It’s 1pm in American Fork, Utah, and the author of one of the biggest books of the year – in physical size and sales potential – is in his bedroom, having just woken up. This, it turns out, is typical. “I usually write until about 4am, then get up around noon,” Brandon Sanderson tells me over video call, leaning forward in a large chair.
The Nebraska-born author has been writing through the night ever since he was a student some 25 years ago, when he spent his graveyard shifts at a hotel drafting a succession of unpublished novels. In 2005, his debut, Elantris (about religious extremists and a cursed city) was published to acclaim. His hugely successful Mistborn series (metal-fuelled wizards battle an immortal tyrant – then deal with the consequences) began a year later. But the Stormlight Archive, a saga that sits somewhere between Final Fantasy and Ragnarok with a sprinkling of Paradise Lost, is Sanderson’s defining work, accounting for more than 10 million of the 34 million copies he has sold throughout his career.
Plenty rests, then, on Wind and Truth, the fifth in a promised 10-book cycle. “There are a whole lot of people who would love to be in this chair,” says Sanderson, speaking with a focused enthusiasm that barely dips over the hour we speak. “And what that means to me is, wow, I better make good on it.”
Stormlight’s setting will feel idiosyncratic to anyone who still thinks fantasy means orcs and wizards: its world is shaped by brutal storms, which leave much of the land only capable of supporting crab-like lifeforms, stubborn plants and hovering nature spirits. Humans have settled, but the god Odium has his sights on domination. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and Sanderson cheerfully acknowledges that “epic fantasy can become a bit of a blur”.
Yet Sanderson’s books, while not exactly concise – he rarely uses a sentence when a paragraph will do, and Wind and Truth stretches over 1,300 pages – carry their intriguing plots forward in great, eager strides, whether they’re delivering cosmic drama or giving his characters room to banter or stew in self-doubt.
“It wouldn’t be a fantasy book without the world-building and the magic, but it’s the least important aspect of the story,” he says. “Lord of the Rings isn’t great because of the world-building. Lord of the Rings is great because of the character interactions and that idea of taking someone small and normal and thrusting them into a world of giants, saying how that person’s core values can be as valuable to society as another person’s heroic might.”
By Wind and Truth, the Stormlight Archive’s scale is epic: cities across the world are under siege and heroes wield supernatural blades, with one on a path to godhood. Sanderson says he never knew things would get this big, or capture so many readers’ imaginations.
“Success at this level is luck,” he says. “It is absolute luck.” He calls The Wheel of Time, the Robert Jordan book series he completed on behalf of the writer’s estate after his death, a “huge boost”, but suggests the success of his works – most of which are set in a shared universe called the Cosmere – was enabled by a cultural shift. “The Marvel Cinematic Universe started in 2008 and the Cosmere started in 2005,” he says. “And I think the advent of the internet, allowing us to go back and easily find summaries and ways to remind ourselves of what had come before, unearthed a natural desire to have stories get a little more interconnected. It allowed complexity to come into a serialised work in a way that hadn’t been mass market-viable really ever before.”
Sanderson’s fans mob him at conventions (he now needs a little buggy to get around) and flood online forums with theories about Cosmere lore. Readers have also signed up in droves to raise funds for special projects, including a Cosmere role-playing game. In 2023, he arranged a Kickstarter offering subscribers four secret novels and associated merchandise, raising an astonishing $42m in a month – it remains the largest fundraiser ever on the platform.
He was prompted to mix regular publishing with these straight-to-consumer projects after watching Amazon remove his publisher Macmillan’s books from sale in a 2010 dispute over eBook pricing. “That’s when I realised, man, I work for Amazon,” he says. “I don’t work for the fans any more, I don’t work for the publisher.” The desire to “get out from under [Amazon’s] thumb” has led to the creation of his “own little publishing house”: Dragonsteel, which sells mugs, T-shirts and leatherbound books, owns property and handles Sanderson’s proofreading and illustrations.
While The Wheel of Time is now a glossy series on Prime, films of Mistborn and The Emperor’s Soul – a novella that’s a great entry point into the Cosmere – have fallen through. “Hollywood,” says a resigned Sanderson, “is a weird place”.
Though he would be up for writing an adaptation himself, he is working to hone his screenwriting skills, as he doesn’t think his success as a novelist automatically means he will be good at writing for screen. He gives the example of JK Rowling, who he thinks made mistakes in the writing of the Fantastic Beasts series. “She should not have been allowed to write screenplays,” he says. “You think you’re good at one aspect of writing? That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re good at others.”
Books remain Sanderson’s love. He rhapsodises about the thrill of combining the wonder of magic with the “crunchiness” of a scientific perspective, and charts fantasy’s evolution as a “brand-new genre” from CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien through George RR Martin (“very smart”), NK Jemisin and Joe Abercrombie. “If you fell out of reading it, give it a try. You will find everything you want that is in any other genre, plus it will have dragons,” he says. “So why would you read anything else?”
• Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson is published by Orion (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
