Back in May I mentioned the new trade paperbacks for the Mistborn trilogy that were coming out, starting with the first book. Since then, The Well of Ascension was released in August, and The Hero of Ages came out this week.

All three books have gorgeous Sam Weber cover art, and Isaac Stewart drew updated versions of the maps. The three books are shelved in the YA section of the store (next to Steelheart and The Rithmatist), but aside from the cover, maps, and some longstanding typos that my assistant Peter got fixed, they’re identical to the versions shelved in the adult science fiction/fantasy section. If you know teenagers who like to read, this new version might be a good one to give them. Check the “Trade Paper” links in the widget to the upper right, as well as on the Mistborn and The Well of Ascension pages.

This Saturday I will be at New York Comic Con. My schedule is below. I hope to see many of you there! Unfortunately, I’ve heard that Saturday passes are already sold out.

New York Comic Con

Date: Saturday, October 11, 2014
Place: New York Comic Con
Address: Javits Center
655 W 34th St
New York, New York 10001

Schedule:
2:00–3:00 p.m., Tor Booth #2223
Brandon Sanderson Signing
We’ll have plenty of Brandon Sanderson’s titles both old and new available for purchase. Free The Way of Kings/Mistborn sampler with every purchase!

4:00–4:45 p.m., Room 1A18
Villains: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Darth Vader, the Evil Queen, Hannibal Lecter, Nurse Ratched . . . let’s face it, being a villain is way more fun sometimes. Join Waltury Jury & Sarah Fine (Scan), Lexie Dunne (Superheroes Anonymous), Matthew Cody (Villainous), Brandon Sanderson (Steelheart and Firefight), Peter Moore (V is for Villain), and Anna Schumacher (End Times) as they discuss with Anna Jarzab (Tandem) what makes a villain memorable, why we need them, and if the tables were turned, would they be the heroes of their own tales?

5:15–6:15 p.m., Autographing Table 19
Villains: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Author Autographing

Readers have been asking if my forthcoming novellas LEGION and THE EMPEROR’S SOUL will be released in audio versions. The answer is that they will be—we have deals made for these, but I’m not sure how quickly the audiobooks will be released compared to the book versions. I’ll let you know when I have more details.

Another question commonly asked is whether Michael Kramer and Kate Reading will return to voice the audiobook for A MEMORY OF LIGHT. The answer is yes, and the audiobook will definitely be released the same day as the hardcover.

All of my books are now out in audio editions, including the last three Alcatraz books that were missing audiobooks for a few years. There are two different kinds of audiobooks of mine that have come out: standard unabridged readings (from Macmillan Audio and Recorded Books) and full-cast dramatizations (from GraphicAudio). Which type each book has depends on how contracts were negotiated.

Recorded Books has unabridged readings of Elantris, Warbreaker, and all four Alcatraz books.

GraphicAudio has full-cast dramatizations of Elantris and Warbreaker.

Macmillan Audio has unabridged readings of Mistborn 1, 2, 3 and The Alloy of Law; The Way of Kings; and The Gathering Storm and Towers of Midnight.

Amazon has most of the above for sale. Audible has everything except for the GraphicAudio editions. iTunes also has many of the books.

Tor.com has a free unabridged reading of the novelette “Firstborn.”

I’m very happy to report that the Mistborn trilogy ebooks are now, at long last, available again in the UK (and Australia and New Zealand) in what should be error-free editions (unlike the old versions that used to be available). This has been longer in coming than any of us would have liked, but it’s good to finally be able to announce this.

Kindle iBooks WHSmith

Kindle iBooks WHSmith

Kindle iBooks WHSmith

I also have an announcement that came as a surprise to me. It turns out that MISTBORN: THE ALLOY OF LAW has already been released, as of five days ago. In Bulgaria. So if you are currently somewhere near Sofia, Plovdiv, Varna, Burgas, Ruse, Stara Zagora, Pleven, or Sliven, you can go out and buy the book now. (Thanks to the Bulgarian reader named “I.” who emailed to tell me about this!)

Finally, some Mistborn readers from Austin, TX wrote in to let me know they have recorded a song from Zane and Vin’s points of view that is, appropriately, metal. With a lot of screaming. Not about puppies. I’ll let you form your own opinion.

On the heels of signed copies of WARBREAKER coming to my online store a couple of weeks ago, signed copies of ELANTRIS are now finally back in stock. I think it’s been over a year—maybe over two—since we ran out of copies and had to pull it from the store. Well, I was finally able to get my hands on some fresh copies from the fourth printing that Tor did recently, so if you’ve been wondering how to get ELANTRIS, now’s your chance.

The best way to get a book signed is to come see me when I’m signing near you. Sometimes the bookstore hosting me will order in hardcover copies of my oldest books like ELANTRIS. But since bookstores are less likely to have one of my hardcovers when it’s been out for a year and a paperback has already been released, at that time I start offering it on my site.

Right now, until THE WAY OF KINGS is released on August 31st, all of my solo adult fantasy books have been out in hardcover for over a year. So I’m offering a bundle of all five of them—ELANTRIS, the Mistborn trilogy, and WARBREAKER—at a discount until that day. If you want the complete set signed and personalized, this is your best bet ever. I’ll also throw in a paperback of ALCATRAZ VERSUS THE EVIL LIBRARIANS. (It’s a humorous fantasy for the middle-grade market, but adults enjoy it too. If you’ve never read it, you’ll probably like it more than you expected.)

So that’s two specials ending on August 31st—the WARBREAKER discount and the 5-Pack discount.

Well, here it is the last day of June and I haven’t mentioned audiobooks at all like I was supposed to, and we all know whose fault that was . . . that’s right, my assistant Peter.

June is audiobook month! There are lots of audiobook-related posts on Twitter with the hashtag #JIAM. There have been contests, some of which are still going on. If you like audiobooks, check it out.

I know many fans enjoy the performances of Michael Kramer and Kate Reading on the Wheel of Time audiobooks. Did you know that Michael Kramer also voiced the audiobooks for the Mistborn trilogy? They’re unabridged and available from Audible.com and via iTunes. And remember how last year Tor.com previewed the second chapter of the audiobook of THE GATHERING STORM? Well, at least one of the upcoming previews of THE WAY OF KINGS on Tor.com is going to be in audio form, and Wheel of Time audiobook fans should be pleased with who you hear reading the chapters. The Stormlight Archive series will also be available via Audible and iTunes as well as on CD.

Most of my other books are also available in audio form. There’s an unabridged recording of ALCATRAZ VERSUS THE EVIL LIBRARIANS. Both WARBREAKER and ELANTRIS are available in two different forms—traditional unabridged readings and full-cast dramatizations. The unabridged readings are from Recorded Books and are also on Audible and iTunes. The dramatizations come from Graphic Audio and are available as audio CDs, mp3 CDs, and mp3 downloads. (They also have an international store.) Graphic Audio editions aren’t completely unabridged in that they don’t have dialogue tags (he said/she said) since the characters are voiced by different actors, and some description is replaced with sound effects, but aside from that you won’t miss any words. Their tagline is “A Movie in Your Mind,” and if you’re an audiobook fan it’s an experience you should try out.

As many of you know, I offer on my website signed hardcovers of books that have been out for a year or so, since by that time the paperback is available and the hardcover is more difficult to find in stores. Well, WARBREAKER has now been out for a year (and the paperback has been out for almost three months), so I’ve put it up in my store here. I’ve also put up the whole Mistborn trilogy again (though without the Steel Alphabet Medallion that I threw in with the holiday bundle we offered last year). Both WARBREAKER and the Mistborn trilogy have a special price until the release of THE WAY OF KINGS: $20 for WARBREAKER and about $70 for the Mistborn trilogy. After August 31st, WARBREAKER will go up to cover price and the Mistborn trilogy will go up to about $75. This year I’m not going to be signing in quite so many cities as I did last year, so if you like signed books this may be a good way for you to get them. Of course it’s best to come to one of my signings and support the bookseller hosting me by buying my books there, but I know that’s not an option for everyone.

Mignon Fogarty, who runs the excellent Grammar Girl podcast (and wrote the accompanying book), who I met at the Superstars Writing Seminar a few months ago, is having a contest with copies of MISTBORN as prizes—she’s giving away two books each week for the next four weeks. She’s calling it a “conversion story” contest—to enter, send in a story about how you got someone excited about Grammar Girl. The best eight entries will win. Of course, this means that not only would you need to already be listening to the Grammar Girl podcast (which you should be doing) but that you’d also have to have convinced someone else to start listening. Very crafty, Mignon. Anyway, to enter, send your conversion story to contest@quickanddirtytips.com—the sooner the better.

In the most recent Writing Excuses podcast episode from our run at CONduit while Howard was away, Dan and I are joined by James Dashner and Julie Wright for another of our brainstorming episodes. People often ask writers where we get our story ideas, and many of them come from throwing random things together as we do here. Check it out.

And tomorrow the final MISTBORN 3 annotation goes up on the website. (Last week annotations for the final chapter and the epilogue went up—again, full of spoilers!) On Thursday the WARBREAKER annotations should begin; I’ll be doing another post about them then.

This year’s World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) will be held in Melbourne, Australia from September 2nd through September 6th. Unfortunately, I won’t be in attendance since I’ll be going to Dragon*Con in Atlanta that same weekend. However, every year the members of Worldcon vote on and present the Hugo Awards, and I have three books that came out in 2009 that are eligible to be nominated in the Best Novel category: WARBREAKER (which you can download for free here–feel free to pass the link on to any Worldcon members you know!), ALCATRAZ VERSUS THE KNIGHTS OF CRYSTALLIA, and THE GATHERING STORM. My editors Moshe Feder and Harriet McDougal are eligible for nomination in the Best Editor, Long Form category, and artists Dan Dos Santos (for the WARBREAKER cover–which a fairly random blogger has just named the best cover for a 2009 SF book by an LDS writer) and Darrell K. Sweet (for the THE GATHERING STORM cover) are eligible in the Best Professional Artist category. (Technically I believe my MISTBORN 2 annotations are also eligible for a nomination in the Best Related Work category, since I finished with them back in April, but I haven’t even considered that those might be worthy of recognition.) Any member of this year’s or last year’s Worldcon may nominate until March 13th, after which only members of the 2010 Worldcon will be able to vote on the final ballot.

Robert Jordan never won a Hugo Award. Not one of his books even garnered enough nominations to earn a spot on a final ballot. On one hand I think it’s a shame that someone who was such a monolith in the field and who did so much for the mainstream success of fantasy publishing should never have been so recognized (as I said back in 2006 when I advocated his nomination for the World Fantasy Life Achievement award). On the other hand, his absence from the lists may simply illustrate that his fan base doesn’t overlap much with the voting base for the awards. If few of Robert Jordan’s fans attend Worldcon, it can hardly be a surprise that he was never nominated for a Hugo. Still, I think nominating one of Robert Jordan’s final three books would be something Worldcon members could feel proud to do, though I don’t know that this year will be the best opportunity for that. We’ll have to see what happens.

If THE GATHERING STORM did get nominated, I’m torn about how that would make me feel. We don’t often realize how much we miss something–or someone–until they’re gone. So, in that regard, I think a nomination might be very respectful. However, to have a Wheel of Time book finally get nominated only after Robert Jordan has passed away would also feel somewhat odd, as I do feel this book would have been better if he’d been around to complete it. Still, the reader response to the book has been excellent. I guess I’ll just leave it in your court, readers. If you decide to nominate the book, I suspect Robert Jordan would be honored. But I’m not going to push or lobby for nominations. (That’s frowned upon anyway.)

This week’s episode of Writing Excuses…wait, now that I think about it, Writing Excuses should also be eligible for a Best Related Work Hugo nomination. Huh…that would be an even more unlikely coup than our Parsec Award win last year. Well anyway, this week’s podcast episode discusses collaboration.

In the most recent MISTBORN 3 annotations, I talk about Lord Fedre and some spoilers as well as Vin’s attempt to defeat the sedative.

This month I’ll be answering questions over at GoodReads’ fantasy book club, following up on their discussion of WARBREAKER. Have something you’ve been dying to ask me, particularly about WARBREAKER? Head on over there.

Rob Bedford sent me a note to let me know he’d named WARBREAKER a standout book in SFFWorld’s fantasy review of 2009. Over on his own blog he also named me his MVP Author of 2009. Thanks, Rob! Unfortunately, this does not come with a trophy.

Finally, a note about THE NAME OF THE WIND author Patrick Rothfuss’s Worldbuilders charity drive that’s ending on January 15th. Last year he raised $114,000 for Heifer International, and this year he’s matching donations at 50%. So far people have donated $87,000, making the total more than $130,000. As a carrot for donating, Pat is collecing a large number of prizes that will be given out in a lottery–each $10 donated gets you one ticket for the drawing. Over a thousand books have been donated so far to give out as prizes. I helped contribute one of the biggest items: a copy of THE GATHERING STORM that is signed not only by myself and Harriet McDougal, Robert Jordan’s wife and editor, but by many people who helped make the book as great as it was: Tom Doherty, Tor founder and publisher; Robert Jordan’s assistants Maria Simons and Alan Romanczuk; Moshe Feder, my editor at Tor for my own books; my agent, Joshua Bilmes; Paul Stevens, my in-house editor at Tor; Dana Giusio, a VP at Macmillan, Tor’s parent company; Phyllis Azar, head of marketing at Tor-Forge; Irene Gallo, Tor’s fantastic art director; and last but not at all least, Dot Lin, the Tor publicist extraordinaire who lined up so many great signings in my recent tour. Anyone who donates at least $10 will have a chance to win this book (or a huge number of other great items, like some kind of book by Neil Gaiman that Pat is packaging with a rock), and the more you donate the better chance you’ll have of winning. I think Heifer International is a worthy cause, so why not lend a hand before the January 15th deadline?

Well, folks, I can safely say that I know ONE reason why the book has been so tough to find for some people. We got numbers for last week today, and they look pretty darn good. Bookscan (the Nielsen ratings for books) lists MISTBORN: WELL OF ASCENSION as the #3 hardback fantasy of the week, right behind Tolkien at #1 and Laurel K. Hamilton at #2. I’ll take #3 behind that short list. If you include SF books in the list, we drop down to #6, since that adds heavyweights like the new DUNE book and the new Stephenson novel.

All things considered, that’s very good for a little book like mine. We were up 75% in sales from book one of the series a great number, and there was much jubilation from my editor and agent.

This is, of course, tempered by worry. Since Barnes and Noble has the book on NO REPLENISH in their system for some reason, that means the book is pretty much sold out at a large number of their stores, with no re-order planned. Sounds crazy, I know, but sometimes the bureaucracy in this business is downright frustrating.

So, if you’re looking to read and find out what all the hoopla is about on this book, you’ll need to go to Borders (who decided to order plenty of copies, then just reordered more and stuck them in floor displays in most of the stores) or to Waldenbooks–or, to your local independent. Amazon or Booksense are other good options.

And, if you’re a fan of Barnes and Noble, it would help if when you visit them you’d complain about the lack of copies of Mistborn 2. If you order from them and make them bring it in, then they’ll probably order more copies of Mistborn 3, realizing their mistake with the second book.

Anyway, by way of celebration, here’s a completely unrelated but still quite stupid pun. Think you know it? Post on my lj or my facebook with your guesses.

Mistborn: The Well of Ascension is out! We’re really keeping our fingers crossed for first week sales on this one, so if you’ve been waiting for it to come out, you should be happy to know that it’s on shelves pretty much everywhere! Some people have even been noting on my forums that it came out a few days early in some parts of the nation.

In celebration, here’s a rejected cover idea:

Okay, so that’s a really obvious pun. Sorry. I figured it would just be a quick Photoshop, then spent forever searching for a shot of Matt Damon looking the right direction. (Never did find one.) Man, that’s an odd angle we’ve got of Vin on the cover.

My agent tells me that I just don’t spend enough time on the blog talking about the upcoming release of Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians. His opinion is that you all are well aware of the Mistborn books, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. However, he doesn’t know that you even realize I’ve got a children’s book coming out in October. (Actually, I believe his complaint yesterday was “ANOTHER Mistborn deleted scene? How many of those do you have? What about Alcatraz bonus material?”)

We shall see. He and I have different opinions about what my blog should be. He sees it as an advertising tool–which, I guess it is, in a way. However, to me, it’s less commercial than that. More a look into the writing process, with occasional glimpses of Brandon the person, rather than Brandon the writer.

—Breaking News: Brandon will be appearing as a guest on the “Wakin’ Up With Rebecca and Kurt” radio show Wednesday, the 22nd at around 8:30 am. The station is AM 820, and should be available in Utah County and Salt Lake.—

INTRODUCTION

Howdy all! You’re getting this because you signed up for the Brandon Sanderson mailing list on my website. As promised, I try not to spam you with lots of email via the mailing list. My goal is to do about two of these a year. If you want to unsubscribe, there should be instructions at the bottom of this email.

ELANTRIS NEWS

It’s been a big year for ELANTRIS, and I just wanted to share some of our success with you. So far, the book has gone into three hardback printings. In addition, we’ve sold the book to thirteen different markets! They are: North American English (the Tor version you probably read), SF Book Club, UK Book Club, Russian language, German language, Japanese language, French language, Dutch language, Spanish language, Thai language, Czech language, Polish language, and Chinese language!

Everyone keeps telling me that so many sales are amazing for a first time author. It usually takes many years to break in to that many foreign markets. I can only hold this success up to the brilliance of my agent, Joshua Blimes, and the book itself having a wide appeal.

The award nominations are beginning to roll in, and I’m honored to have been picked for a few of them. The Romantic Times Awards picked ELANTRIS as a finalist for the epic fantasy category. Also, the Association for Mormon Letters picked the book as the best novel of 2005. Finally, Barnes and Noble (via their online sf magazine) chose ELANTRIS as the best sf/f novel of the year!

So, I guess I’m saying thanks to all of you who bought the book and who passed the word along about it. For a first novel like this, word of mouth is the prime method of publicity I can hope to get. I owe a lot of this success to all of you!

MISTBORN

My next novel, MISTBORN, is ready for pre-order on Amazon.com. It will be released in July, and is the first in a trilogy. However, I did write the first book to stand alone quite well. It has climaxes and wrap-up similar to ELANTRIS, with a few large questions left open, but all the main conflicts dealt with in one way or another.

I’m really excited for this book’s release. I wrote ELANTRIS back in 1999, and while it was the first book I sold, it has been a long time (both in years and in my progress as a writer) since I wrote it. MISTBORN shows off what I can do right now, and so I’m hoping that the reaction to it is similar to ELANTRIS—only more so! You can read sample chapters of the book on my website.

OTHER PROJECTS

Let’s see . . . what else is up in my life? I wrote a young adult novel entitled ALCATRAZ INITIATED over the summer last year while I was taking a break from the MISTBORN world. (I’ve finished MISTBORN 2, and am almost done with MISTBORN 3.) We’re currently shopping it around. We’ll have to see who, if anyone, nibbles at it! The book is very different from my normal style—I wrote it in a first person, with a humorous tone.

I’ve already got my next two books planned. You’ll have to watch the website, and the ‘Current Books’ section to see if I actually get around to them. The first one is named DARK ONE, the second is called WARBREAKER. Both are stand-alones. That ELANTRIS sequel is also brewing in the back of my mind. . . .

I guess that’s everything. Please have a look at those MISTBORN chapters, and preorder it if you are so inclined. In late 2006, I should be doing another book tour through Utah, Idaho, California, and perhaps some surrounding areas. I’ll also be at Conduit in Salt Lake, as well as Worldcon in LA, this year (where I hope to be nominated for a Campbell award) so look me up if you’re around!

Brandon Sanderson

February 21st, 2006