EDIT: a day or so after I posted this video, Brandon Sanderson did a little write up himself on the business side of things. You can check it out here (thanks @Travis Gafford for the heads up - I've been neck deep in revisions for my kids book so I missed it): www.brandonsanderson.com/some-faqs-you-might-enjoy/ If you want to watch me react in real time to the final results, here's the replay of my livestream → ua-cam.com/video/Wi1i0VZ71g0/v-deo.html Annnnd yes, I did win the betting pool in the end 🥳→ ua-cam.com/users/postUgkx8KaxyOwXmWuQdMJXbhKGdTIYwbVxpwj1 Sorry for being late with this video! There was a lot of number crunching and it took a little while to double check it all. If you're looking to build your own title P&L, check out this video next: ua-cam.com/video/gy6VGPtzKqA/v-deo.html
People complaining that he shouldn't be using Kickstarter are just jealous that so many people supported him. There's been a lot of lower-tier author jealousy over this whole thing.
To be honest I'm pretty disappointed with how many people have reacted with "oh it's only because he's Sanderson" and pointed to his unique success factors instead of dissecting what he's done and trying to apply the lessons to their own circumstances. Like, Sanderson is one of the most transparent authors on the planet. If you want to examine how he spent 20 years building his author platform, you can! It's all out there on the internet-and diligently catalogued by his fanbase into easily searchable databases to boot.
@@PaperTigerProductions Exactly. He's been consistently streaming on UA-cam, interacting with fans on reddit (and in fan expos and conventions) and releases at least 2 books a year. He's been doing this for nearly two decades. It's crazy how some people are saying he doesn't deserve this.
On his last livestream, he was talking about how he used to push himself so hard that he would just collapse in his hotel room after conventions/signings/book tours. He's one of those authors who will literally stay where he is, signing books and chatting, until the last fan leaves, because he knows how far they've come to see him. Probably not the healthiest way to do things (like I am not at all advocating everybody emulate that approach, it's not sustainable and is a big reason why he doesn't do this anymore), but it's an illustration of just how much effort he was prepared to put into building a relationship with his readers.
Most of these particular type of "authors" are those certain kind of people whose on Twitter all day, everyday, spent too much time on that accursed platform screeching and whining at every little things in existence instead of spending all those valuable time to write some good story, with all that in mind they have no rights to whine. They don't have the work ethics that made Sanderson successful. The audacity of those non-talents authors are just a prime example of adult-children level of whiny entitlement. Those people are what's wrong with modern society as a whole. Jealous whiny worthless people.
@@TheBodiesInTheWaterBeckons Twitter is a weird platform. It's great in some ways-there are people who have made lifelong friends through it-but also it can have horrifying consequences (like what happened to Isabel Fall). The way Twitter is built encourages tweeting your off-the-cuff thoughts/reactions/venting in real-time, before you've had a chance to really think things over, and because each tweet is so short (and threaded conversations are not easy to follow), it's really easy to just react to things out of context, including without reading stuff that's been linked. I'm sure a lot of those authors do put a lot of time and effort into their writing, at least in their view. Sadly, the relationship between time and effort invested and commercial success is not a linear one. It's a really complex equation to untangle, which is the main reason why I'm behind on the next video 😂 I haven't been able to figure out a coherent way to tackle the topic.
Sanderson and the team are showing themselves to be extraordinarily competent in social media and building hype. Communication directly with your readers via UA-cam adds a ton of value for the average fan in my opinion. He isn't some mysterious writer you never get to see except at readings and such, he has a direct line of communication with anyone who wants to listen. The dude and his team are genius for doing it this way and it's clearly paying off.
100%. Sanderson is an absolute master at building an author platform and I hope he'll revise what he usually covers in his BYU lectures and devote an entire lecture to this topic next year.
Iirc that was one of his early career choices that paid off. Most authors weren't doing anything online for a long time, such as going to forums or social media
Update. Since the response was so overwhelming, Brandon decided to use the money to back every publishing kickstarter on the platform. Check his channel for the details.
Do you happen to know how much money he spent on that? Someone told me it was 20 millions or so which I can't believe. After all, this action was done to fund his projects.
@@tomraineofmagigor3499 - Yes, and that is absolutely amazing. I guess the success stands on two feet: his enormous writing output and his friendly and open attitude towards his readers. I am quite sure that this money will get a lot of his books printed.
Another thing that made this Kickstarter so successful is because of how great Brandon is to all us fans. His quality control is top notch since if he feels something isn’t working he’ll hold off and see why it’s not working (Apocalypse Guard) which is better than some authors who will release crap just to make a deadline and in this case even though he had a deadline for Delacorte he wrote a replacement instead of giving them something that wasn’t up to snuff. He’s also very upfront and honest with us as well which makes it fine when he ‘misleads’ and keeps a few secrets in his corner. Another thing people don’t realize when they say ‘he shouldn’t be doing Kickstarter for this’ is that if he went the traditional route when would these books be released? He already has this year and next year scheduled for Skyward 4, W&W4, Stormlight 5 and Alcatraz 6 through Tor and Delacorte and publishers don’t like to oversaturate the market with one name, case in point is Stephen King using Richard Bachman to release books that his publishers couldn’t get around to since he was already doing two in a year and at the same point in bigness as Brandon is, and after Stormlight 5 he’s going to get the next Mistborn trilogy and the Elantris sequels before heading onto Stormlight 6 so when in that schedule could he get one of his publishers to find a spot in their schedule for 4 books? Even when he had W&W2 and 3 turned in together there was still a wait for the second of them.
YES I've got to remember to do a video on Sanderson pulling Apocalypse Guard and handing in Skyward instead at some point!!! Thank you for that reminder. The publication timeline requirements at a trad publisher is an excellent point as well.
Finally got the chance to check it out today after nailing my print deadlines! Thanks for the heads up, I've put the link in the pinned comment and the description. Here it is again for anyone who's reading the comments and might have missed it in those places: www.brandonsanderson.com/some-faqs-you-might-enjoy/
This was such an interesting video! I really appreciate your quick pacing and addressing a lot of different points. It's clear you love Sanderson's work and that you're passionate about accounting!
@@PaperTigerProductions he's also been a HUGE inspiration for my TTRPG story/full game I've been building. My friends joke that at this point I might as well write a book 😅 Do you have anything made public if your writing/published? I'd love to see what an accountant/author (with obvious good taste) makes!
@@Fuahsawas You should! Write a book! I livestream my writing so if you want to see me struggle through my debut novel (like actual words on the page), just check out any of my livestreams from November 2021 on. In terms of a complete novel length prose work, I do have a finished fix fic that I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2020 that you can find on the Something Awful forums as well. It's a clean first draft that's not been revised...namely because time spent working on the fix fic is time that can't be spent working on books I can actually publish. Otherwise, I have one bilingual kids book about birthdays published and another one about cycling coming out at the end of this month. The goal is to try and publish the prose novel by the end of May but...we'll see how I go with revisions 😅
I was a first time backer on Kickstart ever and I've never read one of his books. True story. The gamble for me was a piece of history and probably an insanely profitable collectors item.
I'm 95% confident you won't regret it. Sanderson is a fantastic gateway author to epic fantasy and based on what I've seen of the secret project previews, these are going to be great gateway books to his work.
Probably not a bad idea to read some of his Cosmere stuff before getting into the Cosmere-related Secret Projects. You'll get a lot more out of them that way. Mistborn and Warbreaker are good places to start, but the Stormlight Archive is the real meat and potatoes of the Cosmere. It is pretty long though, and starts slow with a ton of worldbuilding.
@@zkatt3238 I think there was only one secret project where you'll get much more if you're across the Cosmere already than if you're completely new. But I am one of the people who started with Stormlight first (back when there were only 2 books out, I jumped into it straight from WoT), then Mistborn and then Warbreaker and it didn't affect my enjoyment. What I appreciate a lot about Sanderson's books is the re-read value in them. Every time I do a re-read, I pick up something new.
As an author Sanderson has a wide appeal. I have little doubt that one of these four books will appeal to the poster. As a specutlaive peice of art, I have less confidence. Collectables are designed to move money from whales to artist. Comic books proved that mass delivery + assumed value lowers the resell value substantially.
Looking at ebay, my initial reaction may be incorrect. There appears to be a decent resell on Leatherbound books (especially signed). Way of the Kings had a collectable for $200-$500 (depending on teir). There is a listing for $750. I believe this is at the peak of the market (as Sanderson is currently getting a push), however I’m not as thurough as the lady that inspired this conversation, so I’ll leave it here.
Fantastic breakdown of the set costs. Even if he's running a break-even business model on his swag bags (it's possible) I'm sure he'll be pulling in enough profit on the print books to push this total number up to a "this was worth it!" business model! (And thanks for the shout out!)
I really wish I knew more about the specs of the premium hardcovers, the binderies they've used in the past and the kind of swag being contemplated. Obviously doing all of that is an extra hassle and much lower margins than the digital formats, but those particular rewards are driving so much of the total pledged value that the sheer volume might make it worth it (and I guess the diversification of income streams too).
No doubt. I believe he has spoken in the past about the reason he’s able to do it is TOR doesn’t want to invest in a HC they have to pay out a percentage to the Author. So by granting him permission, it’s his investment, and he can choose to shoot the moon for night quality, sacrificing profit, and still be happy to walk away with $1-$2 in margin. That being said, the larger the print run the higher the profit (lower cost.) That doesn’t provide an answer, but it gets us closer to an idea of what the profit might be on these.
@@AndrewDMth the bundling of multiple formats was another thing he's been pushing his publishers to do for many years without success as well. I remember reading something on the pricing of the leatherbounds ages ago that had more specifics but can't find it now!
@@bz6046 that's right!! I think they're still working through all the items though they've been revealing a few now. So far the only thing that's tempted me is the notebook with extracts from Brandon's writing notebook...and it's not enough to tempt me to sign up for all the swag boxes.
This is an excellent video. Very educational and I"ve looked for data like this in the past. I'll definitely be looking at your spreadsheet in the future for the Brandon Sanderson podcast I'm part of. Thank you so much.
Lol there is a betting pool 😂. I will say that I think Sanderson announcing book 3 and 4 will get more people to sign up. Those seem like the most related to the cosmere, and it will really hype people up. I haven't looked into the numbers the way you have, but my gut tells me that this will likely break 40 million, though I wouldn't have guessed this Kickstarter to be this successful when it started. Also, thank you for going through all these numbers. This is super cool. I have very similar conclusions to you in terms of potential diversity and breaking the publishing oligopoly. Kickstarter has caused a bit of a board game publishing over the last ten years, so I am excited to see where this goes over the next ten years or so.
I haven't been following all of the Shardcast speculation about what secret projects #3 and #4 might be but all I know is when I heard the bit about secret project #4 being about a character we've seen before whose backstory is relevant and that we'll get more out of if we've already read, I was just like....NIGHTBLOOD?!?!?!?! (it's probably not Nightblood because that would technically be a sequel to Warbreaker and he said all of these are standalone but a Sanderfan can hope)
@@PaperTigerProductions my speculation brain has been going off for the fourth secret project too. I feel like it likely will be Vasher, so potentially Nightblood too. I think that would catapult the kickstart more than some side story about some character that no one gives a crap about. However, Sanderson can sell anything, and the more that mane gets in front of a camera and gives his elevator pitch for his projects, the better. The second project didn't get as big of a bump because that was not cosmere. People (myself included) will go bananas for Sanderson adding more stuff that is super connected to the cosmere. It's all so exciting!
@@gregorylaperche5574 It is probably NOT Nightblood, given that the State of the Sanderson back in 2019 has Warbreaker 2 as an official slot. I'm pretty much ruling out anything that is a mainline Cosmere novel per that list, since he knows he needs to do those for the overall Cosmere story. BUT there's a bunch more things that AREN'T mainline Cosmere novels that he dropped in the 2020 State of the Sanderson and I'm guessing it could be one of the Sixth of the Dusk related novels or maybe a sequel to Emperor's Soul (which I would go equally nuts for, because Emperor's Soul is one of his best works). What makes it really hard to figure out is he talked about secret project #4 being something he really shouldn't have written but he also kind of had to because he wasn't going to get another chance to write it if he didn't jump on it then. ...damnit Brandon!
@@PaperTigerProductions I love his main series, but I’d love a Warbreaker or like you said, a sequel to Emperor’s Soul. I absolutely love that story. I found it so intriguing.
@@Arelenedhel If I had to pick his best work, I'd be hard pressed to choose between Emperor's Soul and Skyward. Emperor's Soul was phenomenal and Skyward is the book I wish existed when I was fourteen.
Funny how your “over estimate” that included shipping was still lower than the final value. But seriously who would’ve guessed that he would double the record of the most funded kickstarter! This whole thing was insane!
💯 if you watch Daniel Greene's interview, Brandon does say he knew the possibility was there but even he wasn't thinking it would go this high. They just hadn't tried something like this before. I mean technically they did with Dawnshard but they didn't market Dawnshard in the same way, and I think that had a huge impact on perception.
Also with Kickstarter Dragon Steel has more artistic control. Publishers don’t give authors much control on art and book covers, this allows his team to go crazy.
I love all your breakdown for the estimates of cost and profit, however I feel like the audiobook portion may not be accurately calculated. You estimated about 10 finished hours per audiobook, which I think might be a gross underestimation for audiobooks in general and for Sanderson books in particular (I would triple that at least). Also, the audiobook pledge option includes both the ebook and audiobook, which means that they would only make $20 for audio for that pledge so that's $5 per audiobook. The breakeven point would be much higher, although at this point it's moot b/c they'll definitely break even.
I am very much not an audiobook person so it wouldn't surprise me if 10 finished hours is slightly understated. The figure of 10k words per 1 finished hour is a rough rule of thumb that Travis Baldree (a professional audiobook narrator and self-pub author) gave in his medium article, which could be a little bit skewed since he's mostly known for narrating progression fantasy/LitRPGs which are faster paced. I doubt each audiobook would go beyond 15 hours though, which is about the length of Skyward and Skyward is considerably longer at around 140k words instead of an average of 100k words. Steelheart, for example, is about 108k words (same as the longest of the 4 secret projects) and the audiobook for that comes in at a little over 12 hours. I did debate whether or not to apportion the audiobook pledge value between the ebook and the audiobook, but in the end chose not simply because there's a whole host of questions that get raised when you consider the question of trying to unbundle them when there is no separate audiobook only tier. Obviously, there's a discount for getting two formats instead of one, but unlike a physical product, there is no variable cost of production for giving the ebook to people who opt for the audiobook, so from one perspective, it would very much distort the picture to attribute $40 of the audiobook pledge to the ebook and only $20 to the audiobook, since you're not relying on people in that pledge to make the ebook break even. Then again, maybe it is fair, since I have allocated the vast majority of the title production costs to the ebook, since I'm only considering the incidental costs of producing the audiobook in the breakeven analysis for an audiobook. This is a pretty interesting problem to consider from an accounting perspective and I think I could be convinced either way. But yeah, it is most definitely a moot point that's only relevant in terms of technicalities 😂
Thank you for the thoughtful reply! I just assumed the books will be long since the project reveals he's done so far took him 45min-1hr to read the first 5-6 chapters of the first 2 books, and he teased that the next reading will be almost 2 hours (for the first 5 chapters). I've often heard his books going on for 45 or even 60 hours, but I guess they are the extremes. I appreciate all the thoughts you put into this and it's definitely challenging to tease apart all the bundled format offers.
I love Brandon but I can't deal with listening to him doing readings...probably unfair of me, since I don't like audiobooks normally 🤣 but yeah, I think it's the Stormlight books that are like 45 hours long, which is just insane. He's an otherwise great speaker though! I confess I didn't even look at his reading videos, I went straight to the text version that gets emailed out to his newsletter.
Right now by absolute value I'm the closest on $31.7m. The only other valid guess still in play is $35m by Petrik Leo...and I reckon he's gonna win at this rate. Sanderson just dropped a genius marketing video on his channel that will probably give pledges a little bump in this final 10 day stretch.
@@maxsgeekdom8514 It is legit the only commercial (in the style of a medical advert to boot) that I have ever had my eyes glued to the WHOLE TIME 😂 usually when those come on it's my cue to go get a drink or a snack
Take whatever that profit is and divide it by 30. Dragonsteel has at least that many employees and likely will need to hire more to manage all the shipping and warehouse work.
Yep. This analysis is only limited to the title level (and specifically only for the digital formats). I wish I could do an analysis of the publisher level P&L but Dragonsteel has a LOT of product lines already and there's not a lot of publicly available information about their overheads. You can kind of make some random estimates based on the rough head count numbers disclosed, but we don't know much about the size of the existing warehouse...and they did disclose on one of the streams that they are looking to get a bigger/second warehouse because they don't have enough space...plus a hundred other things that would go into the overheads.
The average pledge value is not dropping as much as I thought it would! I think it **might** be due to the announcement that Dragonsteel Books are going to cover all duties and taxes which might have caused people who were hesitant about backing the swag tiers to go for it. The gradual reveal of some of the swag might also have been a factor as well.
I wish more people would take this view! There have been way too many accusations about this being a cash grab, and that he shouldn't be using Kickstarter, etc which is just unfair. But of course, I'm personally interested in where it goes simply because it's an illustrative benchmark for what you can do at the very heights of self-publishing. It's so hard to get numbers as an indie author, that this is just a gold mine.
Thanks Ryan! Them's the breaks with estimation though...any model always has a margin of error and with how many variables this one had, there was always gonna be a wide margin. I ought to have done a proper sensitivity analysis to produce a probability weighted estimate instead of just going with one scenario 😂
@Claire P I really wanted to do an analysis of those swag boxes but it'd be a hugely complicated task to try and cost out all of those elements. His additional write up which I've linked in the pinned comment and description does give a pretty good overview of what's involved though.
He's asking for gibs he doesn't need. At least he's giving something back for those gibs I suppose. But he's also funnelling more and more money into the hands of damn corpo's. If you think trad pub is out of date, wait until the corpo's own everything and you're not allowed to do even say what you want to say out of fear of losing your contract and probably the rent on your home. Good on him I guess for having such a loyal and willing fanbase, but I'd just feel dirty doing it myself.
Always love to hear a different side of the debate! But mathematically speaking, he's funnelling LESS money into said corporations than he would be if he went traditionally published...and yes, I count traditional publishers (the Big 4 at the very least) as big corporations.
@@PaperTigerProductions maybe they are, but its still 4 + a good number of mid range and smaller publishers. And even the big 4 aren't megacorps but a collection of bigger and smaller imprints. Amazon is just Amazon. Yea, yea, I know I'm arguing for the lesser evil...
@@stephenwolberius Trace any of the imprints up the corporate structure and you'll find the profits ultimately flow through to mega corps. Which, in the case of the privately owned ones, also flow through to a handful of individuals. I don't like a lot of what Amazon does, but they HAVE done a number of things that do benefit smaller players. Can't say the same for trad publishers!
@@PaperTigerProductions let me rephrase my argument. I hear a lot of people saying that this shows anyone can succesfully self-pub and that Sanderson is changing self-publishing with this. That's a conclusion fraught with fallacy. All this shows is that Brandon Sanderson can change the self-pub "rules" for him. We're not Brandon Sanderson and we need multiple options to stand a chance. Take me. I have zero options, zero, to make it doing self-pubbing. Even if trad-pubs offer nothing else, they'll market the book for me. I'd simply disappear on Amazon.
@@stephenwolberius I'm not so certain that trad pub would market your book for you (or that they would put as much marketing force behind your book as you would like); from the discourse that's around, it seems there's a certain expectation that you do some marketing yourself regardless. If you're comfortable talking about it, what are the barriers to self-publishing for you? What makes it untenable, compared to traditional publishing?
💯 Based on everything I've seen and read, Sanderson's awesome in that whenever he goes up an income level, he reinvests that money back into his business...to free up time to write more books and/or get more books out to more readers.
You know what I did NOT factor into my first analysis? That Brandon was gonna RUN ADS for his Kickstarter. I ran into 3 of them during the final 24 hours! AND that there were a whole lotta speculators jumping on board 😅
It's below the line so I'm not gonna factor it in! 😉 But @Taylor Ramage did address the issue of tithing in this reaction video here if you're interested in the subject: ua-cam.com/video/7DAp3QeoIhY/v-deo.html
EDIT: a day or so after I posted this video, Brandon Sanderson did a little write up himself on the business side of things. You can check it out here (thanks @Travis Gafford for the heads up - I've been neck deep in revisions for my kids book so I missed it): www.brandonsanderson.com/some-faqs-you-might-enjoy/
If you want to watch me react in real time to the final results, here's the replay of my livestream → ua-cam.com/video/Wi1i0VZ71g0/v-deo.html
Annnnd yes, I did win the betting pool in the end 🥳→ ua-cam.com/users/postUgkx8KaxyOwXmWuQdMJXbhKGdTIYwbVxpwj1
Sorry for being late with this video! There was a lot of number crunching and it took a little while to double check it all. If you're looking to build your own title P&L, check out this video next: ua-cam.com/video/gy6VGPtzKqA/v-deo.html
Wow! Thanks for the article and great video.
People complaining that he shouldn't be using Kickstarter are just jealous that so many people supported him. There's been a lot of lower-tier author jealousy over this whole thing.
To be honest I'm pretty disappointed with how many people have reacted with "oh it's only because he's Sanderson" and pointed to his unique success factors instead of dissecting what he's done and trying to apply the lessons to their own circumstances.
Like, Sanderson is one of the most transparent authors on the planet. If you want to examine how he spent 20 years building his author platform, you can! It's all out there on the internet-and diligently catalogued by his fanbase into easily searchable databases to boot.
@@PaperTigerProductions Exactly. He's been consistently streaming on UA-cam, interacting with fans on reddit (and in fan expos and conventions) and releases at least 2 books a year. He's been doing this for nearly two decades. It's crazy how some people are saying he doesn't deserve this.
On his last livestream, he was talking about how he used to push himself so hard that he would just collapse in his hotel room after conventions/signings/book tours. He's one of those authors who will literally stay where he is, signing books and chatting, until the last fan leaves, because he knows how far they've come to see him.
Probably not the healthiest way to do things (like I am not at all advocating everybody emulate that approach, it's not sustainable and is a big reason why he doesn't do this anymore), but it's an illustration of just how much effort he was prepared to put into building a relationship with his readers.
Most of these particular type of "authors" are those certain kind of people whose on Twitter all day, everyday, spent too much time on that accursed platform screeching and whining at every little things in existence instead of spending all those valuable time to write some good story, with all that in mind they have no rights to whine. They don't have the work ethics that made Sanderson successful. The audacity of those non-talents authors are just a prime example of adult-children level of whiny entitlement. Those people are what's wrong with modern society as a whole. Jealous whiny worthless people.
@@TheBodiesInTheWaterBeckons Twitter is a weird platform. It's great in some ways-there are people who have made lifelong friends through it-but also it can have horrifying consequences (like what happened to Isabel Fall).
The way Twitter is built encourages tweeting your off-the-cuff thoughts/reactions/venting in real-time, before you've had a chance to really think things over, and because each tweet is so short (and threaded conversations are not easy to follow), it's really easy to just react to things out of context, including without reading stuff that's been linked.
I'm sure a lot of those authors do put a lot of time and effort into their writing, at least in their view. Sadly, the relationship between time and effort invested and commercial success is not a linear one. It's a really complex equation to untangle, which is the main reason why I'm behind on the next video 😂 I haven't been able to figure out a coherent way to tackle the topic.
Sanderson and the team are showing themselves to be extraordinarily competent in social media and building hype. Communication directly with your readers via UA-cam adds a ton of value for the average fan in my opinion. He isn't some mysterious writer you never get to see except at readings and such, he has a direct line of communication with anyone who wants to listen. The dude and his team are genius for doing it this way and it's clearly paying off.
100%. Sanderson is an absolute master at building an author platform and I hope he'll revise what he usually covers in his BYU lectures and devote an entire lecture to this topic next year.
Iirc that was one of his early career choices that paid off. Most authors weren't doing anything online for a long time, such as going to forums or social media
Update. Since the response was so overwhelming, Brandon decided to use the money to back every publishing kickstarter on the platform. Check his channel for the details.
Yes, I saw that! And I know for a fact that at least one backer changed their pledge tier up because of that generous move.
Do you happen to know how much money he spent on that? Someone told me it was 20 millions or so which I can't believe. After all, this action was done to fund his projects.
@@saymyname2417 remember he was only asking for 1 million and by the end got over 40 million
@@tomraineofmagigor3499 - Yes, and that is absolutely amazing. I guess the success stands on two feet: his enormous writing output and his friendly and open attitude towards his readers.
I am quite sure that this money will get a lot of his books printed.
Another thing that made this Kickstarter so successful is because of how great Brandon is to all us fans. His quality control is top notch since if he feels something isn’t working he’ll hold off and see why it’s not working (Apocalypse Guard) which is better than some authors who will release crap just to make a deadline and in this case even though he had a deadline for Delacorte he wrote a replacement instead of giving them something that wasn’t up to snuff.
He’s also very upfront and honest with us as well which makes it fine when he ‘misleads’ and keeps a few secrets in his corner.
Another thing people don’t realize when they say ‘he shouldn’t be doing Kickstarter for this’ is that if he went the traditional route when would these books be released? He already has this year and next year scheduled for Skyward 4, W&W4, Stormlight 5 and Alcatraz 6 through Tor and Delacorte and publishers don’t like to oversaturate the market with one name, case in point is Stephen King using Richard Bachman to release books that his publishers couldn’t get around to since he was already doing two in a year and at the same point in bigness as Brandon is, and after Stormlight 5 he’s going to get the next Mistborn trilogy and the Elantris sequels before heading onto Stormlight 6 so when in that schedule could he get one of his publishers to find a spot in their schedule for 4 books? Even when he had W&W2 and 3 turned in together there was still a wait for the second of them.
YES I've got to remember to do a video on Sanderson pulling Apocalypse Guard and handing in Skyward instead at some point!!! Thank you for that reminder. The publication timeline requirements at a trad publisher is an excellent point as well.
Did you catch his extended FAQ today? You may be interested in his answer (though he approached the answer differently than you I think)
I haven't had the chance yet, I'll have to check it out!
Finally got the chance to check it out today after nailing my print deadlines! Thanks for the heads up, I've put the link in the pinned comment and the description. Here it is again for anyone who's reading the comments and might have missed it in those places: www.brandonsanderson.com/some-faqs-you-might-enjoy/
@@PaperTigerProductions glad you got to catch it!
Wow, not only are you a good League reporter, but also a Brandon Sanderson fan!? Glad I follow your content now.
@@spencer_72 Sanderson is one of my all-time favorite authors-not just as a reader, but also as an author and a business owner.
This was such an interesting video! I really appreciate your quick pacing and addressing a lot of different points.
It's clear you love Sanderson's work and that you're passionate about accounting!
Thanks Izaak, I'm glad you enjoyed it. Sanderson is totally my #authorgoals 🤩
@@PaperTigerProductions he's also been a HUGE inspiration for my TTRPG story/full game I've been building.
My friends joke that at this point I might as well write a book 😅
Do you have anything made public if your writing/published? I'd love to see what an accountant/author (with obvious good taste) makes!
@@Fuahsawas You should! Write a book!
I livestream my writing so if you want to see me struggle through my debut novel (like actual words on the page), just check out any of my livestreams from November 2021 on.
In terms of a complete novel length prose work, I do have a finished fix fic that I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2020 that you can find on the Something Awful forums as well. It's a clean first draft that's not been revised...namely because time spent working on the fix fic is time that can't be spent working on books I can actually publish.
Otherwise, I have one bilingual kids book about birthdays published and another one about cycling coming out at the end of this month.
The goal is to try and publish the prose novel by the end of May but...we'll see how I go with revisions 😅
I was a first time backer on Kickstart ever and I've never read one of his books. True story.
The gamble for me was a piece of history and probably an insanely profitable collectors item.
I'm 95% confident you won't regret it. Sanderson is a fantastic gateway author to epic fantasy and based on what I've seen of the secret project previews, these are going to be great gateway books to his work.
Probably not a bad idea to read some of his Cosmere stuff before getting into the Cosmere-related Secret Projects. You'll get a lot more out of them that way. Mistborn and Warbreaker are good places to start, but the Stormlight Archive is the real meat and potatoes of the Cosmere. It is pretty long though, and starts slow with a ton of worldbuilding.
@@zkatt3238 I think there was only one secret project where you'll get much more if you're across the Cosmere already than if you're completely new. But I am one of the people who started with Stormlight first (back when there were only 2 books out, I jumped into it straight from WoT), then Mistborn and then Warbreaker and it didn't affect my enjoyment.
What I appreciate a lot about Sanderson's books is the re-read value in them. Every time I do a re-read, I pick up something new.
As an author Sanderson has a wide appeal. I have little doubt that one of these four books will appeal to the poster. As a specutlaive peice of art, I have less confidence. Collectables are designed to move money from whales to artist. Comic books proved that mass delivery + assumed value lowers the resell value substantially.
Looking at ebay, my initial reaction may be incorrect. There appears to be a decent resell on Leatherbound books (especially signed). Way of the Kings had a collectable for $200-$500 (depending on teir). There is a listing for $750. I believe this is at the peak of the market (as Sanderson is currently getting a push), however I’m not as thurough as the lady that inspired this conversation, so I’ll leave it here.
Fantastic breakdown of the set costs. Even if he's running a break-even business model on his swag bags (it's possible) I'm sure he'll be pulling in enough profit on the print books to push this total number up to a "this was worth it!" business model!
(And thanks for the shout out!)
I really wish I knew more about the specs of the premium hardcovers, the binderies they've used in the past and the kind of swag being contemplated. Obviously doing all of that is an extra hassle and much lower margins than the digital formats, but those particular rewards are driving so much of the total pledged value that the sheer volume might make it worth it (and I guess the diversification of income streams too).
No doubt. I believe he has spoken in the past about the reason he’s able to do it is TOR doesn’t want to invest in a HC they have to pay out a percentage to the Author. So by granting him permission, it’s his investment, and he can choose to shoot the moon for night quality, sacrificing profit, and still be happy to walk away with $1-$2 in margin. That being said, the larger the print run the higher the profit (lower cost.)
That doesn’t provide an answer, but it gets us closer to an idea of what the profit might be on these.
@@AndrewDMth the bundling of multiple formats was another thing he's been pushing his publishers to do for many years without success as well. I remember reading something on the pricing of the leatherbounds ages ago that had more specifics but can't find it now!
@@PaperTigerProductions They aren't even sure what's going in all the swag boxes yet. It was on one of Brandons you tube shows
@@bz6046 that's right!! I think they're still working through all the items though they've been revealing a few now. So far the only thing that's tempted me is the notebook with extracts from Brandon's writing notebook...and it's not enough to tempt me to sign up for all the swag boxes.
This is an excellent video. Very educational and I"ve looked for data like this in the past. I'll definitely be looking at your spreadsheet in the future for the Brandon Sanderson podcast I'm part of. Thank you so much.
No worries, I'm glad it was helpful!
Lol there is a betting pool 😂. I will say that I think Sanderson announcing book 3 and 4 will get more people to sign up. Those seem like the most related to the cosmere, and it will really hype people up. I haven't looked into the numbers the way you have, but my gut tells me that this will likely break 40 million, though I wouldn't have guessed this Kickstarter to be this successful when it started.
Also, thank you for going through all these numbers. This is super cool. I have very similar conclusions to you in terms of potential diversity and breaking the publishing oligopoly. Kickstarter has caused a bit of a board game publishing over the last ten years, so I am excited to see where this goes over the next ten years or so.
I haven't been following all of the Shardcast speculation about what secret projects #3 and #4 might be but all I know is when I heard the bit about secret project #4 being about a character we've seen before whose backstory is relevant and that we'll get more out of if we've already read, I was just like....NIGHTBLOOD?!?!?!?!
(it's probably not Nightblood because that would technically be a sequel to Warbreaker and he said all of these are standalone but a Sanderfan can hope)
@@PaperTigerProductions my speculation brain has been going off for the fourth secret project too. I feel like it likely will be Vasher, so potentially Nightblood too. I think that would catapult the kickstart more than some side story about some character that no one gives a crap about. However, Sanderson can sell anything, and the more that mane gets in front of a camera and gives his elevator pitch for his projects, the better. The second project didn't get as big of a bump because that was not cosmere. People (myself included) will go bananas for Sanderson adding more stuff that is super connected to the cosmere. It's all so exciting!
@@gregorylaperche5574 It is probably NOT Nightblood, given that the State of the Sanderson back in 2019 has Warbreaker 2 as an official slot. I'm pretty much ruling out anything that is a mainline Cosmere novel per that list, since he knows he needs to do those for the overall Cosmere story.
BUT there's a bunch more things that AREN'T mainline Cosmere novels that he dropped in the 2020 State of the Sanderson and I'm guessing it could be one of the Sixth of the Dusk related novels or maybe a sequel to Emperor's Soul (which I would go equally nuts for, because Emperor's Soul is one of his best works).
What makes it really hard to figure out is he talked about secret project #4 being something he really shouldn't have written but he also kind of had to because he wasn't going to get another chance to write it if he didn't jump on it then.
...damnit Brandon!
@@PaperTigerProductions I love his main series, but I’d love a Warbreaker or like you said, a sequel to Emperor’s Soul. I absolutely love that story. I found it so intriguing.
@@Arelenedhel If I had to pick his best work, I'd be hard pressed to choose between Emperor's Soul and Skyward. Emperor's Soul was phenomenal and Skyward is the book I wish existed when I was fourteen.
If I worked for DragonSteel, I'd hire you. Very thorough. Fun to listen to.
Awww...thanks Ned! 😊 I'm glad you enjoyed my analysis.
Funny how your “over estimate” that included shipping was still lower than the final value. But seriously who would’ve guessed that he would double the record of the most funded kickstarter! This whole thing was insane!
💯 if you watch Daniel Greene's interview, Brandon does say he knew the possibility was there but even he wasn't thinking it would go this high. They just hadn't tried something like this before. I mean technically they did with Dawnshard but they didn't market Dawnshard in the same way, and I think that had a huge impact on perception.
Also with Kickstarter Dragon Steel has more artistic control. Publishers don’t give authors much control on art and book covers, this allows his team to go crazy.
100%. The special limited edition hardcover of the first secret project looks AMAZING.
I love all your breakdown for the estimates of cost and profit, however I feel like the audiobook portion may not be accurately calculated. You estimated about 10 finished hours per audiobook, which I think might be a gross underestimation for audiobooks in general and for Sanderson books in particular (I would triple that at least). Also, the audiobook pledge option includes both the ebook and audiobook, which means that they would only make $20 for audio for that pledge so that's $5 per audiobook. The breakeven point would be much higher, although at this point it's moot b/c they'll definitely break even.
I am very much not an audiobook person so it wouldn't surprise me if 10 finished hours is slightly understated. The figure of 10k words per 1 finished hour is a rough rule of thumb that Travis Baldree (a professional audiobook narrator and self-pub author) gave in his medium article, which could be a little bit skewed since he's mostly known for narrating progression fantasy/LitRPGs which are faster paced. I doubt each audiobook would go beyond 15 hours though, which is about the length of Skyward and Skyward is considerably longer at around 140k words instead of an average of 100k words. Steelheart, for example, is about 108k words (same as the longest of the 4 secret projects) and the audiobook for that comes in at a little over 12 hours.
I did debate whether or not to apportion the audiobook pledge value between the ebook and the audiobook, but in the end chose not simply because there's a whole host of questions that get raised when you consider the question of trying to unbundle them when there is no separate audiobook only tier.
Obviously, there's a discount for getting two formats instead of one, but unlike a physical product, there is no variable cost of production for giving the ebook to people who opt for the audiobook, so from one perspective, it would very much distort the picture to attribute $40 of the audiobook pledge to the ebook and only $20 to the audiobook, since you're not relying on people in that pledge to make the ebook break even.
Then again, maybe it is fair, since I have allocated the vast majority of the title production costs to the ebook, since I'm only considering the incidental costs of producing the audiobook in the breakeven analysis for an audiobook. This is a pretty interesting problem to consider from an accounting perspective and I think I could be convinced either way.
But yeah, it is most definitely a moot point that's only relevant in terms of technicalities 😂
Thank you for the thoughtful reply! I just assumed the books will be long since the project reveals he's done so far took him 45min-1hr to read the first 5-6 chapters of the first 2 books, and he teased that the next reading will be almost 2 hours (for the first 5 chapters). I've often heard his books going on for 45 or even 60 hours, but I guess they are the extremes. I appreciate all the thoughts you put into this and it's definitely challenging to tease apart all the bundled format offers.
I love Brandon but I can't deal with listening to him doing readings...probably unfair of me, since I don't like audiobooks normally 🤣 but yeah, I think it's the Stormlight books that are like 45 hours long, which is just insane.
He's an otherwise great speaker though! I confess I didn't even look at his reading videos, I went straight to the text version that gets emailed out to his newsletter.
Hey @Paper Tiger 31.9 MILLION is that closer to yours or the other guessers?
Right now by absolute value I'm the closest on $31.7m. The only other valid guess still in play is $35m by Petrik Leo...and I reckon he's gonna win at this rate. Sanderson just dropped a genius marketing video on his channel that will probably give pledges a little bump in this final 10 day stretch.
@@PaperTigerProductions oh yeah Quadrovela? that was brilliantly funny. he has a killer team.
@@maxsgeekdom8514 It is legit the only commercial (in the style of a medical advert to boot) that I have ever had my eyes glued to the WHOLE TIME 😂 usually when those come on it's my cue to go get a drink or a snack
@@PaperTigerProductions we are his adoring public. Plus he’s also done the thank you rewards.
Take whatever that profit is and divide it by 30. Dragonsteel has at least that many employees and likely will need to hire more to manage all the shipping and warehouse work.
Yep. This analysis is only limited to the title level (and specifically only for the digital formats). I wish I could do an analysis of the publisher level P&L but Dragonsteel has a LOT of product lines already and there's not a lot of publicly available information about their overheads. You can kind of make some random estimates based on the rough head count numbers disclosed, but we don't know much about the size of the existing warehouse...and they did disclose on one of the streams that they are looking to get a bigger/second warehouse because they don't have enough space...plus a hundred other things that would go into the overheads.
Your analysis is really spot on! If you ever get the chance to get more data I'd love your take on all of that stuff!
May be closer to the 35 mil mark because it is about to cross 30 million now.
The average pledge value is not dropping as much as I thought it would! I think it **might** be due to the announcement that Dragonsteel Books are going to cover all duties and taxes which might have caused people who were hesitant about backing the swag tiers to go for it. The gradual reveal of some of the swag might also have been a factor as well.
This is super interesting! Thanks for sharing
Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed the video 😊
Dude, awesome spreadsheet. That was sick.
I love spreadsheets. They're amazing!
I’ll hack a spreadsheet in ten minutes, takes longer then ten minutes. 11/10 can relate
Oh thank goodness, it's not just me! 😂
I mean to Sanderson right... that's the whole point. Do you buy a TV, look at the company's numbers wondering where the money is going?
Not gonna lie, I often do! 😁 I just find it fascinating.
Who cares where it goes? Everyone who funded it is getting something they bought. Simple as.
I wish more people would take this view! There have been way too many accusations about this being a cash grab, and that he shouldn't be using Kickstarter, etc which is just unfair.
But of course, I'm personally interested in where it goes simply because it's an illustrative benchmark for what you can do at the very heights of self-publishing. It's so hard to get numbers as an indie author, that this is just a gold mine.
Excellent work - sorry you lost out on the betting pool, though
Thanks Ryan! Them's the breaks with estimation though...any model always has a margin of error and with how many variables this one had, there was always gonna be a wide margin. I ought to have done a proper sensitivity analysis to produce a probability weighted estimate instead of just going with one scenario 😂
Cool breakdown
Thank you for doing this analysis.
I'm glad you enjoyed it!
His recent videos talk about what kind of art will be in the book.
I did manage to catch that bit of the recent livestream! And I think I might have underestimated the art budget, if anything 😂
Very interesting analysis, thanks!
Glad you liked it! 😊
Its just a fancy pre order for $40/book. Nothing really beyond that. So I guess its going the same place anything goes when you pay for it in advance.
...and the 8 months worth of swag boxes so many people opted for. That's where it gets complicated.
@wyldeman7 Except more of that $40 goes to Sanderson and his team instead of the middlemen! That's pretty important.
@Claire P I really wanted to do an analysis of those swag boxes but it'd be a hugely complicated task to try and cost out all of those elements. His additional write up which I've linked in the pinned comment and description does give a pretty good overview of what's involved though.
Fantastic breakdown!!
Thanks PJ, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
theres now more that 41 million $ pledged!
It got to $41.7m in the end, just a few thousand short of $41.75m. I can't wait to see what'll happen with his next Kickstarter.
Well y'all underestimated by just a little bit, but I am impressed
We waaaaaay underestimated. But Andrew Meredith was kind enough to let us go for a second round of bets and we got much closer! 😁
@@PaperTigerProductions so who won then lol
@@lonsunocook I think it's meeeee! 🥳 ua-cam.com/users/postUgkx8KaxyOwXmWuQdMJXbhKGdTIYwbVxpwj1
@@PaperTigerProductions congratulations 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
Go Brandon!!!!
I really like your vids!
Thank you! Let me know if there's anything in particular you'd like to see. 😊
He's asking for gibs he doesn't need. At least he's giving something back for those gibs I suppose. But he's also funnelling more and more money into the hands of damn corpo's. If you think trad pub is out of date, wait until the corpo's own everything and you're not allowed to do even say what you want to say out of fear of losing your contract and probably the rent on your home. Good on him I guess for having such a loyal and willing fanbase, but I'd just feel dirty doing it myself.
Always love to hear a different side of the debate! But mathematically speaking, he's funnelling LESS money into said corporations than he would be if he went traditionally published...and yes, I count traditional publishers (the Big 4 at the very least) as big corporations.
@@PaperTigerProductions maybe they are, but its still 4 + a good number of mid range and smaller publishers. And even the big 4 aren't megacorps but a collection of bigger and smaller imprints.
Amazon is just Amazon.
Yea, yea, I know I'm arguing for the lesser evil...
@@stephenwolberius Trace any of the imprints up the corporate structure and you'll find the profits ultimately flow through to mega corps. Which, in the case of the privately owned ones, also flow through to a handful of individuals.
I don't like a lot of what Amazon does, but they HAVE done a number of things that do benefit smaller players. Can't say the same for trad publishers!
@@PaperTigerProductions let me rephrase my argument. I hear a lot of people saying that this shows anyone can succesfully self-pub and that Sanderson is changing self-publishing with this.
That's a conclusion fraught with fallacy. All this shows is that Brandon Sanderson can change the self-pub "rules" for him. We're not Brandon Sanderson and we need multiple options to stand a chance.
Take me. I have zero options, zero, to make it doing self-pubbing. Even if trad-pubs offer nothing else, they'll market the book for me. I'd simply disappear on Amazon.
@@stephenwolberius I'm not so certain that trad pub would market your book for you (or that they would put as much marketing force behind your book as you would like); from the discourse that's around, it seems there's a certain expectation that you do some marketing yourself regardless.
If you're comfortable talking about it, what are the barriers to self-publishing for you? What makes it untenable, compared to traditional publishing?
its his money now, he cna do whatever he wants as long as he has time to write as far as im concerend
💯 Based on everything I've seen and read, Sanderson's awesome in that whenever he goes up an income level, he reinvests that money back into his business...to free up time to write more books and/or get more books out to more readers.
So he makes a couple million for 5 new novels ...good for him!!!!
4 technically! We don't know what he's doing with #5 yet, he suggested graphic novel but who knows?
And now it’s about to break 40 million 😅
You know what I did NOT factor into my first analysis? That Brandon was gonna RUN ADS for his Kickstarter. I ran into 3 of them during the final 24 hours! AND that there were a whole lotta speculators jumping on board 😅
$41 MILLION :D
Don't forget that 10% is going to the Mormon church as a tithe
It's below the line so I'm not gonna factor it in! 😉 But @Taylor Ramage did address the issue of tithing in this reaction video here if you're interested in the subject: ua-cam.com/video/7DAp3QeoIhY/v-deo.html