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Fantasy Author Brandon Sanderson Breaks Kickstarter Records
Best-selling fantasy author Brandon Sanderson made the news by breaking the record for the most successful Kickstarter campaign. He broke that record in just a few days.
As of today, it’s at $31,901,493 with eight days left to go! So if you want to pledge, act soon!
How It Happened
It all started on February 28 of this year, when Brandon Sanderson posted a YouTube video dropping hints of a secret. He told fans he was going to make an announcement about his writing career the next day. He sounded grave. Some people worried he was going to say he was very ill. Others believed he was going to take a break from writing for mental health reasons. Or retire early. So fans and fellow authors were worried.
Along came his next YouTube video, It’s Time to Come Clean. In this, he admits that he “accidentally” wrote several extra novels in secret during COVID. In the video, he plopped manuscript after manuscript on his desk. Some writers thought he was being smug when he did this — but I think he’s just a prolific nerd.
In the middle of the video, he announced he was going to publish four of these books through a Kickstarter campaign — Surprise! Four Secret Novels by Brandon Sanderson. All four books (titles and details not revealed at first) would be published — in eBook, audio, or hardcover. Three of them were standalone books set in his popular Cosmere setting, the universe where most of his fantasy novels take place. The fourth one would be “something completely different.”
It would happen as long as the Kickstarter hit $1,000,000 within 30 days.
It hit its goal within 35 minutes.
That wasn’t the end. Sanderson’s Kickstarter hit $14,000,000 within the first day. That was fast! You could see the counter move as you watched!
By the next day, it was up over $15,000,000.
Within days, it broke the Kickstarter record for the most-funded project when it hit above $20.3 million.
