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After two decades, dozens of novels and record-breaking crowdfunding campaigns, Brandon Sanderson says he’s finally earned his hammock. The SFF titan marked his 20-year publishing milestone by looking back at the grind that took him from graveyard hotel shifts to running Dragonsteel Entertainment, a multimedia fantasy empire built on loyal readers and a sprawling Cosmere universe.
In a new interview with The Bookseller, Sanderson describes drafting in a hammock on his porch or at the beach, a far cry from the days when he wrote 13 unpublished novels before selling Elantris in 2005. Since then, he’s sold more than £14m in books through Nielsen BookScan, completed Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time and launched mega-series like The Stormlight Archive.
From trunk novels to record-breaking fandom
Sanderson’s career now reads like a publishing case study in slow-build fandom. Early on, he used blogs and social media to tell readers exactly where he’d be signing, then drove himself city to city, visiting every bookstore he could find. Handing signed copies to staff “sci-fi nerds” turned hand-selling into a grassroots marketing machine that still pays off at today’s packed events.
That long game exploded into view with his 2022 Kickstarter for four “secret” novels, which raised more than $41m and paved the way for the Cosmere Roleplaying Game. The tabletop RPG has now cleared $14.6m on Kickstarter, making it the most-funded RPG campaign ever and expanding the Cosmere beyond prose into gaming, with dedicated Stormlight and Mistborn settings rolling out through 2026.
Recent coverage has already crowned him “fantasy’s new Tolkien” for this intricate, interconnected universe, where everyday people inherit shards of godlike power. Our own look at that phenomenon, Brandon Sanderson Crowned ‘New Tolkien’ by Modern Fantasy Fans, traced how the Cosmere’s complexity has turned casual readers into lore-obsessed completionists.
Guarded about Hollywood, bullish on new worlds
Despite that reach, Sanderson remains wary of screen adaptations. As he’s explained in past Q&As, including a candid conversation with Polygon, he has turned down major film and TV offers over creative-control concerns and timing. For now, readers are more likely to get new books, games and leatherbound editions than a Cosmere streaming universe.
That doesn’t mean he’s slowing down. Beyond December’s midpoint Stormlight novel Wind and Truth, Sanderson is teaming with Peter Orullian on The Strata Wars, a new fantasy trilogy launching summer 2026, revealed in an exclusive from People. He’s also deepening his connection with aspiring writers, headlining the 2026 StoryCon writing conference, where he’ll speak on craft, persistence and literacy advocacy, as reported by Deseret News.
For fans trying to keep up with all this output, curated entry points matter. Sanderson’s own team has leaned into that, recently assembling a BookTok-friendly starter bundle built around Cosmere touchstones like Mistborn and Tress of the Emerald Sea; we broke down why those picks are catnip for newcomers and completionists alike in our recent look at the growing Cosmere spotlight.
Looking ahead, Sanderson jokes that he’s finally able to rest in the hammock that his younger self built. But with new trilogies, record-breaking RPGs and the back half of the Cosmere still to map, that hammock is starting to look less like retirement and more like a very comfortable command chair.
