Info I gleamed about the four mystery books from Brandon's live stream
I probably missed somethings/got some things wrong. Feel free to provide your own additions/corrections.
Michael and Kate might do the audio book on one of the four novels but Brandon wants to collaborate with other narrators and is taking recommendations on reddit.
They will be on audible and as they're a "small/medium" press publisher, will be making it one credit. whatever that means
Books 1, 3 & 4 are a part of the Cosmere.
That leaves book 2 as an original project.
Number 4 is the one about a returning character. It goes into and has ties to their backstory.
Number 3 is Brandon's personal favorite, along with his wife and Peter's, although the opinion his evenly split among the whole staff.
They're all standalone novels and can be a reader's introduction to Sanderson or the Cosmere.
However they have more references than some of the early novels, which he says is because there's more to reference now that the Cosmere is nearing 20 years old.
One of the book is in first person, the other three are in third.
They're all approximately 100k words, give or take, making all four in total the length of one Stormlight novel.
The shortest is about 80k-90k words and is the non cosmere book (number 2)
The longest is about 110k
The cosmere novels have weird world building. Specifically with setting and not magic systems. Brandon compared it to Stormlight thematically than his earlier novels like Mistborn or Elantris. I assume he means it's less classical fantasy/eurocentric-vibes of those early novels, however this is not a quote from him the only thing directly from his mouth is that it's like Stormlight.
"Four's narrative is unlike anything I've done before. It's polarizing in me leaning into one type of storytelling very much. If you like that style of storytelling you'll love this book if you don't it's just going to be a little much"
All of the novels are him messing around with his style of writing and each have q unique tone of voice according to him.
The video was apparently originally going to be more dramatic with him playing up the unsurity of the situation. The staff got him to tone it down and the one we got is a compromise.
"I was very enamored with the idea. I didn't know if it was a good idea. I only knew I liked the idea."
Given the social media reaction to the video, namely here, Twitter and YouTube, commercially speaking, it was a success.
Kickstarter, Printing, & International Shipping
Despite the now 13+ million dollars, they're not planning stretch goals for the kickstarter or much customization. It was a lot of work for the Way of Kings Leather-bound and they're saving that kind of thing for the Words of Radiance next year.
Paperback printings are certainly going to happen, the only question up in the air is when.
Shipping international was one of the biggest dilemmas for them, as they are printing 100% in house and shipping them everywhere vs printing them much closer to the destinations. He mentioned possibly talking to one of his European publishers, naming Spanish and Polish specifically, to see if they could do a special distribution outside of the original kickstarter, although he states that given they'll be printing English copies, he expects a likelihood of being turned down as that's outside of their slice of the market. UK's Brexit also complicates things.
Some viewers proposed saving all of the books for the end of the year and shipping them all in one package to save on postage, however as previously mentioned, personalized orders are harder to manage and they're not super sure if they have the space in their warehouse to store them all for that long.
As for Canada, they're the same price because of FedEx/UPS being weird and costing them extra despite the fact that they're right there. Brandon theorizes it's because they fly the books over the border rather than drive it.
In the end they decided flatrate price for shipping was the easiest and to keep the price of it low have opted to take a slight loss.
All tiers will include the ebook, as there might be a delay for shipping the packages, to give people something read if they want to leave the books as pure shelf dressing, and also some shenanigans with going up against Amazon that I can't remember and don't want to scrub through the stream to find.
The reason why he can churn so many of these out is because they're all original stories with little pre-existing characters (or at least characters who already had arcs) because according to him
"It's harder to write a character after they had a character arc than it is to write new characters"
He wanted his editors to use colorful pens when giving notes, having them assigned a unique color and write their opinions on the manuscript in said color, and to respond to others notes on the manuscript.
When he gave them the mansucripts for all of them, he forgot to print out multiple copies of each and so they assumed it was 4 different copies of the same story instead of four different stories. It took some discussion for the editors to realize this. However, Brandon prefers them all passing around the same copy so they don't have to allocate all of the notes from multiple manuscripts.
They decided to replicate this with the Beta readers.
If you want Brandon to take a genuine break he will be sitting down to play Elden Ring and may be getting something *vague handwave* from From Software themselves. guess they overheard him being salty that they picked GRRM over him /lh
What about book number 5?
Book number 5 was a special creation of his, different from books 1-4. Namely, it's a collaboration between him and his sons.
One of them (Oliver) drew him a robot frog named "Robog" and Brandon hung it up on his bathroom mirror. Seeing the drawing every day eventually got his gears turning. Eventually wondering "What was Robog's story?"
The answer is its a toy that comes to life and follows the owner of Robog.
And so, Brandon wrote a small chunk of it and read it to his sons. They became so enamored with it and amazed that something they created lead to an actual story that they made more drawings for him and asked Brandon to incorporate it into the story.
The entire thing came out to be about 30k words and so the reason why he's wanting it to be like a graphic novel is because art was baked into the writing process and he wants to pass off the drawings his sons did and have a professional artist develop them using his manuscript for that story.
It's not included in the Kickstarter because he felt it was out of place from the other, more adult oriented books.
It's title is "Super Awesom Danger"
