Running to more than 400,000 words, The Way of Kings is truly epic fantasy. After Elantris, I just hit the ground running.” “But the big advantage I have is that I wrote so much before I sold. “People say, wow, you’re productive, and I’m not really. People write you long emails to tell you you’ve done something wrong, how you need to listen to them. Working from notes left by Jordan, Sanderson completed the tale of Rand al’Thor’s battle with the Dark One over three books – and finally published The Way of Kings in 2010. She decided he was the right author to finish Jordan’s epic work. Great reviews and sales led Harriet McDougal, the widow and editor of Wheel of Time author Robert Jordan, to pick up Sanderson’s books. His career began to take off in 2006 with the Mistborn trilogy, a heist story that twists classic fantasy tropes on their head: it is set 1,000 years after a prophesied hero went on an epic quest to defeat a big bad – only to be killed (possibly). I threw away everything, and started on page one again.” It took me another six years after that until I was able to sit down and start the book over from scratch. I just didn’t have that balance down with Kings yet. But the truth is both of them look at the now, just through different metaphorical lenses. “People say science fiction looks to the future, fantasy looks at the past. Fantasy is wonderful to me in that it can take you to a fantastical new place, show you lots of amazing things, but also can talk about what’s going on in our lives right now,” he says. “I’d always wanted The Way of Kings to be my calling card to the fantasy genre. Tor was also interested in The Way of Kings, but Sanderson, in an unusual move, decided “something wasn’t quite right” and pulled it. In 2003, a publisher, Tor, finally showed interest in one of his novels: Elantris, an epic fantasy set in a former city of the gods, now devoid of magic. In 2002, he finished writing The Way of Kings. If he died with 100 unpublished novels in his closet, he would be “a bigger success than if I give up now because I’m discouraged”. Photograph: © Michael WhelanĪfter so many rejections and some soul-searching, he decided to keep at it. His attempts to write grittier books were terrible, he says, so he became “kind of depressed”.Īn illustration by Michael Whelan from the anniversary edition of The Way of The Kings. But publishers kept telling him that his epic fantasies were too long, that he should try being darker or “more like George RR Martin” (it was the late 90s, and A Song of Ice and Fire was topping bestseller charts). The books were written over a decade while Sanderson was working as a night clerk at a hotel – a job chosen specifically because as long as he stayed awake, his bosses didn’t mind if he wrote between midnight and 5am. Most writers have novels that never see the light of day. All this for a book that was just one of 13 Sanderson wrote before he’d even landed a publishing deal. With 15 days still to go, he’s raised more than $5.6m.
In less than 10 minutes, it became the most-funded publishing project of all time when it topped $1m. The fantasy author initially set out to raise $250,000 (£198,500) to release a 10th anniversary, leather-bound edition of his doorstopper novel, The Way of Kings. W atching the numbers tick up on Brandon Sanderson’s Kickstarter is a remarkable way to pass the time.
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