First, he wanted to see what it might look like to poke a little hole in Amazon’s dominance. One of his goals for this project, Sanderson said, was to experiment. What makes him successful is his ability to appeal directly to his own fans, who may not necessarily want to buy work by somebody else. He also has no plans to use his company to publish other authors, he said. He is published by Tor, which is part of Macmillan Publishers, and Delacorte Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, and he has a book scheduled for publication later this year with each of them. Sanderson emphasized that he was not leaving traditional publishers, in part because he wants to be sure that bookstores can continue to have his work in stock. “For a lot of authors, this would be a bad idea because there’s a lot of management.” “I am an artist who was raised by an accountant and a businessman,” Sanderson said in a phone interview from his office in American Fork, Utah. He also has a warehouse in Pleasant Grove, Utah, a short drive from his house. To that end, Sanderson has built a company, Dragonsteel Entertainment, which employs 30 people including a marketing director, concept artist, continuity editor and human resources director. Printing thousands of copies of physical books, then storing and distributing them, is expensive and onerous. Someone else has to proofread the manuscript, then proofread it again. Someone has to register the ISBN number and file for copyright. Fundamentally, most authors want to write books, not run a publishing house.īooks require editors, designers and lawyers. In 2019, he said, he was on the road for 111 days.īut self-publishing on the scale Sanderson is proposing is an enormously complicated proposition.

Like many authors of science fiction and fantasy, he has spent a lot of time in conventions and interacting with his audience. He has sold 20 million print, audio and e-books, Sanderson said, including titles such as “Rhythm of War,” an epic fantasy novel about a coalition of humans resisting an enemy invasion. Part of why this project has worked for Sanderson, McLean said, is his unique relationship with his fans.

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