Then Sanderson received a life-changing voicemail. An editor wanted to buy his sixth book.
” Elantris revealed two important qualities that I’m always looking for,” says Moshe Feder, a consulting editor for Tor Books. “One is strong storytelling ability—you can’t teach that, it has to be there—and the other, which is even rarer, is the ability to come up with new ideas. [Brandon] definitely had that, and that’s a rare treasure.”
Feder acquired Elantris , Sanderson’s first published novel, for Tor Books.
“I’d met [Feder] at a convention,” Sanderson says. “Then I sent him a book, and it sat on his desk for 18 months. So I’d given up on it.”
Feder insists he hadn’t been sitting on the manuscript for quite so long (“every time Brandon talks about it, I think he makes it even longer”), but enough time had passed for Sanderson to move twice and get a new email address. He eventually tracked down Sanderson’s grad student webpage, complete with a current phone number.
“I woke up to a voicemail saying, ‘I’m Moshe Feder. I don’t know if you remember me, but we need to talk because I want to buy it,’” Sanderson says. “And I was like ‘WHAT?’”
As magical as it was, this was only the first life-altering phone call Sanderson received.
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