. was having something really high end that the super fans could buy to display to show off whether that be the vinyl whether that be the equivalent of going to a concert”
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 no longer the case. Your audience, your market was not the bookstores. It was only Amazon. Amazon controlled everything. By then, they had Audible, and Audible has become the growth segment of the market. They controlled e-books and they were coming to control print books. And having one person be able to turn off my books was a big deal to me. It happened previously with the Alcatraz books where borders decided not to carry one of them. But Barnes& Noble did. And so it was still the book succeeded. And eventually borders came around and decided to carry it. There's only one person. They control your entire career. And I said, I cannot be subject. And that's when the big entrepreneurial part of my brain said, all right, let's change. I went to the publishers and I said, there are certain things I think we should be doing.”
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
“The shelf, even if only one of themselves. Because eventually, nine of them are going to sell. Ten of a copy because everyone will go and say, this must be an important book. They have 10 copies of it here. The best advertisement for a book is having as many on the shelf. And so your fight was to get the bookstores to carry your book.”
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
“Your eight dollars, and the publisher's like, Yeah, but people are going to expect books to be a dollar. And when you control the market, you're going to say, well, we're not paying you eight dollars on these books anymore. We're going to pay you the 70 cents that you would get off of a $1 book. And so whole panic, big contract disputes. Amazon is working very hard to become dominant in this market and the publishers are fighting them and Amazon turns off the ability to buy my books. And this was a wake-up call to me because it told me that the system was no longer what it had been all the way through the course of publishing history, all the way through publishing history, your audience, your buyers were the bookstores, really. Core were the bookstores. If you convinced the bookstores to shelve your books, then people went to the bookstores and the more books you have in the shelf, the more you sold. Old publishing adage that Tom Doherty, founder of Tor, very smart man would say is like, I want to have 10 books on.”
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
“Doesn't sound like very much to be a bestseller, but I hit that bestseller list in the wheel of time happen, and my entire life changed. And I'm sure we'll get to that. But about 2012 through 2014, I started to realize some things. Somewhere in there, I can't remember the exact date. You can look it up. Amazon turned off the ability to buy all Macmillan books. Tour my publishers, a subsidiary of Macmillan. This was because of their contract disputes. Amazon wanted to price ebooks cheaper to sell Kindles. They wanted the loss lead in order to control the market, which was very smart on their end, but the publishers were panicking about driving book prices to the basement because if Amazon sells them for a dollar, at the point Amazon is selling for a dollar and paying us on those books like $8. And they're like, what's the problem? We sell them for a dollar. You still make.”
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 Mistborn 3 was my first one. Very low on. It was either Mistborn 3. It might have been Warbreaker. But it's four or five, hit like the Times list went to 35 then, and I hit like number 35, right? Still counts. Still counts. Still counts. It was for 2,000 copies in a week”
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
“Meager sum. I fortunately was married to someone who was making very sweet, great income as a public school teacher. She was the sugar mama. We were living on her 22,000 a year as a public school teacher, but she supported me while I was doing that and breaking in with those books. We did meet after I'd at least sold one. So I at least had something to say, look, it's real. It made us $5,000 this year, or made me, we weren't married then. But you know what I mean? And so, yeah, first year of marriage, I made $2,500. That was what I grand total I contributed. But at that point, your job is to get stable. And the danger point after, like there's two danger points. One is never selling a book, but the number two danger point is your second book. We talked a little bit about this. Second book is like do or die time. And I can talk all about like I, it was pretty big do or die for me. But then it stabilized.”
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 I realized, well, now the job is to make this a career because I sold my book for a grand total of $10,000 that was broken across three years. So I made $5,000 and then $2,500 and then $2,500. So you can imagine that's not 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
“About book six. Right around, and I hit perfectly at Dave's class about when I was working on book six, I started sending out query letters and things like that on some of the earlier ones and started collecting my rejection letters and things like that. And then I took Dave's class and I started flying out to these conventions and trying to meet editors in person and just kind of hearing from their mouths what they want, what they're buying, what they're interested in, and trying to target my books at them. By that point that I was doing that I had eight or nine and six, seven, and eight were pretty good books. Any one of those three probably could have broken me out. I didn't ever publish seven or eight. I just published six. Then I sell a book.”
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
“Race bank account. Number six. That was go time. That was go time, right? Ride Elantris. And at that point, my goal was only, I'm going to try to conquer this and become a professional writer. If I can earn a living doing this, I will have been successful But then I did. Actually, it took me a few more years. I wrote 13 novels before I sold one. I sold number six after I'd finished number 13, which was Way of King's Prime. And we can talk about there's kind of a dark moment of the soul happens before that where I'm in book number 12 and I'm like, what am I doing? 12 bucks and no one's buying them. Maybe I'm really bad at this. But anyway, when did you start?”
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 in a different world. So that's their similarity. And Game of Thrones is this. The Game of Thrones borrows a little from heroic. That's kind of his secret sauce. He takes heroic characters and sticks them in epic fantasy plot. And then they just start getting killed off because they're living in a much more brutal version of an epic fantasy world than most of them. Epic is me and Robert Jordan and things like that. That's epic fantasy. It's just stakes of the world.”
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
“Token. You can say that some of the heroic epics had a big part in this too, right? Gilgamesh even and stuff like that. But this idea of epic fantasy is the movements of worlds. The world is at stake. Secondary world is what we call it. It's very removed from our planet. All new rules, all new world, all new magic. And it's this idea. They're the big thick ones. They're kind of like historical epics.”
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 had met at conventions and been on panels together, and Joe is a riot. Like if you get a chance, if he's anywhere that you can go see him, Joe has this magic to turn any panel into an enjoyable panel, no matter who's on it with him. And so I won't say that I'm best buds with Joe. I don't know Joe really well, but professional colleagues, and I love being on a panel with him. He makes me look intelligent and funny, which I love. So we've got Portal Fantasy. We've got heroic fantasy, right? Michael Moorecock, all of that stuff. Then we have epic fantasy. And epic fantasy is termed by completely different fantasy world. The other two are generally have roots in our world. Portal, you start in our world, and heroic tends to be kind of our world. The modern ones aren't. But, you know, Conan takes place in the prehistory of our world and things like that. Epic fantasy really starts with.”
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 I did this thing in the airport. I left my book. I took a picture of it in the spot. And I'm getting in the line to get on the plane, right? And I get a tweet. And it's from Joe. And he says, Sanderson, my books next year's and you didn't sign it. And I'm like, well, it's not my book. He's like, sign my book, Sanderson, and all caps, exclamation, exclamation point. And so I have to leave the line. They're calling the line. Run to the bookstore, sign Joe Abercrami's book, take a picture of it. It and say, your book is signed by me, and then I did make my flight, but I almost missed my flight signing Joe's book. So someone out there went and bought Joe's book signed by me because I.”
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
“Tangent. I am flying to Spain, right? And Joe is going to meet me there because we're doing con together. It's called Celsius. I'm actually going back this year. So I'm passing through Amsterdam. And I did a thing back then. Maybe we'll talk about it now. I signed my books in airports. I would see a book of mine at an airport bookstore. I would sign it and I would post on Twitter. And I'd say, I signed my book. First one gets there, gets to get the book, right? This was a thing of mine. My fans loved it. I don't travel that way as much anymore and there's fewer airport bookstores. They've all died off. So I don't really do it anymore. But for a while, I did that. They named it brandalizing.”
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 heroic man versus evil wizard. A lot of the old serials were that. And in modern terms, our grim dark kind of line, you kind of look at Joe Abercrombie as kind of the modern version of 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
“So, epic fantasy fantasy in short follows three main lines of dissent. One line comes from what we call portal fantasies. And you're kind of line of descent of that starts in the modern era with Alice in Wonderland, goes to Narnia, and Harry Potter's one of the more examples. This is kids from our world get sucked into a fantasy world and experience it's usually young adult focused. You can trace that all the way back to the old stories of the fairy tales, people go into the woods and then come out of the woods. They go into the fancy world, come out, right? The second line is what we call heroic fantasy. Heroic fantasies lines kind of really starts with the Greek epics and Beowulf, but in modern terms, you would recognize Conan as the progenitor. It is heroic men fighting against the monsters of the world and taming them and, you know, just kind of destroying 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
“I had an agent, before I had anything, before I even knew what an agent was, before I had taken Dave's class, I took Dave's class the year that I finished Elantris, which is book number six. I had just finished that one. And so I said, all right, book six, that's a launch. That's the one I eventually ended up selling. Those five I'd written in different subgenres, I knew I'd like sci-fi fantasy, but the risk of being too nerdy, my subgenres, I did an epic fantasy. I did a comedic fantasy, a Terry Pratchett style sort of thing. I did a cyberpunk. I did a space opera. And then I wrote a sequel to my epic fantasy to kind of be like, is this what I want to do?”
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
“First novel. Now he did a ton of revisions on that. He spent as much time revising that book as I spent writing mine. But for me, the good advice was your first five books are terrible. Don't stress.”
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 didn't have test readers. I just wrote the books. And again, this is why the advice can be bad. There's some people out there that would be bad advice for. Pat Raffus published his first book and it's brilliant, the name of the wind. Yeah.”
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, I didn't send them out. I did eventually, I shared number five with some people. I got involved with the local science fiction magazine as an editor. I eventually took it over because that's what I do and I was head editor. And I eventually said, well, I do have a book. And I started sharing book five with people right around the world.”
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
“The aspirations, well, they started small, they started with, you know what, I want to be able to make a living from writing. Got back from Korea and said, all right. I am not very good at this writing thing, but I really, really love it. I could tell because when I spent time doing the writing, time didn't matter anymore, right? I could spend hours doing this. And it's the first thing I found other than reading or video games that I could spend hours doing and just come out of it feeling tired but fulfilled. And I'm like, I want to do this. So I sat down and I took what I'd learned, both kind of from my mother and kind of missions have kind of a regimented structure. And I said, I'm going to apply this all to writing. And I'm going to start writing books. And I heard your first five books are generally terrible. I said, well, that's good. I don't have to be good yet. It took a lot of pressure off me. I said, I'm going to write six. And the first five I'm not going to send out to any publishers. Wow. Right. And that's bad.”
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
“All right, so you're right. Most writers want to sell a book and live that kind of dream you see presented in film and television, which is accurate to the top percentage of writers. Most writers you read about or see in film are the big ones. They're doing really well. And so they're often a cabin telling their story. Or they're the ones that have to be pried away from their easy chair to get them to even do any publicity whatsoever, right? They want to live that life that is the classic life of a writer. And there's some of me that wants that. But the secret is I was raised by an accountant and a businessman. And particularly my mother, that accountant, she instilled into me some aspirations. And I call this my superpower. My superpower is to be an artist raised by an accountant, 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
“Where you're writing? I write for my home office. I do like to move around. I go in the gazebo. Lately, I've gone in the gazebo when it's really cold. And I hire one of my kids to come put logs on a fire for me. And I sit by the fireplace. Sometimes I like to be on the beach. Sometimes I like when I'm around here. I like to be in different places. I can set up a hammock here or there. Say with my laptop, I do not work at a desk. That's really sustainable. It's worked for me for the last 20 years.”
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 this schedule, you'll notice I don't have to worry about commuting, which gives me an advantage here, has been really sustainable for 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
“And that gave me this permission. It actually came in a moment, my wife. I went out to dinner with some writer friends. And afterward, I'm like, that was such a great dinner. And she's like, yeah, but you didn't look at me once. And I realized she had become invisible to me because the writing was consuming all. And so made that change. 1030 kids are supposed to go to bed. They're older now. They just don't. But sometime around there, they drift off. My wife goes to bed. She was a schoolteacher for many years, still kind of keeps a school teacher's hour since she is wonderful for getting up with the kids. I don't have to do that and never have. And I go back to work at about 11. I write from 11 to 3. And then three to four or five is just whatever I want to do. That's the real goof off time. That's the go play with my magic cards time. That's the play a video game. Pop out the Steam Deck time.”
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
“Highly successful people. I think a lot of them are going to talk about the same thing, that it's very hard to be there with people when you're there with 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
“And then I'm done. I go, I shower at 6:30. I'm ready to hang with my family. And I'll be with family from 6 until 6.30 to 10.30. Go out with my wife, hang with my kids, build some Legos, play some video games, whatever it is. I learned early in my career one of the most important things I ever did was take that time and demarcate it as non-writing time. I found early in my marriage that writing it will consume every moment possible. And I was always anxious to get back to the story. And as soon as I changed my brain and said, no, no, no, no. Even if your wife is away 6.30 to 10.30 can't be writing time. It is off limits. You have to do something else. Suddenly, it was a lot easier for me to be there for my family. And I think, I mean, you've interviewed a lot of highly productive.”
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 I will go to the gym, which is different from me than other people. The gym is writing time for me. I'm not hitting it super hard. I am there to think through what I'm doing. Some motion moving your body. Number one, it's good for you, but that's a side effect for me too. I can put on music and I can move and I can think about what I'm going to write. Then I go and I work from two until six these days is usually what I do one until five, something 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
“So, I find that for what I do and where my personal psychology is, an eight-hour block is not sustainable for writing. This means I can do it for a week or two at eight hours, but it's going to brain drain me. It's going to exhaust me. I get done with eight hours and I am mentally worn out. I find that if I do two four hour blocks instead, I never quite get there and it's more sustainable. And so what I do is I will get up. I get up late. I get up at around noon or 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
“Just wrong. Something is fundamentally wrong with this story. And I don't want to release it till I know what that is. Sometimes you might figure that out and be able to fix it. Sometimes you might look at that and be like, you know what? I don't mind if people have this response. This is the piece of art and this piece of art is going to have this response from some percentage of the audience. That's maybe not a selling point, but it is part of the art. But with those three books, I put them aside. And with Way of Kings, I eventually figured out what it was and I tried it again. The other two I haven't gotten there yet.”
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 story. At the time, and I've been studying Game of Thrones, and I'm like, I want to write something like this. And so I started with a huge cast. Up front, not recognizing that both of those examples I gave started with a cast who was relatively small, that over the course of several books grew into this complex web of different characters having different relationships. And it had this nice onboarding. And so what I did is I wrote a book that was the beginnings of like 10 characters stories and didn't get through any of them. It was all over the place. And the other was I have the wrong personality. Something feels wrong. And as an artist, I just say, I don't know what this is yet. I put it aside. Once in a while, it happens during Alpha and Beta reads. I'm getting the wrong response. People are reading this book and they are thinking something completely opposite from what I wanted them to. The parts that I wanted them to enjoy, they're bored by, or the character I wanted them to click with, they're just annoyed by and aren't interested in. And you realize something 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
“Even sure what it is for a while. When I put aside the Way of Kings, the 2002 version, we call it Way of Kings Prime, I put it aside and said, I don't know why this went wrong. It was actually two things. It wasn't just having Kaladin have the wrong personality. It was that I went into this book, wanted to write a giant epic while reading The Wheel of Time, which was one of my favorite book series at the time. It was before I had taken it over. This was five years before I would get that call.”
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 you get done with the chapter, and you're like, that just did not work. I'm going to toss that and start over the next day. Amateurs have a lot of trouble with this in my experience. There's a lot of causes of writer's block, but one of the main ones I'm convinced is that you're writing the chapter wrong. You have enough instincts as a writer because you've practiced long enough to know you should throw it away, but you don't want to because you did the work, but your instincts won't let you continue doing it wrong. And you're not willing to toss it and try over. And so there is that. What happens with a whole book? You done with the whole book in one of a couple of things happen with all with two of the three of these books. I get done and I'm like, that just doesn't give me the shine, the feel, the feel of excitement that I want this book to have. There's something fundamentally wrong with it. And sometimes not.”
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
“Know, it's happened to me three major times where I've done it. And of those only one did I ever come back to. Two of them I parked and have laid fallow. One important mindset is kind of a ground rule is remembering as a writer that the piece of art is not necessarily just the story you're creating, that you are the piece of art. The time you spend writing is improving you as a writer. And that is the most important thing. The book is almost a side product. Not really, but it almost is to the fact that you are becoming, you are the art. And if you know that, it helps a lot. One of the things that pros do that amateurs have trouble with in writing is prose throw away chapters a lot, in my experience. You write it and”
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 these things were threading the needle, so to speak, where you've got this character, you need them to go through this plot, but you need to make sure they feel like they're a real person. So you can't hold them to any one point, but you can make it come together, hopefully.”
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
“300,000 words long, with the character having the wrong personality the entire time. And it was only at the end that I'm like, this is just wrong. And I threw the book away, wrote it again eight years later with a different personality, and it worked. But in order to have the characters live and breathe and feel like real people, I feel like I need to give them that volition, which is kind of destructive for that all that narrative structure I've come up with. That's good because having that structure and then saying, all right, now that I know what this person would do, how does that influence how they would actually approach this structure? And I'll go and I'll change that. And knowing about promise, progress, payoff, which I couldn't have named for you back in 2004 when I was writing Missborn, but I kind of understood intrinsically. I could tweak to the character personalities as I went so that I was making sure.”
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 Arden, not science. It just, and sometimes it doesn't work, and you don't figure it out till late. Like my most famous series, they're probably mistborn in the Stormlight Archive or about Tied for most famous. Stormlight, I wrote an entire novel.”
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, is it? How do I walk the line between nerding out and making it feel like approachable? Because I don't want my books to read like an encyclopedia entry or a video game, right? I want it to read like a new branch of science that's really fun. And then character, I'll have these things. And so with the character, you'll notice these are seeds. Vin is like this, Kelsey is like this. I don't know yet how their interaction is going to go and how they're going to be. In fact, I wrote three chapters within first, three different first chapters trying different personalities. I started her with an artful dodger type, really confident moving in the underworld, ripping people off, and it just did not work. And then I tried another one. I can't even remember what that one was, but then I tried a third one, which is the personality she ended up with. Tailscare I kind of had right from the get-go.”
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 exists for me generally a new document that says does setting at the top, then character, then plot. And the setting will have, and some of the Dark Lord won, that's setting stuff, right? What is a world look like where the Dark Lord is won and ruled for a thousand years? In my books, I like to have an interesting use of magic. We can talk about that at some point. Yeah, we will.”
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
“By force in her, who's lost it? And she becomes the apprentice to him as he recruits her into the team. And this idea of a heist where these two people are growing.”
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 just been coasting on my charm and has a crisis of conscience on should I be actually using this to do something? And what happens is his wife is killed, his heist goes wrong, and he decides he wants revenge and he's going to do it by robbing the Dark Lord, right? That's my concept for him. My concept for Vin, who's the other main character is this idea of a young woman who lives in this world who has the magical talent and doesn't know it. I'm looking for a conflict, right? For her conflict is she's managed to remain a good person, but she's lost her belief that anyone else is good. She gets betrayed in some ways that just makes her give up on kind of humanity in general. And the idea is putting them two together. Kelsey, who still kind of has this deep and abiding optimism, he's like, I'm going to do something good. He's learned optimism, right? He's learned I need to do something good with my life.”
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 can't think of a major story that has done a full on heist in fantasy. I was super excited. Then I realized fantasy heist. Dark Lord won, team of thieves rob the Dark Lord. I have a plot. That's like, that's my inception. Meanwhile, I want a good idea for each character. And so Mistborn's about two characters. One is about Kelseier, who is my concept for him for myself was the gentleman thief who had lived his life, you know, conning people kind of small time cons, but living among upper society where he liked to do, that something went.”
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