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I think the main problem was having to print and deliver ~250k more novels than they had arranged contracts for. It's not really something you can just find someone to do on short notice.
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Mar 17, 2023 21:50
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Apparently there were enough issues that some copies of Mistborn got printed by a self publishing hosue
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Mar 17, 2023 21:56
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mossyfisk posted:I think the main problem was having to print and deliver ~250k more novels than they had arranged contracts for. It's not really something you can just find someone to do on short notice. That and they went above and beyond with the covers (extra layers and whatnot) that the manufacturers had to hire additional companies to help with the printing. Louisgod fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Mar 18, 2023 |
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Mar 17, 2023 22:08
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MagusofStars posted:My understanding is that it's something like this: I think Tor is helping print the standard edition, so they have more resources to get them out quicker. Edit: Not even helping, they're just the publisher of the trade edition. That makes more sense, I'm sure they tossed a giant pile of money at Brandon to publish them ASAP and he just hosed up by not making absolutely, 100% sure that backers would get his fancy edition first. Greed got the best of him this time. Ornamented Death fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Mar 17, 2023 |
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Mar 17, 2023 22:21
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pointlessone posted:Is it close enough to start taking bets on if the rest of the hard copies of Tess show up before ebook #2? The race is on now! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dragonsteel/surprise-four-secret-novels-by-brandon-sanderson/posts/3759681
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Mar 17, 2023 23:02
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I kind of feel like being late by 1 or 2 months is early fulfillment for a kickstarter
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Mar 17, 2023 23:07
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Ornamented Death posted:he just hosed up by not making absolutely, 100% sure that backers would get his fancy edition first. Greed got the best of him this time. Not really. The supply chain issues in publishing have been there since COVID and still haven't recovered. Like paper shortages are still ongoing. They went OTT on the foiling and the cover and then the Kickstarter exploded to 10x the volume they expected. There literally isn't the capacity in the supply chain to go faster than they are right now, plus foiling requires a lot of precision so they can't just use any random printer. More specifics in this update video from 2 weeks ago: https://youtu.be/c9fgBbTHhQ0
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Mar 17, 2023 23:08
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I remember Brando talking like, mid-last year-ish, about having to pick a date far in advance for when the Tor paperbacks would be targeted to come out and having to somewhat arbitrarily pick 'three months after the kickstarter', with the idea that 'surely, surely that will be enough time to get the kickstarter books shipped out!' And, well, the best laid plans and all that.
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Mar 17, 2023 23:29
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Brandon could have very easily said 2024 for the trade editions of these books - what's Tor going to do, say no? But he didn't, and there's a reason for that, and my personal opinion is that said reason involved a lot of zeroes. Which, you know, good for him. Maybe his underground Lair needs a new wing. But it's still a black mark on an otherwise pretty stellar career as a publisher (which is likely why it rankles so much).
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Mar 17, 2023 23:59
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I think there's honestly no way he could have decided to have Tor's books come out a year later. Was he supposed to release the official ebook a year later also? He would lose so much money to piracy.
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Mar 18, 2023 00:06
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Torrannor posted:I think there's honestly no way he could have decided to have Tor's books come out a year later. Was he supposed to release the official ebook a year later also? He would lose so much money to piracy. He wasn't under contract with Tor for these books when they were written, so he could have specified any release date he wanted when they did go under contract. That's...what you do in a contract: you codify all the various terms and conditions surrounding the acquisition and subsequent release of a book. And Tor isn't handling the ebook, Brandon is. Direct from the Amazon listing: Publisher : Dragonsteel Entertainment, LLC (January 10, 2023). Says the same thing on the AmazonUK page, albeit with the European-style date.
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Mar 18, 2023 00:12
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He does need to maintain at least a cordial relationship with Tor, as his standard publisher, and saying 'you cant have a guaranteed bestseller from me until there's been a year+ of people getting antsy acquiring it through other means' would not help with that. It's not as simple as 'he can tell Tor whenever, they aren't gonna say no'.
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Mar 18, 2023 00:22
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Tunzie posted:He does need to maintain at least a cordial relationship with Tor, as his standard publisher, and saying 'you cant have a guaranteed bestseller from me until there's been a year+ of people getting antsy acquiring it through other means' would not help with that. It's not as simple as 'he can tell Tor whenever, they aren't gonna say no'. Sure, it's not like there's precedent of him telling Tor they couldn't have something particularly lucrative, like, I dunno, the ebook rights... me, ten minutes ago posted:And Tor isn't handling the ebook, Brandon is. Direct from the Amazon listing: Publisher : Dragonsteel Entertainment, LLC (January 10, 2023). Says the same thing on the AmazonUK page, albeit with the European-style date. Very likely the worst that would have come out of Brandon pushing for a longer gap between the KS release and the trade release is a slightly smaller advance, which simply meant he would have defrayed some earnings by (roughly) the same amount of time because, as you said, it's guaranteed to be a best seller. A smaller advance just means he earns out that much faster. "KS release + 3 months" would likely have been fine...in 2019, but we don't live in those halcyon days anymore. There are any number of ways Brandon could have structured a contract to be certain his backers got their books first, he just chose the absolute laziest and most short-sighted way, either because the offer was too good or he didn't have the wherewithal to think that maybe in a time of unprecedented supply chain issues, his fancy books might run into supply chain issues. And since there's a big ol' paragraph on the campaign page that says he and his team recognize there might be supply chain issues...
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Mar 18, 2023 00:35
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Dude. It's really not the big deal you're making it out to be. He was planning on it being 25k books. It ended up being over 5x that. Physical production can not just easily and instantly scale up to that. There is no greedy plot going on.
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Mar 18, 2023 00:40
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Mordiceius posted:Dude. It's really not the big deal you're making it out to be. I mean... I don't disagree for the most part? It's not like I'm tossing all my Sanderson books in the trash over this. But it wasn't me that made it a selling point of the KS campaign that backers would have their books before the trade editions were published, it was Sanderson. He also had complete control over when and how he sold the books to his usual publishers. To be clear, I think Brandon and Team Dragonsteel are great publishers. I also think there are some unforced errors around the release of Tress, and ardent fans repeatedly going "lol supply chain issues" isn't a compelling argument to the contrary when it's not the delay itself that I take issue with. Delays, in general, don't faze me. A publisher pushing exclusivity that doesn't materialize, however, does bother me. Ideally they'll have everything sorted out for the second book; we'll see soon enough.
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Mar 18, 2023 00:59
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Sanderson really has never been about the greed it feels you are projecting motivations that aren't there.
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Mar 18, 2023 01:32
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socialsecurity posted:Sanderson really has never been about the greed it feels you are projecting motivations that aren't there. Yeah he's said numerous, numerous times in his weekly updates or streams he has more than enough money and that he'd rather use any extra on his staff or for doing something special. Of all authors to accuse of this, Sanderson is like, at the very bottom of the list. Speaking of, got a shipping notification for Tress a bit ago, guess complaining about not getting it soon paid off. Ornamented Death posted:To be clear, I think Brandon and Team Dragonsteel are great publishers. I also think there are some unforced errors around the release of Tress, and ardent fans repeatedly going "lol supply chain issues" isn't a compelling argument to the contrary when it's not the delay itself that I take issue with. Delays, in general, don't faze me. A publisher pushing exclusivity that doesn't materialize, however, does bother me. If you haven't, I'd really encourage you to listen to his past live streams or weekly updates as he's been super transparent about all the delays and why they're happening, with the primary piece being Dragonsteel telling their manufacturer to expect something like 50k books a quarter from the Kickstarter instead of the close to 200k they ended up getting. It wasn't a supply issue as much as an "oh poo poo we vastly underestimated how successful this would be and we have to scramble to get other manufacturers to help us". e: god I'm really coming off a a Sanderson apologist but his openness on the whole process is such a nice change compared to GRRM or Rothfuss. Louisgod fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Mar 18, 2023 |
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Mar 18, 2023 01:40
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Ornamented Death posted:A publisher pushing exclusivity that doesn't materialize, however, does bother me. I'm so confused on where people are getting this idea of "exclusivity" from. The core concept behind Kickstarter, generally speaking, has always been about enabling creators to fund production via customer pre-orders. With more complicated projects where they haven't done feasibility studies or prototypes etc, it's pretty high risk. Insofar as books are concerned, it's really just a long-dated pre-order, except instead of handing your money over to a retailer like Amazon, you hand it over to the publisher directly. Every single pledge level includes the ebook format. So every Kickstarter backer could read Tress from 1 Jan 2023 before the general release of the ebook. I assume that those who backed the audiobook format got the same, seeing how it's a digital reward. The only format where they didn't manage to get the reward to backers prior to the general release was print. But the exclusivity of the format STILL applies. You can't get a premium hardcover anywhere except via the Kickstarter or via Dragonsteel Books directly. The hardcovers and paperbacks done by Tor aren't the special foiled editions. Ornamented Death posted:There are any number of ways Brandon could have structured a contract to be certain his backers got their books first, he just chose the absolute laziest and most short-sighted way Ornamented Death posted:Brandon could have very easily said 2024 for the trade editions of these books It's not like you get these things negotiated overnight. Trad pub moves notoriously slowly; even though Sanderson is their moneymaker, there's a limit to how far their processes and systems will stretch to accommodate. See, for example, Christopher Paolini who couldn't get the AI art in Fractal Noise replaced even though that controversy blew up at the end of last year and the release date isn't until May of this year, and swapping out cover art is a much lesser challenge than squashing in the release of four new titles. By the time the secret projects Kickstarter went live, I would assume that they would have had contracts locked down or close to locked down. When they negotiated all those contracts, they based a 3-month delay off of how the last Kickstarter went (The Way of Kings 10th anniversary edition, where the first lot of delivery was in Dec 2020) which, all things considered, is a pretty reasonable starting point. Then the secret projects went viral beyond what anyone imagined. There are more than 6x the backers and 6x the funds raised. That's a huge scaling challenge in terms of logistics. So yeah, there were supply chain and production capacity issues beyond what they had anticipated. Turns out that he can't actually burn atium in real life, who would have thought?
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Mar 18, 2023 02:31
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Staggered release dates were products are not legally available to some people are a huge incentive to pirate stuff. I pirated a lot of books because the German editions didn't come out until a lot later, and there was no legal way to acquire the ebooks. Sometimes and still bought the book editions because I to like reading real print and paper, but more often than not, I didn't. Thankfully, these times are long past, but still. Nobody but backers and pirates can get their hands on a version of Tress right now, so the incentive to get the book illegally is already big enough. Especially if you're part of the "spoiler" fandom, who like to dissect the books for clues. The low hanging fruit will have long been picked when you get the book 3 months later. But even if you're just general part of the fandom, you might want the book because you're scared of spoilers, or because you're just really curious and can't stand the thought of the book technically being available somewhere, but not being buyable. So three months is already a pretty big waiting time, I don't think he could have justified to Tor to have like half a year, or even 12 month later official release. That's for the ebook alone, but it obviously also impacts the physical book side. I'm sure Brandon thought three months was fine, but the numbers of backers vastly exceeding the Way of Kings backer numbers combined with difficult supply issues just created an insurmountable problem. There's no greed at play here imho.
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Mar 18, 2023 03:17
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Torrannor posted:Staggered release dates were products are not legally available to some people are a huge incentive to pirate stuff. I pirated a lot of books because the German editions didn't come out until a lot later, and there was no legal way to acquire the ebooks. Sometimes and still bought the book editions because I to like reading real print and paper, but more often than not, I didn't. Thankfully, these times are long past, but still. Nobody but backers and pirates can get their hands on a version of Tress right now, so the incentive to get the book illegally is already big enough. Especially if you're part of the "spoiler" fandom, who like to dissect the books for clues. The low hanging fruit will have long been picked when you get the book 3 months later. But even if you're just general part of the fandom, you might want the book because you're scared of spoilers, or because you're just really curious and can't stand the thought of the book technically being available somewhere, but not being buyable. What? I bought Tress on Google play like a month or two ago?
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Mar 18, 2023 03:22
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For a forum dedicated to books, some of you guys don't read the words in front of you. Leng seems to be the one actually engaging with my argument, which I appreciate. They've raised some good points that I'll digest. On the flip side, I've posted at multiple times that the ebooks have been available for months and yet quote:So three months is already a pretty big waiting time, I don't think he could have justified to Tor to have like half a year, or even 12 month later official release. That's for the ebook alone... Tress has been available in ebook format, in Germany, since January 10th.
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Mar 18, 2023 03:51
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Ornamented Death posted:For a forum dedicated to books, some of you guys don't read the words in front of you. Leng seems to be the one actually engaging with my argument, which I appreciate. They've raised some good points that I'll digest. We are reading your words we just disagree. Ornamented Death posted:Brandon could have very easily said 2024 for the trade editions of these books - what's Tor going to do, say no? But he didn't, and there's a reason for that, and my personal opinion is that said reason involved a lot of zeroes. This is very clearly not paying attention to his various supply issues and good faith attempts to get this out in time and instead assuming he did it for more money with no evidence and is something that goes very against his entire personality as seen so far. There are various authors in it purely for more money or whatever Sanderson is definitely not one of them.
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Mar 18, 2023 04:27
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socialsecurity posted:We are reading your words we just disagree. Fair enough. In retrospect, I've been an rear end in a top hat here, so I'm just going to bow out.
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Mar 18, 2023 14:24
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Guess what arrived today (added spoilers in case you don't want the cover to SP1 spoiled)
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Mar 23, 2023 01:49
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Got my shipping confoirmation! As someone who doesnt use ereaders this has been a long wait 
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Mar 23, 2023 12:20
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So I just cracked into the Way of Kings audiobook today, finally starting Stormlight Archive. I will just say, I did not like little prologue at the beginning. 4500 years before the book's start? I'm sure I'll eventually understand it, but it was basically a bunch of characters that are probably really important saying/doing things important, but I have literally no idea what anything means or anything, so I have no reason to remember anything going on there.
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Mar 24, 2023 20:13
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Mordiceius posted:So I just cracked into the Way of Kings audiobook today, finally starting Stormlight Archive. Yeah, don't worry about it.
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Mar 24, 2023 20:24
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Anshu posted:Yeah, don't worry about it. Yeah. I will just continue along and not be concerned by that. I generally like Sanderson prologues. I think his prologues for The Final Empire and Warbreaker are particularly good. This one feels like such a jargon dump with no context that I will just proceed along and not think about it anymore.
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Mar 24, 2023 20:27
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It'll be relevant again at some point in the future and you'll go "oh that's what all that bullshit was about" and you'll go read it again
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Mar 24, 2023 20:34
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I think that prologue would've been more tolerable if he didn't basically dump the reader into an action scene with no context for Chapter 1
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Mar 24, 2023 20:43
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My first kickstarter box arrived. Hell yeah
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Mar 24, 2023 20:54
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Stormlight Archive benefits more than any other Sanderson series from rereads. Of course that was a pivotal moment in the world's history in that little prologue, and rereading it when you know the context is imho quite satisfying. Edit: I think it's an homage to Wheel of Time, which did something similar with the LTT prologue. Only that Lews Therin's fate get brought up much earlier in-series. Torrannor fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Mar 24, 2023 |
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Mar 24, 2023 21:38
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So nobody talked about the Brando Sando article here yet? tl;dr Wired published a hilariously mean hitpiece on the Sandman about how he is boring and fat and poo poo and lame and so are his dumb fat family (who the author of the article had several dinners with) and all of his fans, and everybody has been going "I mean, I don't like his stuff all that much, but wtf". The article in question: https://www.wired.com/story/brandon-sanderson-is-your-god/ His official response (very wholesome): https://www.reddit.com/r/brandonsanderson/comments/1200dzk/on_the_wired_article/ /r/fantasy discussion (not that interesting): https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/11zlk2x/brandon_sanderson_is_your_god/ Summary-ish Twitter thread from Jenny Nicholson I liked: https://twitter.com/JennyENicholson/status/1639168966114570240
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Mar 25, 2023 00:07
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As a bonus, Orson Welles impressionist on Twitter (she's pretty funny) did a double impression of Orson and the article: https://twitter.com/scumbelievable/status/1639011654829522945
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Mar 25, 2023 00:14
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lmao what a dingus
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Mar 25, 2023 00:28
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Holy poo poo.
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Mar 25, 2023 00:29
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I will say it is a hilarious way to make sure nobody agrees to give you an interview again.
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Mar 25, 2023 00:30
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Like his writing style or not, Brandon Sanderson is famously a very nice and kind person and his response to the article is classy as hell. It's like writing a hit piece against Mr Rogers.
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Mar 25, 2023 00:33
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Jose Valasquez posted:lmao what a dingus
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Mar 25, 2023 00:39
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If he just wanted to write a hit piece on a fantasy author, dude, piers anthony is still inexplicably not in jail
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Mar 25, 2023 00:42
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