Of the other four, three of them are set in the Cosmere on “new worlds,” and one is a total standalone with no connections to that universe at all. That one is not part of the Kickstarter, and plans for the release will be announced at a later date.

One of those books is a middle grade novel he wrote for his kids, and may eventually surface in graphic novel format. Sanderson is keeping a lot of the details about these new books to himself, but here’s what we know so far. To go along with the video, he and the team at his small press Dragonsteel announced that they were going to be running a Kickstarter to fund the distribution of these books. He repeated the process four more times, pounding out secret novel after secret novel until yesterday’s video announcement. That was in 2020, practically another lifetime ago. This began as a way for him to do something for his wife the first of these “Secret Projects” was a book he only showed to her, but after reading it she pushed him to share it with others. What he spent his time doing was writing other books. Prior to the pandemic, Sanderson was traveling almost a third of every year to promote his work, but with COVID throwing everything into lockdown, that meant that he was stuck at home like the rest of us. It calls to mind when he announced he’d secretly written an extra Mistborn novel back in 2014.

As much as I was totally fooled by the very serious tone of the reveal video, I can’t help but feel that we all should have seen this coming. Okay, so the big news is that Brandon Sanderson wrote an extra five novels in secret over the course of the past few years.

Brandon Sanderson is releasing four secret novels in 2023

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