Brandon Sanderson is Your God

He's the biggest fantasy writer in the world. He's also very Mormon. These things are profoundly related.

- By Jason Kehe. Photographs by Michael Friberg

Most years, Brandon Sanderson makes about $10 million. Last year, he made $55 million. This is obviously a lot of money for anyone. For a writer of young-adult-is, never ending, speed-written fantasy books, it's huge. By Sanderson's estimation, he's the highest-selling author of epic fantasy in the world. On the day of his record-breaking Kickstarter campaign-$42 million of that $55 million I came to the WIRED offices ready to gossip. How'd he do it? Why now? Is Brandon Sanderson even a good writer?

Nobody had the first clue who or what I was talking about.

On the one hand, who cares. Sanderson has millions upon millions of fans all over the planet; it doesn't matter that some losers at a single magazine (even if it is one of the nerdier ones) had never heard of him. On the other, the ignorance goes far beyond WIRED. As far as I could tell, Sanderson, who has been topping bestseller lists for the better part of the 21st century, had not been written about in any depth by any major publication ever. I called his publicist to confirm this. "Well, we have a piece coming up in LDS Living," he told me. That's LDS as in Latter-Day Saints. It's a magazine for Mormons.

Which makes sense: Sanderson is extremely Mormon. What makes less sense is why there's a hole the size of Utah where the man's literary reputation should be. Is it because he mostly writes fantasy, a-so the snobs sneer-"subliterary" genre? But then, so do J. K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, and George R. R. Martin, and they're household names. Is it because none of Sanderson's work has been adapted for the screen? Well, he wrote three of the