Brandon and Book News

It's that time of week again! Tor has posted the latest Rhythm of War sample chapter, and you can find it here. After you've read this week's chapter, we invite you to join the latest discussion in the forums and on our Discord server!

We will be picking these chapters apart together, and we hope you will join in on the discussion! If you missed previous chapters or discussion threads, you can find both linked in our Sample Chapter and Discussion Thread Index.

That's right folks, more book news! Brandon took to Reddit this evening to bring us the FIRST in a series of updates on Skyward 3! You can read the update in the r/BrandonSanderson subreddit.

Sanderson reports that he'll be taking the next week to update his outline for novel, which is in pretty good shape. After a quick break to finalize Dawnshard, he plans to begin the writing the book on October 1st. Keep an eye out for the next update in November!

Brandon Sanderson and Mary Robinette Kowal's collaborative audio exclusive short story The Original is out today (September 14th) and available for download!

We knew the audio original story The Original, written by Brandon with Mary Robinette Kowal, would come out September 14th, but we barely heard anything about it, considering it was coming so soon. This changed yesterday and now we have the cover, synopsis, and a sample of The Original.

It's that time of week again! Tor has posted the latest Rhythm of War sample chapter, and you can find it here. After you've read this week's chapter, we invite you to join the latest discussion in the forums and on our Discord server!

We will be picking these chapters apart together, and we hope you will join in on the discussion! If you missed previous chapters or discussion threads, you can find both linked in our Sample Chapter and Discussion Thread Index.

After Brandon teased the completion of the cover art for Rhythm of War in one of his recent Kickstarter livestreams, it was only a matter of time for Tor to officially release the full cover for the US edition of the fourth instalment in The Stormlight Archive. It is now finally time to marvel at Michael Whelan's gorgeous art and to start wild theories based on it!

We had a nice surprise today: a newsletter from Brandon, and it contains some new exclusive fiction, this time from Dawnshard! It's pretty cool, so make sure you sign up on Brandon's site. The time sensitive piece on this is that the Way of Kings Leatherbound Kickstarter ends tomorrow at 2pm Pacific. If you're interested, or want add-ons, you need to back it now. Add-ons will come via BackerKit after the Kickstarter is over.

It's that time of week again! Tor has posted the latest Rhythm of War sample chapters, and you can find them here. After you've read this week's chapters, we invite you to join the latest discussion in the forums and on our Discord server!

We will be picking these chapters apart together, and we hope you will join in on the discussion! If you missed previous chapters or discussion threads, you can find both linked in our Sample Chapter and Discussion Thread Index.

Lots of news in the past hour, so let's cover them on the quick!

First, Tor.com has published the Prologue & Chapter 1: Calluses  of Rhythm of War! You can go read them on their website, and also bookmark the Rhythm of War index, because new chapters will be dropping every Tuesday at 9 AM Eastern. You can discuss this set of chapters in our Prologue and Chapter 1 discussion thread.

Normally, this would be news enough, but today we also have a SDCC video of Brandon reading from Chapters 7 & 8 from the new Stormlight doorstopper (also embedded below, for your convenience). Note that the second half of the video is a brief Q&A that's full of spoilers. All of the questions were selected from this Reddit thread from about a month ago, if you want to go read some of the discussion around them.

Today, at 3pm Pacific, Brandon will post a prerecorded video for San Diego Comic-Con. It's said there will be a preview of Rhythm of War, and there will be some questions answered as well. Please note question submission was on a Reddit thread a while ago, and there won't be any live Q&A. This is prerecorded! There may be some spoiler related questions. We'll just have to see in about five hours! 

Hey guys! Brandon did another signing livestream yesterday (#12, more Warbreaker signature pages), so here's a quick recap of what we learned or got confirmations about. Also, the stream was literally too hot to handle!

Dawnshard news

The novella formerly known as Wandersail and now known as Dawnshard will follow Rysn as she travels to Aimia, and will actually teach us some stuff about the Dawnshards! Also, Lopen might be showing up as a secondary POV, though it is unclear whether he will actually join her on the trip. Brandon plans to start writing that this coming Monday, and "will feel bad" if the ebook is not out before Rhythm of War even though the novella itself "is not super integrated with the book."

If you're out of the loop, Brandon always planned to write a Stormlight novella between Oathbringer and Rhythm of War, which is now a Kickstarter reward. It was going to be Rysn novella, and it was going to involve traveling to Aimia. The name that was floating around for it was Wandersail, but Brandon didn't like that title since that wasn't what the story was about. 

Well, what is the story about? A freaking Dawnshard. 

Last night, Brandon finished his work on Rhythm of War, the fourth Stormlight Archive novel. On a screenshot saying "The End," you can see the word count is 459,629 words, which is a bit longer than Oathbringer's 454,000 words. Brandon shared in a Facebook comment that there are 112 chapters, plus interludes, and the prologue and epilogue.

Brandon also said in his post that though the book releases in full on November (specifically, November 17th), preview chapters are coming before then. His tweet says "preview chapters soon." Hooray!

The Politics and Prose bookstore is doing a livestream today with Brandon Sanderson and Tamora Pierce, author of Tempests & Slaughter (and many more great things). It will be at 8pm Eastern time, today, July 9th. Currently it seems that links to the livestream will be posted here. It was a Zoom event which is now capped at capacity but there will be Facebook live and YouTube links on the Politics and Prose page.

A few quick reminders! The Way of Kings leatherbound Kickstarter comes out tomorrow at 9am Mountain time, which is 8am Pacific and 11am Eastern. Brandon posted a big blog post on all the tiers if you're curious about it or its tiers.

The Dark One graphic novel by Vault Comics came out on ebook on the 26th. This story is not a cosmere story, so there hasn't been too much hype in the fandom on this one. Perhaps you're waiting for the hardcover (which comes out in August). Maybe you've been burned by the White Sand graphic novels, which could never reach their full potential because the story wasn’t written for a visual format to begin with. Even then, I wouldn't say a cosmere fan has to read White Sand. It's mediocre at best. So, on that level, I can see anyone being apprehensive about another graphic novel. 

Let's cut to the chase: is Dark One worth getting? Yes. I wholeheartedly recommend it, and I'm almost surprised to say so!

Today Brandon replied to some Reddit threads about his 2020 plans after he finishes Rhythm of War, and talked about the timeline for The Lost Metal! Hooray details, hooray Brandon being transparent with us. Please note that these aren't surefire things, and this is the "perfect world" sort of scenario. First up: looks like Rhythm of War is taking a week or so longer than planned, with its turn in date now being July 10th (it was originally July 1st). 

[See the end of this post for the June 23 updates.]

Some interesting things came out of Reddit today. User u/DataLoreHD did some sleuthing and discovered a few very interesting entries on Recorded Books, Inc., with some release dates. Firstly, The Original--the audio original story written with Mary Robinette Kowal--would be released September 14th 2020, and narrated by Julia Whelan. Then, interestingly, there's a Stephen Leeds story, in the Legion series! It's Stephen Leeds: Death & Faxes, to be released September 1st, 2021. Lastly, there are two Dark One things as well. One is Dark One: Prophetic Histories coming February 9th, 2021, and the other is Dark One: Forgotten, releasing May 5th, 2021.

Tonight on Brandon's livestream, we finally got some specific details on the hotly anticipated Kickstarter for The Way of Kings leatherbound edition, which will run July 7th (at 9am Mountain Daylight Time) through August 7th this year. For those who haven't heard of this already, Dragonsteel Entertainment has been producing leatherbound editions of Brandon's books ten years after their original publishing date. This year is The Way of Kings, which will be done in two volumes and unlike other leatherbounds will be sold initially via a Kickstarter campaign.