New Brandon Sanderson Kickstarter makes million dollar campaigns look tiny

[Enevhar Aldarion]

Just launched today and already at almost 12 million dollars from 44k backers. I knew he was a popular author, but wow!

Surprise! Four Secret Novels by Brandon Sanderson

A Year of Sanderson: Enjoy books and swag boxes throughout 2023!

www.kickstarter.com

 

[p_johnston]

I'm not terribly surprised honestly. Brandon Sanderson is definitively the most famous and popular fantasy author on the market now and has been for a while. At this point I think you could make a fairly good argument for him being the most popular author alive.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

At the moment, it is the fourth most money-making Kickstarter ever.

As a fan of his books, I knew that this Kickstarter would be really successful . . . but I absolutely did not expect this. I think it has a good chance of taking the top spot for most successful Kickstarter if it keeps going up long enough.

Source: Kickstarter: most-funded projects 2021 | Statista.

 

[Morrus]

Wow. Novels don't traditionally do well on Kickstarter! Good luck to him!

 

[darjr]

$14 million and 54k backers.

And he hasn’t even released the titles yet.

 

[Ibrandul]

Literally all he has revealed so far is “one of the four books is completely new, the other three are in the Cosmere universe but set on new worlds.” That’s it, that’s all the deets you get.

Plus the premium editions backers are paying for aren’t even KS exclusive! They merely “might not” be available after the close of the campaign.

Tens of thousands of people are also springing for the swag box add-ons with almost zero information. All you get about those is “each box will have three items” and “some items might be T-shirts.”

Seriously, that’s a preposterous amount of money to raise when the product you’re offering is “It’ll be great, trust me!”

 

[Umbran]

Seriously, that’s a preposterous amount of money to raise when the product you’re offering is “It’ll be great, trust me!”

Yeah, but Sanderson is a well-established, pretty darned popular author - NYT bestseller list four different times, Hugo nominated four times, one of which he won. Folks have plenty of examples of the quality of his work already.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Yeah, but Sanderson is a well-established, pretty darned popular author - NYT bestseller list four different times, Hugo nominated four times, one of which he won. Folks have plenty of examples of the quality of his work already.

And work ethic! Don't forget that the man posts his progress openly, often on multiple projects simultaneously, and shows progress and hits deadlines all the time. He's pretty much a golden bet to complete and extremely likely to do it on time. That paired with obviously creating a popular product is why people are more than willing to take "trust me."

 

[Ibrandul]

Almost ten thousand people have pledged $500 apiece for the top tier, where the majority of that money goes toward the almost totally unspecified swag boxes, not the novels.

I'm not saying the product won't live up to expectations. But it speaks volumes (to me anyway) that tens of thousands of people are willing to blind-buy hundreds of dollars of swag from him with next to no information about what they're buying. Obviously very, very few people on earth could pull that off, and he's apparently one of them.

 

[darjr]

Huh? Secret swag “to be revealed”

New way to do “stretch goals” without having to commit to specifics ahead of any known budget?