For those of you who have been paying attention to my various feeds on my social media channels this won’t come as a surprise, but for those of you who are just seeing this, Humble Bundle has put together a collection which includes many of my shorter works as well as the Graphic Audio edition of a few others. I will get to more on that shortly. Many of you may not know how Humble Bundle works and I don’t think I could say it any more succinctly than they have listed on their website.

Brandon Sanderson’s the man. So we’re bringing you a bundle of some of his highlights – and some lesser-known titles, too. Some are audiobooks and some are ebooks, but all are awesome.

Pay $1 or more. All together, the novellas, audiobooks, game guides, and graphic novel in this bundle would cost over $174. Here at Humble Bundle, though, you name your price of $1 or more and increase your contribution to upgrade your bundle!

Read them anywhere. The books are available in PDF, ePUB, and MOBI formats (instructions are here); the adventure game and supplements are available in PDF; the comic is available in PDF, ePub, and CBZ formats (instructions are here); and the audiobooks are available as MP3 and FLAC files (instructions are here).

Support charity. Choose where the money goes – between the publishers, The Moth Education Program (Storyville Center for the Spoken Word), and, if you like, a second charity of your choice via the PayPal Giving Fund. For details on how this works, click here. If you like what we do, you can leave us a Humble Tip too!

So, What’s Included?

Pay $1 or more

• Firstborn/Defending Elysium
• The Emperor’s Soul
• Legion
• Legion:Skin Deep
• Warbreaker Part 1 – Graphic Audio
• Elantris Part 1 – Graphic Audio
• Mistborn Adventure Game

Pay $8 or more to also unlock!

• Sixth of the Dusk
• Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell
• Perfect State
• Warbreaker Part 2 – Graphic Audio
• Elantris Part 2 – Graphic Audio
• Terris: Wrought of Copper Player’s Guide

Pay $15 or more to also unlock!

• Snapshot
• Dreamer
• The Hope of Elantris – Graphic Audio
• Warbreaker Part 3 – Graphic Audio
• Elantris Part 3 – Graphic Audio
• White Sand – Graphic Novel
• Alloy of Law: Mistborn Campaign

There are a few regional restrictions that we couldn’t work around, so a few items will vary from one region to another so use the link at the top to check the specifics for your locale.

Hey, all! I’ve been deep into revisions on Oathbringer. Turns out, big books don’t just take a long time to write—they take a long time to revise. (Who knew?)

Last year during my trip to the United Arab Emirates, I took a break from working on Oathbringer to write a novella, as is my habit to refresh myself now and then. Other than Edgedancer (the Stormlight novella in Arcanum Unbounded), this is the only thing I had time to write last year that wasn’t Oathbringer.

Snapshot is one of those stories that, once I had the idea, wouldn’t leave me alone. I wrote it furiously, having only about a week’s time to finish it, and I’m very pleased with the product: a kind of cyberpunk–detective thriller mashup. As we’ve posted earlier, Hollywood quickly snatched this one up, and it’s currently under option to MGM.

I think you’ll like it! The print edition is only available in a special edition leatherbound from Vault Books that will be released soon (though we will also have a cheap hardcover toward the end of the year). But as is our tradition, we’re simultaneously releasing an ebook for a few bucks, DRM-free, in all markets. So you can choose whether you want the expensive collector’s edition, or the quick ebook. (Audible has also released the audiobook today.)

Please give the story a look on its explanation page, where you’ll find a synopsis and links to the first two chapters. Also, note that if you buy the print edition in any format, we’ll happily send you the ebook for free at your request. (This will be handled via a coupon for my store.)

On Short Fiction

This seems a good time to take a moment and talk about the various editions I have out for my short fiction.

There are several motives that war within me when it comes to producing editions of my work. The first is that I really don’t want people to feel they have to pay multiple times for the same piece of fiction. I figure once you’ve paid me for it, you’re good, and you should have access (at least in ebook form) to that story for the rest of your life, whenever you want to read it.

At the same time, I want to provide different distinctive editions of the works for people who like them. This sometimes conflicts with my first impression because of additional costs involved. For example, doing an audiobook is more expensive than a print book as—once all the work is done for the print book—you then have to hire another team to take that text and make an audio version. I haven’t realistically found a way to bundle audio, print, and ebook together. (Though I do think the industry will need to figure this out eventually.)

I think the best I can do for now is give away ebooks of the books I myself publish for free, once you have a print edition. (Note the emphasis—I don’t have the legal right to do this for books like Mistborn and The Way of Kings, which were published by Tor. I can only do it for my self-published ventures, like most of my novellas.)

In addition, however, I can talk about in what formats these novellas will be available, and when. This at least lets you know whether you want to hold off getting one until your preferred format is available. So here is what I see us doing with these for the foreseeable future.

Option One: Individual cheap ebook
Available DRM-free from most ebook vendors on launch day.

Option Two: Individual audiobook
These depend on Audible or some other company wanting to release an edition. (They did so for the Legion books, for example, but not others.)

Usually, individual audiobooks for shorts are a bad value for readers—as the Audible economy depends on people using credits on stories, and there are no “half” credits. Which means a credit can be applied to a three-hour novella or a full-length novel at twenty-plus hours.

So you can’t depend on these existing. Sometimes they will, but not other times.

Option Three: Individual leatherbound hardcover
I’ve done these for most novellas, partnering with places like Subterranean and Vault Books. These are meant mostly as collector’s items, and usually have a short and limited print run. For those who want each individual novella separate and in its own book, this is your best option.

Option Four: Dragonsteel edition hardcover
These editions are often printed as “doubles” around the holidays, and sometimes (before official publication) go with me to conventions as convention exclusives.

This is the economical way to get a print edition, as they usually cost $20 and have two stories. (Snapshot, for example, is being published with another story called Dreamer this fall, and will be at conventions with me all summer.)

However, there’s a windowing of a few months on most of these, meaning you can’t get it immediately. This is by request of the publishers of the leatherbounds, who want a small exclusivity window.

Option Five: Collection version (ebook, audio, print)

I will be doing two types of collections moving forward. Cosmere stories (in the Arcanum Unbounded tradition, likely named Arcanum Unbounded II, III, etc.). These will collect in a single edition all the stories that haven’t been collected so far. (Arcanum Unbounded, for example, contained every Cosmere piece of short fiction that had been published up to that point.)

These are for the completionists who want everything, but who don’t mind waiting. They’re also very economical, as if you wait for the paperback edition, they will probably give you a dozen stories (of various lengths) for around ten bucks.

I do anticipate doing a non-Cosmere collection within a year or two, which will include stories like Snapshot and Perfect State. (And probably the Legion novellas, unless they become their own thing.)

Option Six: Dragonsteel collection leatherbound

If there is interest, we might do a leatherbound edition for the 10th anniversary of the collection, like we’ve done with Elantris and are currently doing with Mistborn. So if you like leatherbounds, but miss the initial limited edition, these will eventually be available—but they are a looong way off.

Anyway, I hope that lets you plan! Thank you for your interest in these smaller stories. Your enthusiasm for them is part of what keeps me so productive, as I don’t feel locked into doing one type of story. Overall, this makes even things like Stormlight move faster, as I remain engaged and excited as an author moving between projects.
And do please consider giving Snapshot a look!

Best,

Brandon

I’ve started my tour for Steelheart! After two very successful Utah signings, I’ve flown off to Texas where I will have events in Houston and Austin. You can check out my full schedule here.

To accompany the Steelheart release, I’ve posted a guest Big Idea essay over at John Scalzi’s Whatever blog. It starts off like this:

Early in my life, I knew I was a geek. I just didn’t know what that meant.

For example, I went to a Star Trek convention when I was eleven or twelve. Now, at that point, I’d only seen a handful of TOS episodes. I hadn’t discovered fantasy novels or reading yet. But I went to a Star Trek convention because…well, I was a geek, right? That seemed like the sort of thing that geeks did.

Fortunately, it turns out my instincts about myself were right. During the next few years, I blossomed. In geek terms, that means I discovered comic books, role playing, and novels—then retreated to my room to pupate for the next six years, surviving on a steady diet of Anne McCaffrey novels and bags of Cheetos.

From there it talks about about Steelheart and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Give it a read!

Something else special today is that the cover to Charlaine Harris’s anthology Games Creatures Play has been revealed. You can see it below. When Charlaine invited me to be part of this anthology and explained what it was going to be about, I knew I had to write a story for it. My contribution is called “Dreamer” and is rather unlike anything I’ve ever written—and it’s even a true short story rather than a novella. I hope you’ll enjoy it when it comes out in April.

Here’s the full list of contributors and stories for the anthology.

• Charlaine Harris: “In the Blue Hereafter”
• William Kent Krueger: “Hide and Seek”
• Jan Burke: “Stepping into the Dead Zone”
• Joe R. Lansdale: “Dead on the Bones”
• Caitlin Kittredge: “The Devil Went down to Boston”
• Brendan DuBois: “On the Playing Fields of Blood”
• Dana Cameron: “The God’s Games”
• Scott Sigler: “The Case of the Haunted Safeway”
• Ellen Kushner: “Prise de Fer”
• Brandon Sanderson: “Dreamer”
• Mercedes Lackey: “False Knight on the Road”
• Seanan McGuire: “Jammed”
• Adam-Troy Castro: “Hide and Shriek”
• Laura Lippman: “Ice”
• Toni L. P. Kelner: “Bell, Book, and Candlepin”