The Most Influential Author No One Talks About
Most years, Brandon Sanderson makes about $10 million. Last year, he made $55 million. So why haven’t you heard of him?
DISCLAIMER: The following is a fictionalized edit/rewrite of the WIRED magazine piece on fantasy author Brandon Sanderson. It will contain the original text wherever possible.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN earns 25 million dollars a year. Or, at least, that’s what a cursory Google search would have you believe. The man who arguably brought epic fantasy back into the mainstream pockets eight figures a year on the strength of his television franchise and their numerous spin-off books, to say nothing of the core novel series whose conclusion fans have been waiting for in agony since the divisive ending of its HBO adaptation.
Last year, Brandon Sanderson made over twice that sum, with a good chunk coming from a Kickstarter campaign that net him $42 million and became the most-funded Kickstarter campaign of all time. On the day it closed, I came to the WIRED offices ready to gossip. How’d he do it? Why now? Is Brandon Sanderson even a good writer?
Nobody had the first clue who or what I was talking about.
ON THE ONE HAND, who cares. Sanderson has millions upon millions of fans all over the planet; it doesn’t matter that some losers at a single magazine (even if it is one of the nerdier ones) had never heard of him. On the other, the ignorance goes far beyond WIRED. As far as I can tell, Sanderson, who has been topping bestseller lists for the better part of the 21st century, has not been written about in any depth by any major publication ever. I called his publicist to confirm this. “Well, we have a piece coming up in LDS Living,” he told me. That’s LDS as in Latter-day Saints. It’s a magazine for Mormons.
Which makes sense: Sanderson is, well, Mormon. He’s made no secret about it; in fact, his popular Youtube channel is largely made up of recorded lectures from his class at the Mormon-backed BYU. What makes less sense, however, is why there’s a hole the size of Utah where the man’s literary reputation should be.
One might argue it may be because he mostly writes fantasy, a — so the snobs sneer — “subliterary” genre. That argument might have flown a decade ago, but the overwhelming consensus nowadays is that nerds are cool. Between the regular glut of Marvel media, the post-pandemic Dungeons and Dragons renaissance, and the big-budget bets by streaming services on a post-Thrones successor, the past ten years have been good for fantasy. So it stands to reason that the author of multiple beloved fantasy franchises — the creator of an elaborate full-blown universe — should be a household name.
And yet he isn’t.
Sanderson, when I eventually meet him in person, does his best to explain away his writerly obscurity by playing to that old chestnut about “genre fiction.” It’s kind of fun to talk about, until it isn’t, and that’s when I realize, in a panic, that I now have a problem. Sanderson is excited to talk about his reputation. He’s excited, really, to talk about anything. But the man himself is, well, far from exciting. In fact, at that first dinner, over flopsy Utah Chinese — this being days before I’d meet his extended family, and attend his fan convention, and take his son to a theme park,— I find Sanderson depressingly, story-killingly normal. Boring even.
He sits across from me in an empty restaurant, wearing a graphic T-shirt and ill-fitting blazer, which he says he wears because it makes him look professorial. It doesn’t. Professorial conjures up images of a lordly gravitas, which Sanderson distinctly does not have. Instead, the overwhelming impression of the man is that he talks. A lot. Largely about one thing.
Writing.
GRAPHOMANIA is the name of a condition characterized by the constant compulsion to get words out, down, as much and as quickly as possible. If anyone personifies this, it’s Sanderson. The concept of a vacation confuses him, he once said, because for him the perfect vacation is more time to write — vocation as vacation. His schedule is budgeted down to the minute, months out, to maximize the time he spends, rather counter-ergonomically, on the couch, typing away. Most days, he wakes up at 1 pm, exercises, and writes for four hours. Break for the wife and kids. Then he writes for four more. After that he plays video games or whatever until 5 am. A powerful sleeping pill is all that works, finally, to get him, and the voices in his head, to shut up.
In the five months or so it has taken me to sit down and write this magazine story, which is 4,000 words long, Sanderson has published two books. During the Covid lockdowns, he wrote and/or edited seven: two for his regular publisher, a graphic novel, and four more in secret, telling no one but his wife until he surprise-announced a Kickstarter in March 2022 to crowdfund their publication. (Hence the $42 mil, raised in a month.) Since his debut, Elantris, in 2005, Sanderson has published 30-plus books, the biggest ones in excess of 400,000 words; there are far more if you count the novellas and graphic novels and YA fiction. I’ve read 17 of the actual books. Or maybe it’s 20. At some point, it all begins to blur into one huge universe — intentional, perhaps, as the bulk of Sanderson’s fiction takes place in an interconnected world called the Cosmere.
When he isn’t actually writing, the man is talking about writing. I’ve watched his YouTube videos, made a dent in his podcast empire (most of it, again, about writing). Like his books, it all blurs together — an alternate Sanderson universe surprisingly denser than his actual prose. Or maybe unsurprisingly, because, well, he’s not that great of a writer.
This is a fact that Sanderson agrees with: at the sentence level, he is no great gift to English prose.
The early books especially. Here’s a sample sentence: “It was going to be very bad this time.” Another one: “She felt a feeling of dread.” There’s a penchant for redundant description: A city is “tranquil, quiet, peaceful.” Many things, from buildings to beasts, are “enormous.” Dark places, more thesaurically, are “caliginous.” On almost every page of Mistborn, his first and probably most beloved series, a character “sighs,” “frowns,” “raises an eyebrow,” “cocks a head,” “shrugs,” or “snorts,” sometimes at the same time, sometimes multiple times a page. I count seven books in which one of the characters frets about their metaphors. “I have trouble with metaphors,” one literally says. Of his own work, Sanderson has admitted: “I detest rewriting,” “I write for endings,” and “I write to relax.” He writes, by one metric, at a sixth-grade reading level.
Here’s where I’ll stop using Sanderson’s words, written or spoken, against him. It’s not fair. As a person he’s simply not — I’ll say it again — very quotable. I spent days with the man. I typed some 40 pages of notes for this story, and who knows how many pages of transcripts the AI spat out when I fed it the many hours of recorded audio. Now that I’m writing, I find I’m referring to none of it. Possibly, this is the influence of Sanderson himself, on me. Graphomaniacally get thoughts down. Have fun. Write for the ending.
So I will. This story has an ending, I promise, and I’m sprinting toward it. Like the best of Sanderson’s endings, my ending might surprise you. But you’re not ready for it just yet. You need more story first. For now, there is only Sanderson, both wordful and wordless, the best-selling writer no one writes about because, when it comes to writers, most people only know how to talk about words.
Sanderson’s readers — loving, legion — care about something else.
TEN SECONDS TO GO until the launch. The lights are flashing, the music thumping. “This is siiick,” someone whispers behind me, as a Cosmere’s worth of nerds count down the remaining seconds. At zero, an enormous applause. Then the VP of merchandising and events walks out.
This is Dragonsteel 2022, the second annual convention for Sanderson’s worlds and works. At the first one, the year before, 1,200 fans showed up. At this event, a two-dayer in November, attendance is closer to 5,000. Even though the con is being held in the biggest venue in downtown Salt Lake City, the Salt Palace Convention Center, fans are turned away from panels left and right. The first morning, I was panting by the time I reached the end of the line, down multiple city blocks abutting stony Mormon gothica. Some 7,000 people are expected for Dragonsteel 2023, the VP of merch and events tells me later — and in 2024, the year Sanderson plans to release Book Five (of 10) of The Stormlight Archives, his biggest franchise, the one with the 400,000-word books, a full 12,000 people. The Dragonsteel planners will need to think bigger.
For now, the fans, even the turned-away ones, are in unconquerable spirits. As is typically the case at these things, there’s a general air of euphoric unselfconsciousness: men in Sanderson-appropriate graphic tees swing giant replica swords. (There’s an arena for refereed fights.) Women run about in billowing cloaks and spritely makeups, wielding precious weapons of their own. If you don’t come prepared, never fear, because the sprawl of purchasable Sandersonalia is endless: art, clothes, figurines, games, jewelry, ornaments, special-edition books, a letter opener (not available yet) in the style of a telepathic sword named Nightblood.
I talk to as many of the fans as I can, some in their teens, others in their sixties, from here in Utah and as far away as India, Norway, Australia. Many of them have been reading Sanderson since the beginning, since Elantris. A teenage girl announces, “I’m here basically because I’m a huge nerd!” Everyone is smiling, sharing info and panel gossip. One guy from Massachusetts tells me he just spent $170 on a rubber sword (not Nightblood; this one is called Mayalaran). It’s bigger than he is; he’s happily willing to shoulder the extra to get it shipped home. Another guy, 41 years old, tells me he made his sword (Firestorm; they all have names) himself. It took more than a year, on and off, to design, and then six weeks to 3D-print.
I see a young couple with very young kids. “Are you indoctrinating them into this fantasyland?” I ask, gesturing to the stroller. “Trying to,” the dad says.
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The one question I ask practically everyone is, Why Sanderson? I only need to ask it a few times to realize the answer is always the same. It’s a two-parter. First part: Sanderson’s characters. “They feel like real people,” everyone insists. Multiple parents say they’ve named their kids after their favorites. “I’ve done some things I’m not proud of,” one man tells me. Then he read the first Stormlight book, The Way of Kings, and now, reformed, he has a 2-year-old son named Kaladin.
The second answer to Why Sanderson? is his worlds. This is probably what he’s best known for. Worldbuilding, as it’s called. Sanderson dreams up far-off lands — sometimes cities, sometimes whole planets, with rules and systems and politics — and then he populates them with characters whose fates are also the worlds’. So the second answer is just the inverse of the first; you can’t have worldbuilding without characterbuilding. Some characters die, some become gods. No one has sex (a fact that is increasingly remarkable in the fantasy genre). They only save lives.
What nobody, not a single person, complains about, in my two days walking the Palace floors, is Sanderson’s writing. If they mention his sentences at all, it’s merely to acknowledge that they’re easier to read than, say, Tolkien’s — whose work they may well graduate to, with Sanderson lighting the way. (Sanderson himself admits he was late to Tolkien, in whose shadow he now happily lives, even as he tries to write beyond it.) Perhaps I am possessed by some Cosmerian trickster deity; I can’t help but try to trip them up. Surely he’s not a great writer? I prod. Polite, embarrassed smiles. They’re suspicious of me, I can tell. They probably think I don’t know my Kaladin from my Adolin. I do! I even like Kaladin! The scene midway through Way of Kings where Kaladin talks to a mysterious stranger (SPOILER: it’s Hoid!) on the Shattered Planes? “A story doesn’t live until it is imagined in someone’s mind,” Hoid says.
How many minds, then, to make a whole Cosmere come alive? Whatever the number is, the crush of humanity at this convention should be more than enough. With every wrinkled nose, every skeptical reaction to my provocation, it becomes clear that while others may choose to debate the value of a virtuoso sentence…here, people don’t care about sentences. They care about Sanderson. Or, well, that isn’t quite true. I sit through multiple panels about the future of his publishing company, which is called — as is the convention — Dragonsteel. Post-Kickstarter campaign, the company is now 50-some-people strong. This is the Year of Sanderson, the panelists keep saying. Four new books, with special swag for backers! Now they’re talking about warehouse expansion efforts. Now they’re talking about a possible future bookstore, housed in a castle. “When will the Dragonsteel amusement park be built?” someone asks. I catch sight of a teenage boy in the audience, his eyes glowing with reflected convention center light. The look on his face is hard to place — excitement? Hunger? Overwhelm?
The answer, I realize, is all of the above. The Cosmere is expanding, swallowing everyone up in it.
THREE DAYS LATER, I pull up to Sanderson’s own world: his home(s) in a gated community of American Fork, Utah. There are three properties. On the left is the newest one, the subterranean man cave unofficially known as the supervillain lair, officially the Ammonite Club, complete with 28-seat industry-caliber movie theater. The middle structure is the Sanderson family manor, where his three boys play. On the right is the Cosmere House, which serves as Dragonsteel’s HQ. Props and merch and books for days. That’s where I’m staying, specifically in the Elantris Suite. It has cover art from the book on the walls, gold and silver frilly things everywhere, and the world’s best shower.
I already knew about the shower because a few nights earlier I’d gone out for drinks with a friend of Sanderson’s I met at the con. After contextualizing Sanderson’s success for me — basically, he gives fans exactly what they want — she insisted I stay a night in the Elantris Suite. “And you have to try the shower,” she said. “I’ll text him.” The next morning I woke up to an invitation from his assistant.
Sanderson’s assistant is his wife’s sister. As I orient myself within the Cosmere House, I keep running into his nearest and dearest. His doppelgänger brother. Multiple siblings-in-law. Neighbors. People’s children. Friends Sanderson formed a writers’ group with almost 30 years ago, back in college at Brigham Young University, when he was a nobody and worked the graveyard shift at a hotel so he could write the nights away. Dragonsteel is a company, one that’s shaking up the book industry. It’s also Sanderson’s extended family.
The writers’ group still meets every Friday, which is what today happens to be. It’s the most PG gathering of writer types I’ve ever been to. There are chips and sodas. Someone’s baked an apple crisp. Before the meetup kicks off, I corner some regulars in the kitchen. They’re gossiping, cracking jokes. One — Dragonsteel’s new “head of narrative” — lets slip that Sanderson feels no pain. It’s true, Sanderson’s sister-in-law says. Even though he writes for eight hours a day on a couch, he has no backaches. The hottest of hot sauces cause scarcely a sweat. At the dentist, he refuses novocaine for fillings. When I ask Sanderson later to confirm this, he does but asks if I really have to print it. I’m sorry, I say. I really do.
The writers’ group is standard stuff: What’s this character’s motivation? Can the reader follow that fight sequence? Sanderson gives feedback with half his brain, the other half occupied with autographing books. It’s only afterward that the real talk happens, such as Star Wars debates. When those subside, I bring up the pain thing again. Turns out Sanderson doesn’t seem to feel pain of any kind, even emotional. On roller coasters, he’s dead-faced, while his wife is shrieking. “It’s sick and wrong,” she says, smiling. She likes to say she married an android. For his part, Sanderson actually, at this moment, looks pained. He might not feel, he says, but his characters do. They agonize and cry and rejoice and love. That’s one of the reasons he writes, he says: to feel human.
The conversation eventually turns to a theme park called Evermore, located just down the street. Though unaffiliated with Sanderson, it’s Sandersonian to the core: You show up, hang around taverns, and embark on quests. We have to go, I say. But it’s falling apart, everyone groans. Something to do with bad management — there’s a four-hour YouTube video all about it. Still, Sanderson seems tempted. We leave it at that. I go back to the Elantris Suite, where I finally take that shower. There are multiple showerheads. I turn everything on. Water hits me from every angle, until I’m immersed in the spray.
I wonder if this is, somehow, a metaphor.
THE NEXT NIGHT is my last night in Utah, and not a moment too soon. It’s not that Sanderson has been an unpleasant host — far from it. As I’ve said before, he’s been so kind and obliging you might even call him un-exciting. Even in his self-proclaimed “villains lair,” full of trinkets and toys and a hallway of custom stained-glass renditions of his favorite books (Tolkien, Harry Potter, The Belgariad), Sanderson doesn’t fit the bill of a “bestselling, record-breaking author,” that image of a professorial deity-on-earth touched by some arcane inspiration. The man has been nothing but consistent: consistently ordinary. And yet, everything I’ve experienced still somehow feels like it’s too much.
Perhaps my host senses I need a break, because we’re down in Sanderson’s below-ground movie theater, in plush red-leather seats that not only recline but also have adjustable headrests. He wants to show the specs off, so he plays the opening scene of The Greatest Showman. The scene starts. The chair shakes with otherworldly sound. When Hugh Jackman opens his mouth to sing…I actually burst into tears.
After I recover from Hugh in 4D, Sanderson collects his 15-year-old, and we all drive to dinner. This time the food is better: Utah Japanese. Sanderson and I order ramen. We awkwardly mention but do not mention the fact I just cried in this man’s home movie theater. Instead, I ask Sanderson if he’s ever so moved by a scene he writes that he cries. Sometimes, he says. Though it might not be the scenes people expect.
He won’t say more, but it’s enough. We’re heading toward something now, some kind of admission, I can feel it. When Mormons ask God for a sign, they speak of a “burning in the bosom.” Say you’re a kid, wondering if you should be a fantasy writer when you grow up. You might ask God what He thinks. If there’s a burning in your bosom, that’s probably a yes.
So I press Sanderson on the moments he has felt the burning. He says they’re too intimate, too special, to talk about. That’s fine. Then let’s talk about Mormonism in another way. Let’s talk about it as it relates to fantasy. Sanderson is, after all, in good company: Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game), Glen A. Larson (the original Battlestar Galactica), and Stephenie Meyer (Twilight) all shared his faith, with its angels and alternative histories, embodied gods, visions and plates made of gold.
I ask Sanderson if I’ve got the ultimate promise of the religion right — the ultimate promise being, as I understand it, that we humans will, if we’re good, and marry well, and memorize the passcodes, eventually pass into the highest kingdom and come into our divine inheritance: a planet, a world to call our own.
Sanderson doesn’t balk at the characterization; he agrees that’s the gist, and he knows where I’m going. He knows I want to know if what he’s doing — writing fantasy books — is fundamentally, in some way, some very central way, Mormon. Of course it is, he says. The worldbuilding. The gods incarnate. The systems of magic. So much of Mormonism is about the rules that underpin the world; so are his books, where miracles don’t happen unless you put in the work. That’s when, between mouthfuls of pork cutlet, Sanderson makes the connection between his work and the work of his Heavenly Father explicit. “As I build books,” Sanderson says, “God builds people.”
He says it in the context of the act of creation: God is creative. Humans are made in His image. Ergo humans are creative. It’s a message that he — and many others — have made before. But here, in this little Japanese restaurant, with the memories fresh of that crush of bodies swinging swords and cheering and standing and staring in wide-eyed wonder, it clicks in a way Sanderson did not intend, but that perhaps has said more about him than anything else so far. If you ask Sanderson, his work is deeply Mormon, but few — none, really — of his fans mentioned that aspect at all. He is, arguably, the Cosmere’s one true God, but that hardly matters. His fans don’t worship their Creator.
No, they worship his Creation.
WE DESCEND ON one final world. After dinner, it’s time for Evermore, the rundown theme park. The night is misty and cold — caliginous. I remember one of Sanderson’s friends saying the park is only open at night to conceal the decay. I believe it. As we walk around, Sanderson narrates. Those are bad prosthetics. That’s half a costume. Shouldn’t there be more skeletons in this dungeon? At least the apple cider is good.
He gets recognized by everybody. I guess that’s inevitable when you go to a fantasy land with a fantasy legend. Sanderson’s son and I start keeping a silent tally. Every time a new fan walks over, we hold up fingers behind Sanderson’s back. We quickly run out of fingers. One girl says she wants to take Sanderson’s writing class at BYU when she grows up. A surprisingly large number of guys ask for autographs “for my girlfriend.” Lots of people have already finished the latest book, which came out, like, yesterday.
Sanderson shines in these situations, mostly because, while they’re ostensibly about him, they’re also not about him at all. His fans beg him for information about future projects. He obliges: hints, teasers. Will they ever make a big movie version of one of your books? Sanderson makes meaningful noises. Everything’s been optioned, he says, but then things revert and discussions continue…he doesn’t get very far before his fans are pestering him about the next thing: new books, new characters, new worlds, new stories.
So many of us mistake sentences for story, but story is the thing. Things happening. Characters changing. Surprise endings. As I drive us back to the house, drop off the kid, and then stay in the car with Sanderson a bit longer, talking about life, talking about worlds, my ending takes shape. The surprise is that it was Sanderson’s ending all along, the ending of his best books. A character becomes a god, the god beholds his planet below, and watches as time passes. As people forget him. As the story goes on.
Because the story isn’t about him at all. It’s about the world. And, in the end, that is the thing worth talking about.
Jason Kehe wrote this piece. He is senior editor of Wired.
Frankie Torres edited this piece. She isn’t part of Wired.
