Brandon Sanderson (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1975), a best-seller in fantasy literature with more than 19 million readers around the world, is preceded by his fame as a tireless worker, prolific and prolific forger of worlds. It is known, for example, that in the time it takes for George R. R. Martin to prepare his morning coffee, Sanderson has already concocted a couple of sagas and designed the main pillars of, let’s say, the new installment of ‘The Storm File’, a monumental decalogy with which he has earned the nickname ‘Tolkien of the 21st century’. It is also known, he has never hidden it, that more than a writer he is a company; a kind of literary assembly line capable of feeding a dozen different series and in which thirty people are responsible for ensuring the continuity of the plots and the coherence of the stories.
And although it was possible to intuit that his ability to convene was as excessive as his ambition, not even he could imagine what has happened with his most recent narrative project; four novels written in secret during confinement whose self-publishing he decided to finance through a crowdfunding campaign on the Kickstarter platform.
“It all started as a gift for my wife, but soon new ideas arose that I couldn’t let escape,” he acknowledges in a video in which, one by one, he stacks the manuscripts of those four secret novels that he has decided to launch outside of their traditional publishers. The challenge was simple: if the campaign managed to raise 1 million euros before April 1, patrons would receive a new book by Sanderson during each quarter of 2023, as well as merchandising and rewards according to her contribution. To maintain the mystery, she has not even revealed the title of the books. «I have always liked the idea of surprising my readers with something new and unexpected», defends the author.
The surprise, however, was him when, 24 hours after launching the crowdfunding campaign, more than 8 million dollars had already been raised. A month later, the score exceeded 45, a feat to which more than 185,341 ‘sponsors’ contributed and which has broken all the platform’s records.
“I’m supposed to write fantasy worlds, not live in them,” the writer joked on his Twitter account just as the scoreboard exceeded 20 million dollars and some voices began to wonder if the American was not pressing the key of a new literary revolution in which publishers and booksellers would vanish as if by magic. Sanderson, however, has already made it clear that he does not rule out publishing these novels “with a traditional publisher” in the future and has been quick to praise the work of the bookstores.
“My career was made in part by the bookstores that were selling my books by hand, and I don’t want to exclude them from this process in any way,” he said. Proof of this is that, a few days later, his ‘Creative Writing Course’ (Ediciones B) arrived in Spanish bookstores, a true love song for books and reading in which, it could not be otherwise, explains how to get the most out of social networks and new technologies. The Kickstarter thing, who knows, maybe I’ll leave it for the next volume.
