Brandon Sanderson Wrote 13 Novels Before Selling One
Quick answer: Brandon Sanderson wrote 13 novels before selling Elantris, drafting on hotel graveyard shifts. The persistence story every unpublished writer needs.
Picture the night desk of a hotel in Provo, Utah, some time around the turn of the millennium. It is two in the morning, the lobby is empty, and the clerk is typing. He has taken this job on purpose: the graveyard shift pays a person to stay awake in a quiet room, which makes it, by his reckoning, a writing grant with a name tag. The clerk is Brandon Sanderson, and the novel he is working on will not sell. Neither did the ones before it. Neither will several of the ones after it.
By the time a publisher finally said yes, Sanderson had written thirteen novels, a fact he has repeated in lectures and interviews for two decades because he wants unpublished writers to hear it precisely. Thirteen finished books, most of them submitted, none of them bought, across roughly eight years. The one that eventually sold was not even the thirteenth. It was the sixth. The gap between writing your best work and the world noticing can be measured, in his case, in years and in shelf-feet of unsold manuscript.
Eight years of finished books nobody wanted
Sanderson decided on the writing life young, and after returning from two years in South Korea in the late 1990s he organised his whole existence around it. At Brigham Young University he studied English, joined writing groups, and chose jobs by one criterion: how much writing they allowed. The hotel night desk was the famous one. He drafted at speed, finishing epic fantasy novels of enormous length, and sent them out to publishers whose slush piles moved at geological pace.
The rejections accumulated in the way rejections do, impersonally and slowly. What is unusual is the record he kept producing against them: novel after novel, each one finished, each one different. Some were, by his own cheerful admission in later lectures, not good; he often says his early books were how he trained. But calling it training was a decision made in hindsight. At the time, it was simply a man in his twenties with a growing pile of unsold books and no external evidence that any of it would ever matter.
The rule that saved him: write the next one
Sanderson has been explicit about the principle that carried him through, and it has become one of the most quoted pieces of advice in modern genre fiction: when a book does not sell, do not spend years rewriting it, write the next book. Each new novel let him practise a different skill, a new magic system, a new structure, a new voice, instead of sanding the same manuscript into dust. The habit kept his craft compounding while his inbox stayed empty.
There is a hard honesty inside that rule. It assumes rejection, plans for it, and refuses to let any single book carry the weight of the whole dream. A writer with one manuscript is a hostage to it; a writer with thirteen is a bibliography waiting for a door to open. The same logic scales down perfectly to poems. Six poems in circulation can absorb a no. One poem, endlessly revised and never sent, absorbs its author instead.
An eighteen-month silence, then a voicemail
The door opened in 2003, and it opened absurdly slowly. Sanderson had submitted Elantris, his sixth novel, to Tor Books, the largest fantasy publisher in the world, where it sat unread for about a year and a half. He has told the story often: editor Moshe Feder finally read it, loved it, and called to buy it, and the good news very nearly missed him because the call went to a number he barely checked. After nearly a decade of trying, the acceptance arrived as a voicemail.
Elantris was published in 2005 to strong reviews, and Sanderson followed it fast with Mistborn, the series that made his name, built around a heist plot and one of the most admired magic systems in the genre. The unsold years immediately started paying dividends: he had drawers full of worlds, characters and hard-won technique, and he shipped books at a pace that baffled his peers. The overnight success, as usual, had been rehearsing for eight years.
The turn beyond the turn: Wheel of Time
In September 2007, Robert Jordan, author of the bestselling Wheel of Time saga, died with the series unfinished, and millions of readers wondered if its ending had died with him. Jordan's widow and editor, Harriet McDougal, went looking for a writer to complete it. She has said she was moved by the heartfelt eulogy Sanderson posted on his blog, and after reading his Mistborn work she chose him, a decision announced in December 2007 that instantly made a mid-list fantasy author one of the most scrutinised writers alive.
He delivered. The Gathering Storm appeared in 2009 and debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, as did the two volumes that completed the saga after it. From there the documented numbers only grow stranger: in 2022 his Kickstarter campaign for four surprise novels raised over 41 million dollars, the most funded campaign in the platform's history. Every stage of that ascent stood on the same foundation: a man who had proven, thirteen times over, that he finishes books.
What a working writer can take from it
Sanderson's story dismantles the most seductive myth in writing: that quality is discovered quickly. His sixth novel was good enough to launch a major career, and it still waited eighteen months in a pile and eight years in a life. The lag between merit and recognition is not a sign that merit is absent. Budgeting for that lag, financially, emotionally and productively, is the most practical act of faith a writer can perform.
The second takeaway is his redefinition of success as output rather than outcome. He could not control editors; he could control whether there was a new book every year, so that became the measure he lived by. A poet can adopt the same accounting overnight: count poems finished and poems sent, not acceptances. Writory's monthly rhythm suits this kind of ledger, a fresh contest every month where each entry gets read and scored, so the habit of finishing and releasing gets an answer twelve times a year instead of a silence.
Where to start reading him
Start with Mistborn: The Final Empire rather than Elantris; it is the book where his signature virtues, rigorous magic, propulsive plotting, brutal reversals, arrive fully formed. Then, if structure interests you, read Elantris to see the earlier, rougher version of the same mind at work. The distance between the two books, written only a few years apart, is a visible record of what the unsold-novel apprenticeship taught him.
Writers should also seek out his free university lectures on creative writing, recorded at BYU and watched by millions, where the thirteen-novels story is told with dates and self-mockery. Few successful authors document their own failure years so thoroughly, and the generosity is deliberate: he wants the next hotel night clerk to know exactly how long the tunnel can be.
What poets can take from this
- When a piece is rejected, start the next one instead of endlessly rewriting the old one; new work trains new muscles.
- Choose day jobs and shifts that leave your best attention for writing, the way Sanderson chose the hotel night desk.
- Measure your year in finished and submitted work, never in acceptances, which you cannot control.
- Budget emotionally for the lag between merit and recognition; his sixth novel waited years for its yes.
- Keep every unsold piece; drawers full of old work become raw material the moment a door opens.
- Tell your writing group your real numbers, as Sanderson tells his thirteen, so nobody mistakes a long apprenticeship for failure.
Try it yourself
Write a poem numbered like an inventory, cataloguing thirteen finished things nobody has seen: loaves, letters, songs, apologies. Let the fourteenth item break the pattern and step out into the light.
Questions
How many novels did Brandon Sanderson write before getting published?
Thirteen, by his own frequently repeated count, written over roughly eight years while he worked jobs like the hotel graveyard shift in Provo, Utah. The first to sell was Elantris, which was actually the sixth novel he had written, bought by Tor in 2003 and published in 2005.
How was Sanderson chosen to finish the Wheel of Time?
After Robert Jordan died in 2007, his widow and editor Harriet McDougal selected Sanderson, influenced by the eulogy he wrote for Jordan on his blog and by the quality of his Mistborn novels. The three volumes he completed all debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
What is Brandon Sanderson's advice to unpublished writers?
His most repeated advice is to write the next book rather than endlessly revising a rejected one, since each new project builds skills the old one cannot. He also urges writers to judge themselves on output and persistence, because recognition can lag years behind quality.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.