Most years, Brandon Sanderson makes about $10 million. Last year, he made $55 million. This is obviously a lot of money for anyone. For a writer of young-adult-ish, never-ending, speed-written fantasy books, it’s huge. By Sanderson’s estimation, he’s the highest-selling author of epic fantasy in the world. On the day of his record-breaking Kickstarter campaign—$42 million of that $55 million—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 extremely Mormon. What makes less sense is why there’s a hole the size of Utah where the man’s literary reputation should be. Is it because he mostly writes fantasy, a—so the snobs sneer—“subliterary” genre? But then, so do J. K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, and George R. R. Martin, and they’re household names. Is it because none of Sanderson’s work has been adapted for the screen? Well, he wrote three of the Wheel of Time books, and an adaptation of that series came out on Amazon Prime in 2021. Could it be, finally, because he’s a weirdo Mormon? But so are Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game), Glen A. Larson (the original Battlestar Galactica), and Stephenie Meyer (Twilight). Mormon, I mean. Only Orson Scott Card is also a weirdo.
Sanderson, when I eventually meet him in person, makes versions of these excuses, plus others, for his writerly obscurity. 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 none of his self-analysis is, for my purposes, 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, and cry in his basement—I find Sanderson depressingly, story-killingly lame.
He sits across from me in an empty restaurant, kind of lordly and sure of his insights, in a graphic T-shirt and ill-fitting blazer, which he says he wears because it makes him look professorial. It doesn’t. He isn’t. Unless the word means only: believing everything you say is worth saying. Sanderson talks a lot, but almost none of it is usable, quotable. I begin to think, This is what I drove all the way from San Francisco to the suburbs of Salt Lake City in the freezing-cold dead of winter for? For previously frozen dim sum and freeze-dried conversation? This must be why nobody writes about Brandon Sanderson.
So, recklessly, I say what’s on my mind. I have to. His wife is there, his biggest fan, always his first reader, making polite comments; I don’t care. Maybe nobody writes about you, I say to Sanderson, because you don’t write very well.
The world unfreezes. He agrees.