Brandon Sanderson on Hammocks, Fandom and 20 Years of Fantasy

Brandon Sanderson is supposed to work in an underground “supervillain lair” buried beneath his Utah home. Instead, the most in-demand epic fantasist of the moment says he’d rather write in a hammock—on a beach, or on his front porch. Two decades after his debut Elantris, the author hailed as a modern “New Tolkien” is finally taking time to look back at the grind that built his empire.

From graveyard shifts to Cosmere giant

In a wide-ranging new interview with The Bookseller, Sanderson describes the long road from hotel graveyard shifts to becoming one of SFF’s most powerful brands. He wrote 13 novels before selling one, then found that selling Elantris in 2005 only raised the pressure: could he turn a single book deal into a career?

That question has now been answered emphatically. Sanderson has published more than 30 books, with UK print sales topping £14m, plus millions more from completing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time finale. His interconnected Cosmere universe now sprawls across epic series, novellas and cross-media projects. In December 2024, Wind and Truth closed the first five-book arc of The Stormlight Archive, laying groundwork for even deeper cross-series links in future novels.

Readers who’ve been following our coverage of how Sanderson was crowned fantasy’s new Tolkien will recognise the pattern: relentless output, meticulous worldbuilding, and a long game measured in decades, not trilogies.

Internet hustle, Kickstarter records and Dragonsteel

Sanderson is clear that none of this happened by accident. Early on, he embraced the internet as a way to keep readers informed in an era when, as he puts it, he “never knew when new books were coming out.” He blogged, “microblogged,” and posted tour updates back when that felt radical. When his publisher said a tour would cost $2,000 a day, he took the money, got in a car, and personally visited every bookstore in each city, handing signed copies to staff sci‑fi nerds who would handsell his work for years.

That groundwork evolved into Dragonsteel Entertainment, the in-house operation he runs with his wife. Dragonsteel now handles special editions, a dedicated convention, and ambitious crowdfunding. In 2022, Sanderson stunned publishing with a four-book “secret project” Kickstarter that raised over $41m. More recently, the officially licensed Cosmere Roleplaying Game campaign brought in $14.7m, making it the most-funded tabletop RPG in Kickstarter history.

Those projects sit alongside a packed release slate—upcoming books include Tailored Realities (Dec. 2025), Cosmere novel Isles of the Emberdark, and the long-awaited Mistborn Era 3, Ghostbloods, planned for 2028–2030.

Honouring Tolkien while building what’s next

As fans and critics increasingly call him Tolkien’s heir, Sanderson has been careful to point back to the original. In recent Spanish-language coverage he openly paid tribute to J.R.R. Tolkien as his foundational inspiration, even as global reissues in markets like Brazil and Bulgaria show how far his own influence now spreads.

For readers, Sanderson’s 20-year retrospective isn’t just nostalgia. It’s a reminder that today’s sprawling Cosmere—spanning novels, special editions, and even tabletop tie-ins that sit alongside other fantasy game adaptations—was built by a writer willing to drive city to city, one bookstore at a time. Now, as he jokes about resting in the hammock built by his younger self, the rest of us are left watching what he constructs next.