I saw a copy of Final Empire in my local bookshop, I picked it up, read the back cover and rolled my eyes. I put it down.
But the name was familiar to me from somewhere. I came home, I was browsing tvtropes and then I got to a WoT article and remembered where I knew the name Brandon Sanderson from: he was chosen to continue the WoT series!
I'm a very casual reader and fan of WoT but the fact that he was chosen to continue something so seminal made me want to learn more about Mr. Sanderson. So I looked him up on tvtropes, saw that that book I scrunched my nose at and rolled my eyes because the synopsis on the back cover read like a really crappy idea was in fact a book that was all about playing with those very stereotypes.
This got me interested. The next time I was at the bookshop, I bought the book, read it casually (mostly because I was reading other books at the time and so it was pretty low on my list)...then I stopped halfway to the end. Why? Because I liked it and I wanted to wait to get the other two books, just knowing in my gut that I'd want to read the whole trilogy in one go.
So I did, and it took months to get to the next two books but when I did, I read voraciously and finished Hero of Ages just the other day. Then I started on Alloy of Law and finished it about an hour ago.
Needless to say, I'm hooked on Sanderson.