If you haven't heard, fantasy author Brandon Sanderson is running a campaign on the internet. The most successful Kickstarter of all time, with $30 million in pledges and more money rolling in every day, is Four Secret Novels by Brandon Sanderson. The Lost Metal: A Mistborn Novel will be arriving this fall and is one of the four new secret novels that Sanderson has been busy with lately. If you don't know him, he's an epic fantasy author who has been publishing with one of the premiere SFF publishers in the business since 2005. He has many books under his belt, including the Stormlight Archives and the last three books of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. The $30 million fundraiser is the result of 20 years of hard work, humility, and accessibility, as well as a science-fiction/fantasy fanbase that is well-known to have money to spend on their favorite creators. You can only see that if you look at other projects, like Critical Role's animation or Magpie Games. The nerds are waiting for their favorites to deliver. In a new interview with Daniel Greene, Sanderson talks about his newest project and the state of traditional publishing. When an author acquires an agent, they usually sell that author's book to a publishing house. Self-publishing has long been the domain of zines, chapbooks, and most recently Amazon, but what Sanderson is doing is very clearly not traditional publishing. Many of the companies that are hybrid between traditional publishing and self-publishing are little more than companies that authors pay to produce their book. The accessibility of Amazon and the global nature of the marketplace are some of the reasons why self-publishing is gaining popularity. It has not upset traditional publishers. A $30 million dollar campaign for four books might turn heads. In the interview, he says that he doesn't want to abandon traditional pub forever. His reasoning? There are bookstores. The self-pub route makes it hard to distribute copies to bookstores, and there is no current plan to do so. Traditional publishing has an advantage here. Its distribution model can compete with Amazon, and it relies on bookstores. There is very little competition for Amazon out there, and bookstores are the best against Amazon, according to Sanderson. The more bookstores are lost, the harder it is for new authors to break into the industry.
He is partially correct. He doesn't mention that only a small amount of books were written by authors of color. The hoops debut authors have always had to go through, but have always been more difficult for people of color, queer people, and people with disabilities. There is an advantage to being a straight, white male in a white-dominated industry.
The struggles of people of color in publishing are well documented. Disney's response to Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill has caused a lot of problems with straight people gatekeeping queer media. In publishing, the racism, homophobia, and sexism that exist in the real world are heightened because the reviewers are mostly cis, straight, white men. There are some things about traditional publishing that I think are backward- thinking, and I wanted to kind of prove to them a bunch of things.
I'd like to know what he's been saying because it's the product of Dragonsteel Books, his own version of a traditional, mid-century novel. Dragonsteel has been making leather bound copies of Sanderson's books, special art, and merchandise for years, and is a large company that will be working with Sanderson to bring all these projects together.
Sanderson is a unique case. He works hard, he gets lucky when it counts, and he has the ability to take advantage of that luck when it lands in his lap. Will this latest project have an impact on other authors who might want to try self publishing? There are few people who would be able to pull off a stunt like this and make more money than they would from a traditional advance. He might be sending a message about himself to the Big Five traditional publishers.
Wondering where our feed went? The new one can be picked up here.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
