SFF titan Brandon Sanderson looks back over his storied 20-year career

I am surprised when SFF titan Brandon Sanderson tells me he enjoys writing in a hammock. Surely, I thought, he would be writing in what he described previously as his “underground supervillain lair” – a decadent space built 30ft beneath the ground of his home in northern Utah. But no, it is much simpler, and here we are on a Thursday evening chatting about hammocks. “One of my favourite things to do is be able to write on the beach in a hammock,” he says, grinning over video call. He also writes in the hammock on his front porch.

Sanderson has been heralded as the heir of JRR Tolkien. His magnum opus, The Stormlight Archive, a 10-book series split into two five-book arcs, has been described as “The Iliad from another solar system”. Since the 2005 publication of his debut Elantris, the story of a ruined city and its people, Sanderson has become stratospherically successful, penning over 30 books for more than £14m through Nielsen BookScan. This figure jumps over £2.5m if you include the three Wheel of Time novels Sanderson was asked to complete by the late Robert Jordan’s wife in 2009. Some estimates put Sanderson’s total net worth north of £50m.

Like the hobbits who save Middle-earth from Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, Sanderson’s stories feature seemingly ordinary people raised to positions of power by virtue of their character rather than their might. Scholars, surgeons, thieves, outlaws and aristocrats populate the pages of his books, fighting against forces of darkness and oppression. Although he vacillates between epic and cosy fantasy, SF and short stories, most of Sanderson’s writings are set in the Cosmere, a fantastical universe that he describes as a “giant, interconnected, epic fantasy world [where] a long time ago there was this deific force that was destroyed and a bunch of its power went around. The Cosmere is about what normal people do when they inherit the power of a deity”. However, readers can enjoy the books discretely – the way the Cosmere stories interconnect is an extra bonus for his fandom.

And what a fandom it is. In 2022, the world saw the full force of Sanderson’s fans when he announced a Kickstarter campaign that offered readers the chance to buy four secret books he had written during the Covid-19 pandemic across a tiered price commitment. The project raised more than $41m, a record-breaking amount for the platform, and, crucially, readers made their pledges knowing very little about the books – the fact they were written by Sanderson was enough. The four novels were designed, produced and shipped in-house by Sanderson’s business Dragonsteel Entertainment, which he co-founded with his wife Emily. In 2023, fans were treated to what he dubbed “the year of Sanderson” as the four books gradually made their way to his backers.

Dragonsteel not only produces a convention akin to Comic Con that celebrates Sanderson’s work and an immersive experience called the Worldhopper Ball, it also allows Sanderson to publish independently of Tor and Gollancz, his respective US and UK publishers. He sees himself as an “indie author” in an “odd position”, straddling both self and traditional publishing. “Most people will buy their first book of mine from a bookseller not from me.” Hopefully, the casual reader will become a fan “and they’ll want to get the leather-bound [from me]. That’s how my business works”. He continues: “I depend on booksellers to sell my trade editions, and I sell upgraded versions. I sell to people who are already fans of my work… My goal is only to have Dragonsteel add value, not to take over.”

Sanderson set out to build a loyal readership early in his career. “I grew up in an era where I never knew when new books were coming out… and so when I broke in one of the things I wanted to do was use the internet, which was relatively new [at the time]. I realised: ‘Hey, maybe my fans, if I’m lucky to have them, won’t have to be in the dark like I was.’” And so, Sanderson began blogging, “microblogging” and posting on social media to keep readers updated.

“The publisher was like: ‘Well, we can’t really afford to send you on tour, it takes $2,000 a day to put an author on tour.’ I’m like ‘$2,000?! I can do two weeks for that…’. And so they gave me $2,000 and I drove.”

There was “immediate pay-off”. Initially, during Sanderson’s first book tour, when he accompanied the late Dave Wolverton, “nobody” was there to see him for Mistborn: The Final Empire, the first in a trilogy published in 2006 by Tor. But Sanderson kept blogging, kept posting and then – while on his second tour with Wolverton,   promoting The Well of Ascension – “my fan base at the readings was the same size as his”, all because “I was posting on the internet. This doesn’t sound revolutionary now, but back then it was”.  By the third tour, Sanderson’s signing lines were “three times as long because the fans just knew where to go… I still remember how powerful that was”. To this day, Sanderson maintains clear lines of communication with his readers. The homepage on his website displays progress bars, charting the status of four projects he is working on simultaneously. He also produces two podcasts and posts regular updates on YouTube.

Sanderson worked relentlessly for decades to reach this point in his career. Before he was a household name, he wrote during graveyard shifts working at a hotel. “I wrote 13 novels before I sold one,” he explains. “This is in part because I was not a good reader when I was young. I discovered books when I was a teenager and really got into it at that point.”

He describes the period after selling Elantris as being even more stressful than being an unpublished author. Now that he had a glimmer of success, the question became: “‘Will I be able to do this for a career?’ Getting that taste of ‘I have a book that is sold, but will I be able to do this for a career?’ is really, really stressful.”

And so, Sanderson took control. “I wasn’t a big enough deal to fly around,” he explains. “The publisher was like: ‘Well, we can’t really afford to send you on tour, it takes $2,000 a day to put an author on tour.’ I’m like ‘$2,000?! I can do two weeks for that…’. And so they gave me $2,000 and I drove.” In each city, Sanderson would track down all the bookshops: “I would have a big map with them all circled. I would take an entire day after my book signing and I would drive to every bookstore in the city.” In each bookshop, he would find the “science fiction reader on staff” and give them a signed copy of his latest book. “I did that for several years in a row and, to this day, I have people come to my signings and they’re like: ‘You came through my little indie bookstore in San Diego and I was the sci-fi nerd you gave a copy of Mistborn to and I sold 300 copies of that book.’”

Describing Sanderson as an author seems inadequate; he is a master worldbuilder, able to construct intricate fantastical landscapes and characters on the page while bringing that same flair to his business strategy and fandom. The hard work paid off. Sanderson is now one of the most important voices in SFF of this century. “Now I am able to rest in the hammock that the Brandon in his late 20s and early 30s built,” he laughs.