Little Big Kickstarter
Plus: The Weirdly Mean Wired Article
Last week I wrote about Leigh Bardugo’s big book deal, and therein I mentioned Brandon Sanderson, aka Branderson, aka Brando Sando, and his Kickstarter, but I did not get around to covering that topic. I thought this essay would be a nice bookend to that one; if you have not yet read the previous, I hope you will. Together, these offer (what I think is) an interesting vision of some of the directions in which publishing may be headed.
In this order, I’m going to talk about:
Kickstarter
Brandon Sanderson
Brandon Sanderson’s Kickstarter
The weirdly mean Wired article
(if there’s space) Possible futures of publishing
Probably that last bullet could be its own article, if not its own newsletter.
Anyway, briefly, I’ll describe Kickstarter for those who are not familiar. Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform. Crowdfunding is the process of raising money for something by getting a little bit of money from a lot of different people—ordinary people, not professional investors. There are different types of crowdfunding. For instance, the type where contributors fund an artist so that person can create content (like Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee). Also, the type where contributors fund an event or expense for someone who needs financial assistance (like GoFundMe). Then there’s the kind Kickstarter is (and Indiegogo, among others), where contributors fund a project or product that someone is trying to bring to market.
Some notable Kickstarters you may have heard of include Levar Burton’s Kickstarter to bring back Reading Rainbow, the tabletop game Exploding Kittens, and the Critical Role film. If you haven’t heard of any of those things I’ll explain. Someone like, say Levar Burton says, “I’d like to bring back Reading Rainbow but I don’t have the money to do it.” Funds are needed to pay for production—actors, film crew, editing, all that stuff. Burton posts this project on Kickstarter and advertises it. Tiered rewards are set for backers (you can browse the reward tiers for the now-closed Reading Rainbow Kickstarter at the link above to get an idea).
Backers pledge money to the project in exchange for rewards. The reward often is or contains the item that is being Kickstarted, with higher tiers offering perks like early access or special editions. If the project receives enough pledges to meet its funding goal by the deadline, then the pledges are collected by Kickstarter and delivered to the project initiator, who then is responsible for delivering the rewards to backers and delivering whatever product or project the Kickstarter was for.
If the project does not raise enough pledges fund, the pledges are not collected. Even after funding, Kickstarted projects might still not see the light of day if the initiator fails to finish the project. This risk of pledging and then paying to fund a project and the project not coming to fruition is an inherent risk of backing Kickstarter.
Okay so that’s what a Kickstarter is. Now: What’s a Branderson?
First, Brandon Sanderson is a really big deal in epic fantasy. Is he like a household-name famous author? Depends on the household. There are very few (living) authors who I think would have name recognition in pretty much every American household, among them Stephen King, JK Rowling, John Grisham, Tom Clancy. The next tier of household-name-famous authors is “depends on the household” and contains almost every other living author because, hey, every author is probably a famous author to someone’s household. At the top of that tier probably are names like George RR Martin, Margaret Atwood, Danielle Steel, Nora Roberts, Nicholas Sparks, maybe Haruki Murakami.
Then a bit further down that tier are the authors who are famous with their dedicated genre readers but maybe not necessarily outside that, for instance, Stephenie Meyer. Everybody would know what I was talking about if I said, “Twilight, you know, Edward and Bella? Sparkly vampires?” but not everybody would know Meyer’s name to hear it. Robert Jordan (The Wheel of Time), Neil Gaiman—these folks have some name recognition (and streaming TV shows for their properties, which helps) but if you’re not a fan of the genre—or even a casual fan—you might not know those names.
I mean, all this is colored by my own perspective but I’m trying to be as unbiased and accurate as possible.
Brandon Sanderson is a fantasy author who has been publishing novels since 2005. In that time (18 years), he has published more than fifty titles (a mix comprised mostly of novels, with some novellas, short story collections, and graphic novels mixed in). He is one of the most prolific authors writing today. He writes epic fantasy (Elantris, Mistborn series, Stormlight Archives), science fiction (Cytoverse), middle-grade fantasy (Alcatraz), plus he wrote the last three Wheel of Time novels after Robert Jordan died and has done a Magic the Gathering tie-in novel among other standalones.
Brandon Sanderson has sold more than 20 million books—he’s in the same sales range as Colleen Hoover, who you also might not have heard of if, again, you don’t follow YA romance—and books from his Mistborn and Stormlight Archive series are among the bestselling fantasy of the century so far. In other words, if you read fantasy you already know who this is and if you don’t, you just need to know that he’s among the biggest names in fantasy right now.
Here’s where it gets really interesting and we put Kickstarter plus Brando Sando together. A little over a year ago, on March 1, 2022, Sanderson announced that, in addition to the novels he owed to his publishers (the next installments in his various ongoing series plus whatever else he had under contract), he had also written four extra novels during the COVID pandemic—during the copious free time he had, as the father of three kiddos—that were uncommitted to any publishing company.
Instead of shopping those four novels to a publisher, Sanderson decided to publish them himself, through his own publishing company, Dragonsteel Books, which at this time publishes only Sanderson’s stuff. To fund the publishing operation, Sanderson launched a Kickstarter to raise $1,000,000 from his fans. Their reward would be the books four—ebooks, audiobooks, hardcovers, all of the above, depending on contribution, with higher and higher tiers offering more and more extras.
The project funded in 24 hours, the fastest project ever to fund on Kickstarter, and went on to raise more than $41,000,000—forty million dollars more than the original ask.
Any publisher would be over the moon if they presold $10 million of a book without revealing a single thing about it except who the author was. Imagine preselling $10 million each of four books at once without giving up the title, logline, synopsis, or anything except to say that one of them would be Stormlight Archive–adjacent.
When you read last week’s Shelf Life about Leigh Bardugo scoring an eight-figure deal for twelve titles over several years? Sanderson got eight figures for four titles and he got it all at once and he doesn’t (necessarily) have to break any off to his agent (Kickstarter does take 5 percent).
This is the ultimate self-publishing gambit. No agent taking a piece, no publisher taking a piece, and millions of dollars forked over by the customers before the books even hit press. All managed by the author’s publishing company, under sole control of the author.
If Bardugo’s big score is lighting up dollar signs and daydreams in the hearts and minds of authors who want to be traditionally published, Branderson’s situation is doing the same for authors who want to self-publish. This is the deal anyone would want for themself.
So what’s the deal with the Wired article? First, you can read it for yourself: Brandon Sanderson Is Your God. The author of the article took the position that Brandon Sanderson is one of the bestselling and most prolific authors of the twenty-first century (true) but outside his niche/genre there’s no name recognition, nobody knows who he is (true?), and so the author set out to meet him, interview him, and write about him.
The resulting article is weirdly mean-spirited. Sanderson is painted as a weird nerd—I mean, he probably is, most sci-fi/fantasy writers are, to some degree, weird nerds, I am including myself in that weird nerd demographic—in ill-fitting clothes, a Mormon (factually true) who is not a very good writer (not true, in my opinion).
I think if you entertain that many readers you’re a good writer. Period. I don’t think it has anything to do with how elegant your sentences are or anything like that. Entertaining readers so well that they’ll line up to read anything you write ever after is about as good as you can get.
The whole time I was reading this Wired article it felt like reading The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss, which have an insufferable narrator but you know his comeuppance and redemption are coming. But, like The Kingkiller Chronicles, which Patrick Rothfuss stopped writing before the end, the comeuppance and redemption never come. I was waiting for a moment of clarity where the article writer would say, “Hey, I had this all wrong. My hubris and prejudice (and possibly my jealousy?) were obscuring my vision” but nah. It’s pretty petty all the way through.
I’ve been interested to see the social reaction to the Wired article versus the social reaction to the Leigh Bardugo press release the previous week. Anecdotally, most of what I saw on writing/book Twitter about the Bardugo news was, “wow no one needs this much money can’t the publisher spread some of that around instead of dumping it all on one person?” and most of what I saw about the Sanderson news was, “if you come for Brando Sando we will find you and we will kill you.”
I can’t—I can’t—like I can’t even start unpacking that with the tip of my ten-foot pole. Okay.
I think the Sanderson Kickstarter is creating unrealistic expectations for self-publishing the way the Bardugo deal will create unrealistic expectations for trad publishing. Most people—including (not all but) most authors!—do not live and breathe the ins and outs of the publishing industry, follow its news, take notes on its comings and goings and trends and fads. And this is normal. When you’re an author you don’t work in the publishing industry, you work with the publishing industry. An author is their own employer. They don’t work for the publisher. They don’t come to work each day in our office.
(It does make my day, and always has, when an author comes to the office to visit.)
So when publishing-industry news becomes big enough for layfolks to hear about it, that’s the only part of the picture they have. I’ve heard authors over the last year (both on social and in conversations I’ve had with individuals)—particularly those who are hoping to publish that first title or make the move from self- to trad publishing—comment that obviously Kickstarter is the way to fund your self-published novel and why didn’t anyone think of it sooner!
Backers don’t cough up funding for authors they don’t know the way they do for Branderson, just like publishers don’t cough up dozen-book deals for authors they don’t know the way they do for Bardugo. Just as Bardugo is a sure bet for the publishers who signed her check, so is Sanderson a sure thing for his readers. They know they are going to like whatever he puts out. They’ve had more than fifty titles to decide if they like his work enough to buy whatever he puts out, sight unseen, on the strength of his byline only. (The answer is $40 million worth of “yes.”)
Fortunately, the financial bar to entry for self-publishing is fairly nonexistent. It doesn’t cost anything to self-publish except the time it took you to write the manuscript (plus a little extra for uploading). But there’s also not a $40 million payday coming for most of us. And it’s not even the payday that’s necessarily putting the glimmers in eyes at the thought of this—it’s also the idea that you could gauge market appetite before you put your heart and soul into something, by seeing how many people back it on the concept. It’s also the potential to raise funds that make the difference between a digital-only release and a beautiful hardcover edition. Having backers to fund copyediting and cover design.
I’m interested to see whether more successful authors follow this model and branch out into crowdfunded self-publishing, and whether crowdfunding becomes a viable method for less-well-known and new authors to break into the markets. I guess time will tell.
Brandon Sanderson’s first of four surprise Kickstarter novels is available now as an ebook, with print editions shipping later this spring.
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