Fantasy Author Brandon Sanderson Breaks Kickstarter Records

Anne Marble
6 min readMar 23, 2022

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!

Standing before a starlit sky, a smirking blond man in fantasy garb points to the text “Surprise! Four Secret Novels: Brandon Sanderson.” On the left is text that reads “#1 Most Funded Kickstarter.”
Surprise! Four Secret Novels by Brandon Sanderson. (Source: Brandon Sanderson Homepage.)

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…

--

--

Anne Marble

I’m a writer and a copy editor with experience in editing science and engineering articles. Click Lists to find my most popular articles. And hidden gems.