Brandon Sanderson v Audible

Brandon Sanderson is one of those authors that I've never quite gotten around to reading, but I've been fascinated by the shape that his career has taken in the last decade or so. He's become immensely popular for his work: he's a prolific writer who debuted in 2005 with his novel Elantris (he'd written a full dozen prior to that) and who was tapped by editor Harriet McDougal to complete her late husband's (Robert Jordan) fantasy series The Wheel of Time. Many of his books are set in a larger world known as Cosmere, and he's currently working on a massive epic fantasy series called The Stormlight Archive, which kicked off in 2010 with The Way of Kings.

That's a lot right there, and on top of all that, Sanderson launched a massive Kickstarter project to self-publish four novels that he wrote during the COVID-19 lockdowns, all of which he's since flipped over to Tor for regular market editions. The Kickstarter, which raised a staggering $41 million helped fund a huge operation to print and ship those books and additional boxes of stuff for backers. It was a pretty incredible operation. That attention spawned a snotty profile in Wired and a better one in Esquire that provides a good overview of what he's been doing with that popularity.

I find the underlying logistics of storytelling fascinating, which makes Sanderson an interesting person to watch. He's been busy lately, too: first, he launched a new crowdsourcing campaign on Backerkit to fund a leather-bound, two-volume edition of his novel Words of Radiance, the second installment of The Stormlight Archive. Another part of the campaign? A new "secret" book, which he'll announce in due time. The campaign ends on March 30th and it's already raised $18 million.

Buried in this news is something a bit more interesting: Sanderson has reached an agreement with Audible to bring some of his books to the audiobook platform. Back in 2022, he revealed that while he had produced audiobook editions of those books, he was withholding them from the platform over concerns that he had. He was blunt: "Audible has grown to a place where it’s very bad for authors. It’s a good company doing bad things." He called the deals that they make for authors "unconscionable" – that creators made around 40% for an exclusivity deal, and 25% for non-exclusive publishing rights. So, he decided to make a point by not selling them through the site.

Two years later, that's changed: Sanderson announced that he had reached a deal with Audible with some much better rates. He explained that he had taken meetings with company executives, which yielded a better royalties structure for authors. He noted that it isn't perfect, but a much better improvement over what he had seen before, and he'll be bringing those four books to the marketplace in the near future.

It's a good thing to see: an author using their platform and fanbase to push for some major changes within the industry. It's a good demonstration of not only of his weight in these circles, but that these types of changes are possible to implement with enough pressure. I don't think that these types of changes should only come from those types of players (and I doubt that these changes are just a result of Sanderson's actions), but it's worth remembering that any step in the right direction is generally a good thing. Hopefully, it'll lead to some bigger changes for the larger author community.

Update (3/21/24): shortly after I sent this out, I spoke with an author who is heavily involved in the audio world. These changes, they noted, are a long time coming, and that while it's good that Sanderson has been an outspoken advocate for these changes, there are other factors that played a big role coming to this point: Spotify's foray into audiobooks is upending the traditional credits model that Audible and others have used for years, and it's not entirely certain how these changes will play out for authors in the long run. It's something certainly worth keeping an eye on.