What Brandon Sanderson's $14M+ Kickstarter Project Means

Book publishers should take note

If you’re on writing or publishing Twitter, you probably saw news of Brandon Sanderson’s astoundingly successful Kickstarter project, which launched at 11 AM Eastern time yesterday, and less than 24 hours later, has passed $14 million pledged by over 50,000 readers.

I drafted this post over a year ago, but seeing the wild success of Sanderson’s new project made me dig it back up and finish it.

I worked with Brandon Sanderson and his team on their first Kickstarter project back in 2020 when I was Head of Publishing at Kickstarter. I even got a chance to interview him about his writing process and his amazing fan community for The Creative Independent. I just left Kickstarter after eight years this past Friday — what a time to leave!

The success of books and writers on platforms such as Kickstarter, Patreon, Ko-Fi, Substack, and others proves that there is slack in the system. Readers and consumers of creative content are WILLING TO PAY MORE FOR CREATIVE WORK than publishers are currently receiving. But fans want to pay this money so the writer or artist gets a fair share.

It’s really hard to maintain a creative business. Most writers want to write and occasionally do an interview or event to meet their fans. They don’t typically want to spin up a whole e-commerce sales and marketing business (as Brandon Sanderson has done with Dragonsteel Books). But because publishers are not paying writers a fair wage, more writers are finding ways to connect directly with readers to earn additional sources of revenue for their work.

This is inefficient on both sides. Publishers could make more money, and pay writers more too, if they were more creative and found new and better ways to connect readers with stories and writers that excite them. There’s also a huge, often-unsatisfied audience for bookish merch and special editions.

Now, not every writer has the potential to generate tens of millions of dollars for their work. Brandon Sanderson’s new project is currently the second-most-funded Kickstarter project of all time, so I’m not suggesting that this is an average case study. But writers who have a few books under their belts and a solid fanbase could be earning more from their work, and publishers could as well, with a bit more publisher ingenuity and experimentation.

And publishers should be thinking of ways that writers can be paid more. According to this 2019 Authors Guild study, writer pay is low and decreasing. The median book-related income for traditionally published authors was $12,400 a year. This is capital B bad for numerous reasons, but even if we’re only talking about the publisher perspective, it’s still bad. Talented writers who are only making $12K a year from their books are obviously going to have to seek out other forms of income, spending less time than they otherwise could on writing books and improving their craft. That means that talented writers with audiences are writing less than they otherwise could.

As I am finishing this piece, Brandon Sanderson’s project is about to cross the $15M mark. This project is a wild ride, and it’s only getting started.

Let me know if you’re interested in a post about why Brandon Sanderson’s Kickstarter projects have done so incredibly well.