Brandon Sanderson

Sci-fi and fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson has just torn up publishing’s scorekeeping rules, said David Barnett in The Guardian. In a Kickstarter campaign that he launched on March 1, the 46-year-old Utah resident and author of the Mistborn and Stormlight Archive series raised more than $15 million in less than a day from readers, who are essentially paying the advance for four upcoming, untitled novels, all of which he will self-publish next year. That one-day haul, which was 15 times what he’d hoped to raise across a full month, smashed the all-time record for Kickstarter projects of any kind, and it keeps growing. It now exceeds $28 million, which puts Sanderson in the company of Barack and Michelle Obama, who split a $65 million advance from a traditional publisher for their memoirs. It shames Britney Spears, who was recently paid $15 million for hers.

Sanderson doesn’t expect many writers to follow his path, said Elizabeth Harris in The New York Times. “I am an artist who was raised by an accountant and a businessman,” he says. “For a lot of authors, this would be a bad idea because there’s a lot of management.” In fact, to create and distribute the books, e-books, and related swag that he has promised to Kickstarter contributors, he has hired a staff of 30. He also has created a fictional universe with a more devoted following than most authors enjoy. Sanderson vows that he won’t abandon his original publishers or the bookshops that helped him build a fan base. But he doesn’t mind if he’s poked a hole in Amazon’s online dominance. “My goal in all of this,” he says, “is to see what’s possible.”