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A project that raises $100 can be a scam if it doesn't deliver. A project that raises $42 million can not be a scam, if it does deliver.
If Sanderson provides products that many people value at a collective $42 million+, why should I not be fine with those people giving him that much money? It's their money, they can spend it how they like.
The scam part is everyone always putting new Kickstarters under extreme scrutiny regarding the money they're trying to raise and if they really need it. Meanwhile this project has no upfront costs, nothing, that defends asking people to pledge money to it.
So what exactly is wrong with using kickstarter for this? It’s essentially a platform for placing orders for things that won’t be delivered for a while, which is exactly what happened here.
(Note that Brandon Sanderson and Dragonsteel have spent or committed a lot of the money already despite having delivered nothing yet. Those employees aren’t working for just equity without money or benefits!)
They have to get the books recorded and printed without overproducing and losing money while also not getting a worse deal with a smaller print + miss out on sales. Same thing for merchandise. All of it needs to be warehoused until it's ready for delivery. Plus probably other things I'm unaware of.
A major publisher already has all this infrastructure to take a gamble on new books while paying with current sales. Dragonsteel is still very small.
In Sanderson's case it's just a pre-order where you milk your fans for some extra bucks. He doesn't need this money to make these four books happen.
Large publishers have some expertise in guessing that, and probably still plan to eat some costs for the times when they get it wrong. But on a smaller scale, "Oops I have piles of extra copies of every single book I printed" would be a big problem for someone self publishing a couple of books.
If your fans trust you to follow through on a kickstarter, there's not really a downside.
According to you. If you don't like it, your gripe is with KS, not Sanderson. And it's pretty common for things to launch their v2, v3 etc on KS even if strictly not needed. It's a hype channel, not an investment channel.
> In Sanderson's case it's just a pre-order where you milk your fans for some extra bucks.
Why so loaded language? It's not milking, it's fan service. People specifically want these extra things. Hence the success of the KS.....
Reputations matter. It's a fact of being human.
Brandon Sanderson appears to be running most of this operation in house, and he would have pulled it off entirely on schedule if it weren’t for a massive storm introducing a (short!) delay.
By doing the Kickstarter he got a great idea of what the demand was, and then had the money to make it happen without putting his money at risk as well. He delivered superbly with his first Kickstarter. He’ll do the same with this one.
So why are you defending this company?
People are not fine with him collecting money. They are fine purchasing some premium books written by him.
Like with his Audible comments, this also served as another way for him to use his clout to help other authors. I think he has said that he was trying to pull in people who don't normally back projects so they'd be more comfortable doing it with other authors. They even highlighted some other projects and redirected some of them money to them (https://youtu.be/TVdZ018gsRw)
Fwiw, Sanderson took some of that money and backed every single publishing Kickstarter that wasn’t against the TOS or NSFW.
Some people complain that he doesn't 'need' the kickstarter -- which is true, sure -- but he's not hurting or tricking anyone, so why would anyone be incensed?