Brandon Sanderson is a fantasy writer who makes webs Ten million of dollars in book sales per year, which puts him in the same book sales league as George RR Martin. However, its financial success hasn’t really translated into similar mainstream visibility outside of its specific fanbase — until this week. The Tech Magazine Wired published a cynical profile about Sanderson yesterday, and the author’s fans are pissed. Things got so heated that Sanderson had to take to Reddit to tell his community to back off.
Sanderson is best known as an author The Stormlight Archive, The ReckonersAnd Mistborn series, all taking place in his original fictional universe called Cosmere. His books contain extensive magical systems and He is known as the inventor of the concepts of “hard” and “soft” magic. He also wrote the final books in the epic fantasy series The wheel of timepick up after Robert Jordan passed away in 2007.
The Wired profile
Despite extensive successes and references, Wired Editor Jason Kehe didn’t appear impressed by Sanderson
As a result, the article is not very flattering. “At the sentence level [Sanderson] is not a great gift to English prose,” writes Kehe. “He writes at a sixth-grade reading level on some metric.” It’s definitely not a description fans are used to hearing about a multi-million-dollar-selling author who’s written decades worth of books.
Kehe is also not impressed with the personal life the bestselling author leads or the way he holds himself up. “In my opinion, I still haven’t received anything real by Sanderson, all true. I’m not the first person he’s shown through his lair to politely marvel at his treasures and trophies and his hallway of custom-made stained glass of his favorite books,” he writes. “Sanderson has lived so much of his life and fame openly and with self-promotion. That is a key reason for its success.”
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“I find Sanderson depressing, stories deadly lame,” Kehe wrote days before meeting the author’s family or fans. “He’s sitting across from me in an empty restaurant, sort of stately and confident of his insights, in a graphic t-shirt and an ill-fitting blazer he says he’s wearing because it makes him look professorial. It doesn’t. It’s not him. Unless the word just means: believing that everything you say is worth saying. Sanderson talks a lot, but almost none of it is useful, quotable.”
At the end of the play, Kehe describes Sanderson as a god. Not because of his literary prowess, but because the author created worlds that have captivated so many readers over the decades. “If Sanderson is a writer, that’s all he does. He lives his fantasy of deity on earth,” he writes. Kehe seemed to have trouble seeing humility in a man with a literary empire within reach. Kehe was a visitor from a far-off land (San Francisco) and he took off his kid gloves when he had to leave a review of his travels.
Continue reading: subnautica Developer and fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson join forces in a cool looking miniature fighting game
Fantasy fans responded on Twitter
The internet reacted loudly. “[The article writer] is mean, jealous, hateful and unloving to someone who adds value to millions of fans and never has a bad word to say about anyone,” tweeted an author named Travis Corcoran. “I can imagine he’s pissed that Sanderson isn’t nearly as good at constructing sentences as he is…and still making $20 million a year at the same time Wired The editor makes, I don’t know, $60,000? Several other people cited Sanderson’s friendly personality and financial success as reasons why the profile should never have been published.
Even Activision Blizzard’s Poster in Chief interfered. “The mocking tone. The baseless meanness of insulting a man in front of his family after he invites you to his home. Bullying cheap shots at people you consider nerds,” Lulu Cheng Meservey tweeted. “Fantasy writing is valuable, being productive isn’t a bad thing, people may like different things than you, and nerds are the best.”
“My basic feeling has always been: We write stories and then they belong to the readers,” Kehe wrote in an email my city. “Readers have the last word”
Brandon Sanderson’s answer
See, no one comes for the human rights of fantasy nerds. And a writer who makes millions of dollars a year from his own intellectual property is not going to be brought down by some mean article. Even Sanderson himself thinks so. He enrolled Reddit thread today he asks his fans to keep calm. He agreed that his life wasn’t very exciting for a profile and that his ordinary and trauma-free life was “Is kind of boring, from an outsider’s perspective.” While he appreciated his fans’ willingness to defend him, he wanted them to leave Kehe alone. He feels that the profile is not an attack on the community and that the Wired Editor had honestly expressed his opinion. my city asked for a comment but did not receive one at the time of publication.
“[Kehe] should not be attacked for sharing his feelings,” Sanderson wrote. “If we attack people for it, we’ll make the world a worse place because fewer people will be willing to be their authentic selves.”