It's been a busy week for Brandon Sanderson. In addition to teaching his writing course (which you can watch online) and writing his numerous series, Sanderson recently sat down for a lengthy interview with Tim Ferriss, the author behind The 4-Hour Workweek and host of theTim Ferriss Show podcast. Ferriss grilled Sanderson on a wide number of topics, including how he got his start as an author, his philosophy for storytelling, how he built his booming business Dragonsteel, how he shattered Kickstarter records with his four Secret Project novels, and much more.
Sanderson has said he considers this "the definitive interview" on his career to-date. If you're a fan of his work, I can't recommend watching it enough. We've already discussed a few interesting tidbits from it, like the fact that George R.R. Martin was in the running to finish The Wheel of Time following Robert Jordan's death, before Sanderson was chosen to write the final three books of the series.
Today we're going to talk about another fascinating detail from the interview: how Sanderson's breakout fantasy series Mistborn nearly killed his career during his early days as an author, before it ultimately launched him onto the New York Times Bestseller List.
The original Mistborn paperback was the "most dangerous" period of Brandon Sanderson's career
I've been following Sanderson's career for more than a decade at this point, but as Kelsier would say, there's always another secret. I hadn't heard all the details of this story before, and neither had Ferriss, who pressed for more when Sanderson revealed that his publisher Tor Books worried he was "maybe going to be a failure as a writer" when he was first approached to finish The Wheel of Time, because of how badly the original Misborn novel The Final Empire was selling.
Mistborn: The Final Empire was Sanderson's second adult fantasy book, published in 2006 following his 2005 debut novel Elantris. As Sanderson tells it, authors get a certain boost on their debut book; more reviewers pick up first novels than later ones, and many readers are more willing to give a debut book a shot to get a taste of an author's work. Sanderson dubs this the "shiny new author glow," and says that publishers have specific strategies for capitalizing on it to launch a career.
"That is why generally, publishers recommend that you take your first book and you write a sequel to it as your second book," he explained. "Because when you jump from a sequel to a different series, you lose a percentage of audience. And so I had this shiny new author thing; we sold about 10,000 copies in hardcover of Elantris, which is really good for a debut author...and Tom Doherty [the head of Tor] called me and said 'we want a sequel to Elantris,' and I said 'No. I've got this idea of Mistborn and I really want to do this.'"
This was a bold move on Sanderson's part, but he viewed it as an important investment in his future. "One of my real goals, my powerful goals early on, was I wanted to build an audience for me, not for a given book series," he said. "I wanted to write in a lot of different subgenres, I wanted to do a lot of different things, I wanted the flexibility to do this thing called the Cosmere...and I was really ambitious about it, I wanted to build something bigger than Elantris and a sequel."
Sanderson's publisher warned him it was a bad idea. But in Sanderson's eyes, it was a way to try to teach his audience to follow him from one series to the next, ensuring his long-term stability as an author. His greatest fear was getting trapped in one series, a fate which befalls many authors whose readers are unwilling to try out different stories from them (and publishers are less likely to buy those stories).
Time has obviously shown Sanderson's approach to be successful, but at the time it seemed Doherty was right. Mistborn: The Final Empire sold fewer copies than Elantris in hardcover, despite being a "much stronger book." Then came the death knell: a book cover so bad that it drove away readers.
"They release the paperback, and the paperback has a dreadful cover," Sanderson recalled. "I love the illustrator, he did the hardcovers of all of them. But once in a while a cover just doesn't click, and this cover was one of the worst covers that I've had. It didn't click with my audience, and that paperback came out and just crashed. Completely tanked. And that's the most dangerous point my career has had."
"I was right then thinking, 'I'm gonna be a middle-grade author writing these kids books [Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians], because that's the new thing. But I went to my agent and we went to the publisher and said 'We need a new cover. This cover is not clicking.'"
Here's the cover in question, which is known among fans as the "grim reaper cover" for Mistborn: The Final Empire on account of the sickle-wielding figure on the bottom left:
I'm inclined to agree with Sanderson; it's not very eye-catching. Sanderson says that he and his agent had to fight hard to get a new cover, with Tom Doherty ultimately agreeing once the idea was floated to re-release the Mistborn paperback at a lower $4.99 price point to try and "jumpstart" Sanderson's career ahead of the release of the second book in the series, The Well of Ascension.
That new paperback cover ultimately saved the author's career. Before it launched, Sanderson said he was falling into the publishing "death spiral," which is when publishers order fewer and fewer copies of each subsequent book from an author, since each book is selling less and less. As Ferriss points out, this becomes a "self-fulfilling prophecy" — when publishers order fewer copies, a book has less shelf-space at book stores and is less likely to sell well. This can often lead to deteriorating careers for authors, and Sanderson says he was "on the death spiral" when the initial, "bad" order numbers came in for The Well of Ascension.
"But then, the paperback. That paperback, we got selling. And so what happened is Mistborn 2 came out, instantly sold out," Sanderson said, going on to explain how that caught his publisher's attention. The book swiftly got a second printing. "And then there was this clamor online, people emailing bookstores, emailing the publisher: 'Where is our Mistborn 2? We have to have Mistborn 2!" And that fueled Mistborn to, eventually with all the reprints, [sell] 12 to 15,000 in hardcover. And that primed Mistborn 3 to hit the bestseller list."
This is a fascinating story, because according to Sanderson the only difference between the previous Mistborn paperback and the new one was the cover artwork and lower price point. But that was enough to sway readers, ultimately turning his career around. "The cover was a little more targeted at what was popular then," he said. "Photo-realism was starting to be a thing for fantasy, partially because of Jim Butcher's books. We used the same illustrator, cover artist as Jim Butcher's books, and it has that sort of urban fantasy feel."
The cover above is the one which saved Mistborn, and I've got to admit I do love it; that's the cover which initially tempted me into picking up a copy of the book, so I'll attest first hand for how well it worked. I don't think I would have bought one of the copies with the "grim reaper" covers.
This story shows not only Sanderson's savvy and willingness to take risks in order to set himself up for future success, but the fickle nature of publishing as an industry. A nicer cover and slightly lower price made the difference between tanking Mistborn and making it a smash hit. It calls to mind something George R.R. Martin said during our interview with him last year, about how writing "is not a profession for anyone who needs or wants security," because it's such a constant gamble, and that working in the creative arts is "really rolling the dice."
Here's another fun, kind of wild example of Sanderson hitting the jackpot with Mistborn:
Mistborn is The Hunger Games of Taiwan?
In the middle of this interesting story about how Mistborn almost killed his career, Sanderson talked about how well-suited the books were for the market by comparing it to another huge book series that came out around the same time: The Hunger Games.
"Mistborn was really primed to take off, partially because of Hunger Games. Teenage girl protagonist in a kind of dark future world," Sanderson explained. "In fact, in Taiwan, it released before Hunger Games and it became The Hunger Games. Meaning, the market wanted a dark dystopian teen YA, and we outsold Hunger Games there. And we became Hunger Games and Hunger Games became Mistborn in Taiwan, because we beat it to market. We didn't [in the U.S.] and we didn't market it as YA...it's got two viewpoints, one teenager, one adult. But it was really good for the market."
He also compared Mistborn to The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, another fantasy heist novel that came out around the same time which was also a smash success. A heist novel in a fantasy world hadn't been done much before then, and both Lynch and Sanderson were able to capitalize on the excitement for this fresh take on the genre.
I do have to point out a weird inconsistency here: Mistborn came out before The Hunger Games in both Taiwan and the United States. The first two Mistborn books were published in the U.S. in 2006 and 2007, while the hardcover run for The Hunger Games didn't release until 2008. Maybe the cover snafu contributed to Mistborn not taking off in the U.S. the way The Hunger Games did, but even without that wrinkle, I have a hard time imagining it capturing the cultural zeitgeist in quite the same way.
Then again, the fact that The Hunger Games was marketed as YA in the U.S. while Mistborn wasn't was probably also a big factor. Fun fact: the first Mistborn novel did eventually get a different printing that was shelved in the YA section in U.S. bookstores, but that wasn't until 2014. So publishers seemingly did realize that the book appealed to a wider range of readers than they had thought at first.
These are all examples of how unpredictably the winds of the publishing industry blow. Good thing Brandon Sanderson and his agent were able to win that fight for a new Mistborn cover in time to turn the series' fortunes around; who knows where the Cosmere would be today if they hadn't? Of course, Sanderson was also approached to write The Wheel of Time while all of this mayhem with the Mistborn cover artwork was going on, so I imagine he would have bounced back one way or another.
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h/t Coppermind.net