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Was a time George R. R. Martin could've pulled off something as splashy. Doubt he could do it now.

I wonder if this will be the inflection point in Sanderson's career, I can already hear the "everything sucks" critics sharpening their knives over the amount of money raised. He could drop something with the impact and longevity of "Lord of the Rings" and there's still gonna be people bitching about that much money for 4 books.

Another nail in the coffin of the traditional "publishing industry" too. Expecting to see "edited and produced by" credits in books soon, and to pay attention to the names of those as much as the authors.

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This isn't really a nail in the publishing industry's coffin. The number of authors who can do this and even do okay let alone insane amounts of money is miniscule. If you don't already have a huge name, making people even aware a book exists is HARD. Some writers have managed indie only by being found by someone with a big enough audience to catapult them into making very very real money, but it isn't the norm.

The only thing this really means is Brandon could skip dealing with Tor/whoever else he publishes with after his current contracts are up, if he's willing to forgo being in bookstores. I would suspect he keeps Stormlight with Tor simply so you can find every book the same way, but any future books are much more up in the air.

The way this would hurt the publishing industry is by taking away their cash cows. As I understand it, publishers are effectively funded by a handful of successful books, and bankable authors. This money lets them release books by many other authors, who are less successful. If the "big name" writers left traditional publishing, the whole model implodes: new writers, or niche writers, wouldn't have as many opportunities.

On the other hand, there are plenty of opportunities for those writers to be successful outside the traditional publishing industry. So, if every big name writer switched to crowdfunding (which is not by any means guaranteed) I don't think literature would necessarily suffer. The publishing industry would suffer, but I don't feel the need to protect their business model.

A lot of the authors who matter most here (and there are ones way bigger then Brandon like King and Grisham) likely don't care about putting in all the work for a few more millions of dollars when they already make 7-8 figures per book. A LOT goes into arranging print runs, managing all the extra goodies he's adding as bonuses at the higher tiers, and so on.

Writers who need extra stuff to make a name and convince people to notice them is one thing. When you already make insane amounts of money it becomes less worth it.

Also I wonder if less nerdy/technical fan bases than SFF would be as inclined to even get involved with Kickstarter.

> If you don't already have a huge name, making people even aware a book exists is HARD.

The reason why Cory Doctorow gives/gave away his books for free (earlier in his career?) is because obscurity is a bigger problem than piracy for most authors.

If people are pirating your books that's a "good" problem to have because people are actually aware of you and your work.

Publishers definitely still have a role in the world to play. I've looked at self-published stuff that has embarrassing and, frankly, appalling typos in them (like, did you even look at the red underlines in Microsoft Word before publishing this?). The good ones go beyond just editing, though: they are "curators" and establish a brand or reputation for quality. "Penguin Classics", for example, is usually a few bucks more than other brands that might publish the same novel, but particularly for translated works, you're paying for Penguin's commitment to a quality translation.

On the other end, there's the Publisher role as providing the niche catered experience, like these guys I discovered recently:

https://dmrbooks.com/

I'm enjoying some of their anthologies so far, particular the dedication to tracking down the unedited versions of obscure works by famous fantasy authors.

>>I've looked at self-published stuff that has embarrassing and, frankly, appalling typos in them

2010 called, they want their attitude back.

This whole "Self published stuff is low quality, only legacy publishers edit their books" is such a terrible meme, it needs to die. It might have been true in 2007-10 when indie publishing really took off, I can't believe people are still repeating this.

I take it you've never looked at the self-published stuff on Kindle Unlimited or put up for Free/$1 on Amazon Kindle. I've seen programming books published in the past year that are supposed to be "C Programming Exercises", but in reality are little more than poorly-copied solutions from Stack Overflow.

It's still a problem. I'm not knocking every indie author who wanted to self-publish their first Sci-Fi novel. Far from it. Traditional publishers can churn out low-quality garbage with the rest of them, particularly when trying to make a quick buck by reprinting Public Domain works. My point is that it's always a race to the bottom for some people, and digital publishing has made it much easier, since it has largely eliminated the cost associated with production.

There is a very strong selection bias with publishers. Publishers aren't necessarily worth something because they reject bad material.

Sure, but if they have a track record of publishing material you like, it stands to reason that you might have a better-than-normal chance of the pulling a random book off the shelf by this publisher and liking it, no?

I consider it comparable to record labels. I follow some small/mid-sized record labels on Bandcamp that have signed several bands I like. Their releases tend to stick to a particular sound or genre that I enjoy. If the label drops a new album by an unknown artist, I am more likely to give the artist a try, because the label has a good track record in my mind. It certainly helps if the album is free to listen to before buying, but you get the idea.

> Another nail in the coffin of the traditional "publishing industry" too. Expecting to see "edited and produced by" credits in books soon, and to pay attention to the names of those as much as the authors.

I think Scalzi had a good point about this not being a nail in the publishing industry's coffin: https://whatever.scalzi.com/2022/03/01/very-quick-thoughts-o...

I doubt RR would ever have gotten this response -- he's never been consistent. John Grisham, Stephen King or the late Tom Clancy may have. They are/were consistent over decades. That said, Grisham's last book deal was huge (over 100 million I believe), and Sanderson absolutely has the clout to negotiate a great deal with Tor if he wanted to go that way.

He did mention that he expects the books to eventually come out as trade books under an imprint (at least the hardback), so the kickstarter is more to allow superfans to buy extras.

Honestly, I'm not sure about G. R. R. Martin. On one hand, he's taken 11 years and counting to write one book (Ok, he's also been busying himself with countless side projects, but that's not what the fans really want), so my confidence for him meeting a Kickstarter deadline is pretty low. On the other hand, the above-mentioned fans would probably do anything which is likely to speed up the release of the two last books, so a Kickstarter might still be successful...

A little confused. I assume he is already quite wealthy as a very successful Fantasy author with a long list of books written. What is the point of this? I doubt he needs the money and could already self publish and is well known enough that his fans will buy what he puts out. What does this achieve other than a cashgrab?

My understanding is that Brandon thinks fans benefit from more flexibility than the standard "publish book through big company" strategy -- he's helped start an audio company, has his own company for merch (Dragonsteel books, etc). I think the Kickstarter is more about giving people unconventional purchase options (pack of 4 books! Monthly swag deliveries!) that aren't possible through the usual "buy a book from amazon" pathway.

More cynically, this means that he can get money directly from consumers without having physical bookstores / retailers taking their cut -- but honestly, I do believe this is more designed for a better fan experience.

Interesting. I mean raising $18M from this is kind of astonishing, I would expect he probably has barely earned that much over his entire career otherwise.

I've seen this sentiment on twitter a lot, but why is an established person doing a kickstarter considered a cash grab?

Kickstarter is not only a crowd funding platform but also a pre-ordering system, it's mighty convenient, why not use it as such?

>Another nail in the coffin of the traditional "publishing industry" too. Expecting to see "edited and produced by" credits in books soon, and to pay attention to the names of those as much as the authors.

Unless I'm very mistaken that is the publishing industry.

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