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I read the first Mistborn series, knowing nothing about Brandon Sanderson, and thought "This author has to be a Mormon." I looked him up afterwards and yup, bingo.
Sanderson is a mid author who has become enormously popular through a combination of prolificacy, pure nerd appeal, and writing books that are unsophisticated yet reliably entertaining, like fantasy potato chips. I have read about a dozen Sanderson novels, and eventually they all run together. He does worldbuilding made to be written as RPG splatbooks, and his characters basically win by figuring out the exploits in whatever game system their GM has given them. The plot and character beats are the same, the dialog always has the same tone, and you can be assured it will always be
LDSComics Code Approved.I really liked The Way of Kings and thought I'd invest myself in a long epic fantasy series, but I should have known better since I never got past the first Wheel of Time book (the series which Sanderson famously finished after Robert Jordan died). The second Stormlight book was so boring and tediously Sandersony that I bailed on the series and have pretty much given up on him, though I'll probably read something else eventually. He always writes pretty good series starters, and they just get worse as the series goes on. I started the second Mistborn series and never read more than one book. Cytonic turned to shit by book three. Elantris (his debut novel) is so badly-written I question the literacy of people who praise it. Steelheart tries to be grimdark superheroes but it's pure YA. In fact, almost everything Sanderson writes is YA, but it's YA for M:tG-playing nerds, with only chaste Mormon romance and no problematic, messy, and challenging females (no, not even Vin or Shallan- powerful/crazy is not the same as scary) so dudes can enjoy it without either thinking too hard or being challenged.
I'm being critical but, like I said, I've read about a dozen of his books, so clearly he is doing something right. The ideas are cool, and there is a certain comfort in knowing what you're getting. I keep picking up the next one thinking "Maybe this one won't suck by book two." But he's a harder sell for me nowadays. Increasingly everything he writes reads like someone writing fanfic of his own work.
I have nothing but respect for his dedication and his drive, and he really, really loves what he does. I can overlook his dorkiness and Mormon cosmology that always inserts itself into the books. I ignore the whole Cosmere thing-- I am not a fan of tying every single book into the same multiverse and I don't care about how Hoid is going to appear this time, like Stan Lee always making a cameo in MCU films. But for prolific reliably entertaining authors, Stephen King and Adrian Tchaikovsky both have just as much range and are far superior writers.
The reliability thing is actually pretty great/important. I'm hesitant to read too far into the readership of places like Ao3 or Royal Road or what have you, but I actually think web serials are something that will only grow more popular in the future. A nice drip drip of book which suits the avid readers (who just assemble large numbers to follow at once, or dig up finished ones) just as well as the causal ones (for whom more than a chapter or two at a time might be a heavy lift, and are used to things releasing on a cadence). So for Sanderson, producing eminently readable books at a steady pace is a genuine superpower, and readers like it. Waits between books are always rough, but for Sanderson fans you can just go to his website and see nice circles that slowly but surely tick upwards with progress towards the next two books.
Or you can be a GRRM fan and be waiting a decade for a book that he basically has written three times over but then threw in the trash can only to start over again. It's a bit insulting. (At least Rothfuss just out and said he got depressed and hasn't even really bothered to even give fans false hope)
Put another way, beyond a minimum level of talent, if you can churn out books reliably you can make a good living and grow popular as quantity as a quality of its own.
All of this discussion, though, misses one big part of the appeal of Sanderson. Well, maybe two. The maybe is the worldbuilding. For some people an interesting world can forgive a large number of writing errors (and not all of his books suffer as terribly from length issues! The Mistborn sequel quartet of books are actually about half the length of the average original trilogy book on an individual basis). The bigger one is twistiness. Let's give Sanderson some credit, here: the Mistborn trilogy, for example, has some excellent little twists at the end of each book that are quite fun, especially if you don't know they are coming.
Japan has already figured out a clear [webnovel > light novel > manga > anime & beyond] pipeline and China & Korea look to be following that route. It seems like the self published web novel stuff is increasingly dominating the media landscape over there and I expect it could be similar in the West if entertainment companies can figure out a similar route to mass consumption.
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I am not convinced that any book in the scifi/fantasy genres should count as a normie book.
Bro, they've got wandshit #1 on the nyt bestseller list these days.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/quicksilver-callie-hart/1145866827?ean=9781538774205#
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SF/F is as mainstream as capeshit now. Being a LotR or SW fan doesn't make you part of an isolated little nerd subculture anymore.
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Thanks for the Tchaikovsky rec! Which of his books do you recommend in particular?
If you like epic fantasy, I really like his Shadows of the Apt series (it was his debut). It's big and bloated and goes on for a while and some of the middle volumes are kind of filler, but I was never bored. For science fiction, I love Children of Time (it has David Brin/Uplift vibes), but The Final Architecture is a close second. All of his stand-alones are also good. Service Model and Alien Clay were his recent Hugo nominations and I thought they both deserved it.
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