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Interview #978: Advertising Some of my Smaller Projects - Fantasy Faction Q&A, Entry #10

Overlord

Some great projects there Brandon and I’m really excited to hear you’ve decided to publish some of your own books.

Firstly, thank you so much for stopping by! It was great meeting you in England last year (despite my nerves!) and that interview we did still picks up tons of hits on youtube! It was truly a great day. Remembering how many question I hit you with; it probably won’t surprise you I have more

  1. So, now that you are self publishing - has it given you a new found respect for those who have been self publishing from the beginning? I mean, now you are do doubt speaking with printers, typesetters, cover artists, reviewers, convention organisers. I guess you are having to market your own titles as well (although you’ve always been a great author for self promotion). Also, has the amount of work surprised you?

  2. I remember you saying originally that a lot of your work you wrote from your heart and based upon your own interests. I believe you struggled to get much attention from this early work and I believe your said Mistborn you wrote for the market as opposed to for yourself. Now that you are self-publishing certain titles, do you think we will be seeing more ‘unique’ and ‘out-there’ projects? I.e. Fantasy that is quite unlike things we have seen before?

Thanks for your time, Brandon!

BRANDON SANDERSON

  1. Well, I get to cheat. I’ve done well enough that I ave a full-time assistant with a lot of experience in desktop publishing. So, I can hand him the book, and he can take it to design town. That said, we on the more traditional track have had to do some eating of our words in recent years. Once upon a time there was a large stigma to self-publishing, and we all kind of got infected by it. So when it became viable as a real, serious alternative for authors, we had trouble getting rid of our biases.

I wouldn’t say the amount of work has surprised me, as I’ve paid attention to those self-publishing. I teach a writing and publishing class, and I’ve found that as publishing changes, I’ve had to keep my eyes on what it takes to publish reasonably on your own. I also know how much work goes into publishing a book on the publisher’s end, and had no illusions about how much work it would take us.

  1. You’ve got the story mostly right, though it was the original draft of Mistborn (that did not get published) which was a ‘For the market’ book. It was awful. The Way of Kings was the book I wrote after that, giving no care to the world, writing only from my heart–and so you can say I’ve already started doing that. I would like to point out, though, that the second version of Mistborn (the one that got published, in which I tossed aside everything but the magic system and some original character concept) as in my mind a ‘return to form’ of the books like Elantris that I’d been writing and feeling were not getting attention.

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