The Way of Kings is a broad-canvas cinematic story, but it’s also an intimate exploration of some of Sanderson’s central themes: what leadership is, whether idealists can put their ideals into practice without betraying them, and whether people of good conscience can overcome their religious and political differences. Very much a book of the American moment, in other words.
Like all his others, it didn’t sell. But one of his earlier books suddenly did.
This was the point where the people he could now describe as his publishers asked what else he was working on, and he told them, and they blanched. So he offered them a more conventional project, taking some of the ideas he’d developed for his two loathed market-chasing books, and reworking them into what became his Mistborn fantasy trilogy. This got extremely good reviews and led to a phone call from Harriet McDougal, the editor and widow of the fantasy writer Robert Jordan.
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