Brandon Sanderson scores the biggest Kickstarter of all time

A month after launching it, Brandon Sanderson has ended his latest Kickstarter on a stunning wave of success. The Kickstarter ended having raised $41,754,153, making it the most successful campaign of all time, bringing in more than twice the previous record: $20,338,986 for the Pebble smartwatch in 2015. The campaign brought in almost $10 million of that total in its last hour.

Sanderson launched the campaign after revealing that he had written five secret books whilst in lockdown in 2020 and 2021, taking advantage of the cancellation of his normally time-consuming touring schedule. Sanderson decided to put together an ambitious campaign consisting of limited editions of four of the books, loot bags and more bonuses to get the books out to fans (the fifth book is apparently going to be reworked into a graphic novel and will be handled later, separately).

The four books consist of three books in his Cosmere setting and a further book which is a complete stand-alone. The Cosmere books are Tress of the Emerald Sea, Yumi and the Nightmare Painter and The Sunlit Man, whilst the standalone is called The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England.

This is in addition to Sanderson's other announced projects, such as the fifth Stormlight Archive novel which is due out in late 2023 or early 2024, and the next Mistborn novel, The Lost Metal, which is due later this year.

Sanderson's enormous Kickstarter success was made possible by a company he set up for the purposes of creating merchandise for fans. Other authors will no doubt be looking at this model to see if they can replicate its success, but I think it'll be a tall order.

Sanderson did "pay it forward" due to the overwhelming success of the Kickstarter, donating money to every currently-active literary Kickstarter to boost their profile as well.