In yet another definitive win for him—and Neopatronage—Fantasy King Brandon Sanderson has shattered a second crowdfunding record.
Brandon Sanderson, the bestselling author known for his epic fantasy novels, has already raised more than $16 million on crowdfunding platform BackerKit since launching it earlier this week.
Related: Neopatron Brandon
It should be noted that the Publishers Weekly article cited above was written last month.
King Brandon’s latest crwodfunder has since reached its triumphant conclusion, and the astounding results speak for themselves.
Related: Sanderson’s Neopatronage Masterclass
As many readers will know, King Brandon just set the all-time high score on Kickstarter with his $40 million + campaign. Going on to raise more than half as much on a platform with a fraction of Kickstarter’s traffic might be an even more impressive achievenement. So what did his patrons trip over themselves to give him money for?
The campaign is to fund a leatherbound edition of Words of Radiance, the second book in Sanderson’s fantasy series, The Stormlight Archive. The leatherbound edition will feature premium materials and illustrations, as well as a new “secret project,” Sanderson has teased. Add-ons include an audiobook, which Sanderson says will also be available on Audible, suggesting he has come to an agreement with the audiobook giant .
Related: Audible Bows the Knee to King Brandon
Sanderson’s BackerKit campaign, which has 55,000 backers and runs through March 30, is the most successful fundraising effort on the platform thus far. This follows Sanderson’s previous record-breaking Kickstarter campaign in March 2022, which raised $41.7 million from 185,341 backers, setting a new record for the most funded Kickstarter in the platform’s history. That campaign supported the release of four books.
Yeah, it’s a cliché, but it’s true: The debate is indeed over. King Brandon just told us twice. Struggling to get validation from a Big 5 publisher and earn out a $1500 advance $1.25 at a time has been a dead end for years. Running yourself ragged to crank out a book a month and make back your $5K Amazon ad spend at 3 bucks a pop is obsolete. And here’s why:
Related: Sanderson’s Neopatronage Masterclass
Brandon Sanderson 5x’ed his annual income thanks to a single Kickstarter. And he’s now proven it wasn’t a fluke.
That ratio isn’t just due to the size of King Brandon’s brand, either. I’ve been crowdfunding my novels since 2018, and those campaigns consistently outperform my Amazon royalties by 5-10x. What that tells us is that the Neopatroange model scales.
Related: No Gatekeepers Where There Are No Walls
The reason Neopatroange works, even for first-timers, has to do with its revenue model. Marketers have long recognized three main segments of the earnings curve: the blockbuster, the middle market, and the long tail. Blockbusters give you the biggest payday, but over the shortest time. Long tail channels provide a small but steady drip pretty much forever. Middle markets are—as the name implies—midway between the two.
According to the former common wisdom, which track you got on mostly depended upon your product. Your publisher/studio/record label decided which sales channel your work belonged in and threw it out there to sink or swim—maybe with some ad spend that was a black box to everybody. The marketing wisdom further held that products couldn’t change lanes. If they went for a blockbuster and came up short, the product was an unsalvageable flop. Sometimes you had a mid-market sleeper that broke out and hit the big time, but it never worked in reverse.
What Sanderson has figured out—and with all humility, what I figured out first—is that the revenue curve isn’t strictly product-dependent. Everybody just thought it was due to the artificial bottlenecks maintained by 20th century media cartels. Since then, advances like KDP, Kickstarter, and even Fiverr have let creators eliminate the middleman to reach audiences directly. And it turns out doing so lets them plug the same product into all three segments. You crowdfund your project for a big capital infusion up front. You give subcribers exclusive access to the work-in-progress, then you offer it on Amazon to keep earning forever.
That’s Neopatronage. And it answers the question that’s been on every author’s mind: Why does Brandon keep working with publishers when he earns 5x more on KS?
Related: Sanderson Is Not in Audible
The reason is simple. Tor Books and the other New York houses he still works with are Sanderson’s long tail. To put it in perspective, if you land a new job that pays $40M a year, why quit your old job that pays $10M and requires zero additional work? It’s free money at that point.
For new authors, the takeaway is that playing the last-century game of tossing your work out there and hoping for a blockbuster is just gambling. That’s true of oldpub and newpub … on their own. But embracing the Neopatronage model removes a massive chunk of the risk and minimizes the element of chance. You still need the work ethic to deliver on your promises and the talent to please your readers. But giving them the chance to become your patrons lets them support—and even commission—the entertainment they want without go-betweens getting the lion’s share.
Thanks to King Brandon, Neopatroange has gone from theory to indie entertainment’s biggest open secret. The new model has now matured to the level that self-publishing had reached ca. 2014, but without a glut of creators flooding the scene. That lessened volatility and concurrent greater stability suggest that Neopatronge will be around for a while.
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