Beyond the Book Podcast: How Kevin J. Anderson Sold 20 Million Books

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Kevin J. Anderson has over 23 million copies of his books in print.
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He's wrote novelizations of popular films such as Star Wars and The X-Files, and has written over 150 novels, has dozens of bestsellers, and has gone beyond the book more profoundly and at a higher level of success than just about any author on the planet.
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What you'll find today is that Kevin is a storyteller that is incredibly innovative.
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He's constantly looking for the next thing he can do to stay ahead of the curve because as we know, publishing is full of ups and downs, but Kevin manages to weather the storm and continue to reach new heights by reinventing his career from traditional publishing, to novelizations, to indie publishing, to publishing other legendary sci-fi authors' works through WordFire Press, to finishing Frank Herbert's Dune, and now diving into Kickstarter and doing some incredible things with combining his books and creating rock albums for his books with legendary rock musicians.
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It's pretty incredible. I'm very lucky to have been able to chat with Kevin J.
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Anderson, and I think you will learn a ton in this conversation as we really see his arc throughout decades of his publishing career, and see how Kevin's been able to go beyond the book and really serve his readers and innovate
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more than practically anyone. So I hope you enjoy this podcast episode. I wanna thank you all, and specifically Jamie Davis, for introducing me to Kevin J. Anderson. This podcast is a community.
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I wanna bring together the best and brightest minds in publishing to share with you the incredibly cool ways they're making a living as an author and turning their stories into an empire, and there's very few publishing empires bigger than that of Kevin J.
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Anderson, and it's all thanks to Jamie Davis in specific for making this episode happen, for connecting me to Kevin, and I'm just so grateful for that. Now,
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one last thing before we jump to this episode is that Kevin has an incredible Kickstarter going on right now for Terra Incognita in specific. It's his epic seafaring fantasy series.
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In addition to some really special editions of his books, he also has three accompanying rock albums, two that are remastered and one brand-new rock album that go along with these books.
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So you can check that out, Terra Incognita on Kickstarter. It'll also be linked in the description. Once again, I'm super grateful for having Kevin here with us today.
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And with that said, we're gonna dive into learning about Kevin's journey, how he's been able to go from starting off with a dream to write and publish novels to
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now having over 20 million copies in print and really leaving a legendary mark on this industry. Kevin, I am so excited to chat with you. You are an absolute legend in the community and what you've done, not only selling
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some astronomical amount of bestseller books that you've written but also innovating and doing things with IP that I rarely have seen done, and rarely do you see it done by an author.
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I'm one of these people that really made a big deal, big killing of it in a, as a trad author.
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So I published my first normal books by Signet Books and Bantam Books and normal traditional career, and then I got discovered by Lucasfilm, and then they had brought me in to do Star Wars books, and that was like a sudden...
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I'm trying to remember what it, what it is when you're looking at, like, the graph of how progression happens, that there are, like, these, these inflection points where things change.
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And so I published my first book, and I had, like, six or seven books published, normal traditional books, midlist paperbacks. Did fine. Got, I think I got nominated for some awards. I got great reviews.
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But, you know, I couldn't quit my day job because they didn't make that much money.
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And then I got asked by Lucasfilm to do Star Wars books, and that was an inflection point because all of a sudden I hit the New York Times bestseller list. My books were selling millions of copies.
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I had all these fans that, like, "I've never heard of this guy before. Let's see what else he wrote," and then, you know, they would trickle over.
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So that was a huge thing for me, and I did a bunch of projects for Lucasfilm, and I worked for The X-Files. I worked for DC Comics. I did-- There was kind of a big deal during that time.
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We're talking, like, the, the '80s and early 2000s where you could make a good living by writing not just TV tie-in books but, like, every TV show had some spinoff books, and people wanted to pick up paperback of The Further Adventures of Lara Croft or, or whatever.
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X-Files came to me, and that was one of the, one of the big kahunas out there. So I did some X-Files books, and- So much fun...
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and I wrote some comics, and, and there used to be that every movie that came out, some author got paid to write the paperback book of that movie. So they're called novelizations.
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They'd send you the, "Here's the movie script for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," and I would take the movie script, and I would turn that into a paperback book, and it would take me a few weeks.
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And of course, the paperback books would come out, and they would only sell during, like, the month that the movie was in the theaters, and then no one would ever find them again.
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But that was kind of a, it was a lot of work, and it was writing work, but it was lots of fun because I'm a, I'm a fanboy at heart, and I got to, you know, work on movies before anybody else got to see them and things.
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So I did that, and then the next big inf- inflection point was when I contacted Brian Herbert because I was always such a huge, huge Dune fan.
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I read all of Frank Herbert's stuff, greatly influential to me when I was a, a young writer, and I loved those books. I read them again and again and again.
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And then Frank Herbert passed away, leaving his last novel was called, or his last Dune novel was called Chapter House: Dune, and it just, like, ends in a cliffhanger.
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It's clear that this is not where the end of the story is.
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And I, you know, I was a pretty successful author by then, and I had a whole bunch of bestsellers and awards, and, and I waited like 10 years to see if Frank Herbert's son Brian was going to finish the story because I was a fan.
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I wanted to see how the story endedAnd because science fiction authors, we, we have connections or we all know each other.
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So I found somebody who gave me Brian's address, and so I just wrote him a, a cold call letter just like, "Hey, I'm a huge Dune fan, and I've written all these books, and are you ever gonna finish the story?
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And if not, can we maybe work together on it?" And, and, you know, that turned into us writing all the, the Dune stuff together and finishing up Frank's story and doing prequels to it.
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And, you know, we worked, both of us worked on Dune part one and part two, and the Dune prophecy TV series is, is based on one of our novels. And so that's kind of taken off and busy with that.
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But so that, that's all great stuff, but let me, let me back up a bit to around 2010 or something like that. If, if you've... If you're an indie author...
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See, a lot of indie authors are very successful, and they're very forward-thinking and very positive, but they don't pay any attention to history or where things came from.
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And 2010 is about the time when the asteroid hit the publishing world. Mm.
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And, like, traditional publishing, like, everything changed around 2008, 2010, and that's when, uh, that's when Amazon came out with this thing called the Kindle, and that's when Borders bookstores closed.
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And, and that's when, like, the, the paperback market, which was where most of us like me made their living, I made my living writing paperback books.
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Well, then paperbacks just sort of went away and kind of to be replaced by e-books but not... it's not really apples and apples. Yeah.
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And so all this stuff happened, and in 2010, um, I had this, this great thing happen, and I signed three really book, really big trad book contracts. I signed a new Dune trilogy with Brian Herbert.
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I signed this big fantasy epic with another publisher, and I signed another science fiction trilogy with Brian Herbert.
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So I had these contracts locked in for, like, the next five years, and they, they paid pretty well, and then I started looking at what was happening in publishing.
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And I thought, "There's a big asteroid coming here, and I wanna be a mammal, not a dinosaur." Yeah. And that's when I first started publishing my own e-books because I had, I had a long career behind me.
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I had all these books I had written that were now out of print, and I got the rights back to them, and nobody else wanted to publish them, so I figured out how to publish them myself. And I put them out.
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They were just, just Kindle at the time. There wasn't really anything else that was, was doing e-books. I mean, this was early days.
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You could put up the crummiest looking cover, and your formatting could be bad, but nobody else was doing e-books. So
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I put mine up, and I started making pretty decent money on these old books that I'd written a long time ago. And I thought, "This is maybe something to pay attention to. Let's, let's start working on this."
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And I had a lot of other science fiction author friends who were in my position. They had a lot of books published. They have won awards.
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They were big, well-known, but they didn't know how to publish an e-book, and they weren't interested in doing it, that they didn't wanna go dive into this indie publishing thing.
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And that's when I formed WordFire Press, my own publishing house, and I, I went to my friends. I says, "Well, well, if you don't wanna do it, let me publish them. We'll just split the money 50/50."
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And I got all kinds of like... We published Frank Herbert's books 'cause the, they were out of print, and nobody else wanted to publish them.
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And we had Mike Resnick and Jody Lynn Nye and Allen Dean Foster and all kinds of big name authors that they had all these old books, but they didn't wanna publish them. So then we started putting those out.
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Again, those were like the gold rush days. So I figured out how to do that, and again, that was just e-books, and it was shortly after that that it was possible to do print books and print on demand.
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So I went, "Oh, well, I'm an old school guy. I wanna... Yeah, I'll read on my e-reader, but I like my book, you know. I like to have it in my hands and read them."
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And so we started doing print books, and you know, that was kind of the... All of these are these little inflection points I'm telling you about.
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But another big thing that we did, and you'll talk to some of the very successful indie publishers, the ones that really, really hit like KU and work on that, that all their sales are e-books, that they don't do anything with print.
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They don't care about anything with print. Well, I'm a little bit different because I knew all of these author friends, and I got plugged into all the Comic Cons around the country. And so if I would...
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And they would invite me as a guest because they wanted Kevin J.
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Anderson as a guest of the Comic Con, and one of my conditions was, "Well, yeah, but you need to give me a couple tables in the dealer's room so I can sell my books."
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And so I would bring the print books, and I would have my author friends show up to do guest signings. And we had Brandon Sanderson. We had Sherrilyn Kenyon. We had Christopher Paolini. We had Terry Brooks. We had R.A.
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Salvatore. We had Larry Correia, all these. These are just my buds, and they would come and sign books at our table, but these were our print books that I did print on demand.
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And you know, if it, if it costs you $5 to print one and you sell them for $15 or $20, then, you know, it's pretty good to do print books.
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And so I, I kind of went down that rabbit hole for a few years where we were doing like 15 or 20 shows a year, and we were running all over the country, and we had a warehouse. And while
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that meant I didn't get much writing done, so that kind of burned me out, but that was a completely different thing. So I, I sold the whole traveling bookstore thing, and I still now appear in Comic Cons and, and stuff.
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But so that was another big thing, but then publishing my own books and, and I still do some trad contracts, maybe one a year.
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The Dune books pretty much I want them with a trad publisher 'cause those go all over in the book Barnes & Nobles and all over the place.
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So Matt, Matt Dennemann's a good friend of mine, and he with his Dungeon Crawler Carl that they got picked up by Ace Books, and they're being... He's on The New York Times Best Seller list this week, and he's selling.
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He's running himself ragged doing book signing tours and things. But that's, that's a whole different thing from indie publishing. So- Yeah...
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and yes, I promise you I'm getting to answer your question that you started with. No, no.
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I mean, this, this background is, is beautiful andIt makes me think throughout all these pivots and really, like, in a sense, different business models and different businesses you've run in the publishing world, how do you know when...
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You seem like the person who goes all in.
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Like, I can see, like, from you traveling the country, you do 15, 20 cons a year, or writing dozens of, you know, um, you know, books related to different screen-to-novel adaptations.
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You know, how do you decide to go all in on something? Is it, like, you feel the passion, you do it?
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Or you seem to also be a very futuristic kind of person, so how are you, how are you deciding, "Oh, this is the opportunity I'm going for right now?" It's more, like, desperation. Like, "Oh no, what do I do now?" And
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well, I, I actually have given a talk at, at Superstars Writing Seminar, which I, I run in Colorado Springs, or at AuthorNation a couple of times. It's called Black Ice: What to Do When Your Career Spins Out of Control.
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And it, uh, I like to say that, that my career has crashed and burned, and I've resurrected myself so many times, you can call me The Doctor, because that just feels like that's...
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Like, oh, boy, that, that thing that I thought was going to be my, my... I've got it made. My career is made. I can do all this forever, and then it just dies in five years.
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That paperbacks went away, and movie novelizations went away. I mean, that, that...
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When's the last time you went into a, like a grocery store and saw a paperback book of Captain America, the new Captain America movie, or, or anything? I mean, you used to see them everywhere. Yeah.
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Nobody does them anymore. So anyway, my... That... I always kinda keep my eyes open, and it's not so much looking for the next opportunity. It's, it's girding my loins against the next disaster.
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And this, that talk, the Black Ice talk, was inspired by a, by a panel I was on at, at 20 Books to 50K. We were up on the big stage, and I'm, I'm with Mark Dawson and a bunch of, like, big name indie authors.
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And they're s- they're spouting about, and, like, they're very bullish that, "I've sold this many millions of copies this year, and this many, and I track- tried this," but they only had, like, a one or two-year track record because it's all new.
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Yeah.
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And I had this little, little revelation, and I just went, "You guys haven't had your first crash yet," that, that this, what you think is going on right now is not gonna go on three years from now because everything is evolving and changing, and there's disruptions in the market, and there's, there's massive things happening, that just because you've got a perfect model for the year 2025, that doesn't mean that it's gonna work in 2028.
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So you better figure out how to pivot and how to do something. And again, getting back to actually answering your question, I had this big series that I had written for a trad publisher. It, it was a, a
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comedy-horror detective called Dan Shambles: Zombie P.I. And I just loved this character. It was hilarious. It's very out of brand for me because I write Kevin Anderson. I write big epic science fiction and stuff.
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Well, I just, just got a kick out of this so much. It's kind of like The Addams Family meets The Naked Gun. It's like...
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It's, it's very silly monsters and werewolves and ghosts, and the, the guy's like Sam Spade, but he's a zombie, and he solves crimes with, with, you know, werewolves and things.
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So it, it's funny, and they're fast, and they're, they're hilarious, and they're filled with dad jokes, and they're... It's just a delight to write them.
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I wrote the first one entirely unspec'd because it's just completely against brand, and I, I got a lot of pushback when I sent it to my agent, my New York literary trad agent who's sold a bunch of big contracts for me.
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And he's like, "Well, what is this? Kevin Anderson can't write funny horror mystery." And I... He said, "This is hilarious. What is this? You can't write this." And I said, "Well, you just said it was hilarious."
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He said, "Yeah, but Kevin Anderson can't write comedy horror." And I said, "But you just said I did." And he said, "Well, I can't market this anywhere because it's against your brand."
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And so he shopped it around to all my publishers that have sold, I'm not kidding, who have sold millions of books of mine, and they didn't want it because it was not the... It wasn't Dune, or it wasn't a big space opera.
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And so we did find another trad publisher to take it. But again, these are fast and funny, and you read one, you want the next one soon. And so, and I'm a fast writer.
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We sold three books to this, this trad publisher, and I said, "Great, here's how we do this. You will...
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We wanna bring them out, like, every six months, bam, bam, bam, and get them going because people are gonna want the next one," and they go, "And, well, that doesn't work very well in trad."
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They, they wanted to bring them out every, one every year and a half. And I went, "But nobody's gonna wait that long."
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And, and then they brought it out, and it was trade paperback for $15, and then they put out the e-book for, guess how much. Was it 14.99 or s- Well- Seven- $15. It was $15. Okay, there we go. So 15 bucks for- Yeah...
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the e-book, 15 bucks for the trade paperback. I said, "That's nuts. Nobody wants that." And they said that they didn't wanna compete with their print books.
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Now, that kind of thinking is just crazy because it's different, it's a different book buyer who buys the paperback or who buys the e-book. You're not eating into each other's sales.
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Somebody's gonna buy the e-book, or somebody's gonna buy the print book. But regardless, what do you care about eating into your print sales? Your e-book is 1,000% profit. There is no cost to you. You put it up there.
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Whoever buys one, you just cash that money. It ju- it's like... So anyway, we, we had, we had trouble, so that went on.
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I did four books for them before they, they said, well, my e-book sales were disappointing, so they didn't wanna continue the series.
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So I got the rights back- Ironically, your e-book sales are disappointing when they do everything to suppress it.
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So I, I got the rights back to those, and I republished the Dan Shambles series on my, my own WordFire press.
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And by then I had enough-I was always writing Dan Shamble short stories too, so I had enough that I could publish a s- Dan Shamble short story collection.
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So I did that, and then I reprinted the other ones, and finally I got around, I thought, "Okay, I'm just gonna write a new Dan Shamble book 'cause I love this," and I published it at WordFire Press.
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I just kinda went out there. I didn't have a giant advertising budget or, or push. I just put it out there, and it did fine.
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I mean, it did okay, but I'm writing Dune books, and I'm writing graphic novels, and I'm writing X-Files books and things that are much bigger ticket items. And so I, h- I kind of let the Dan Shamble series...
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I don't wanna say let it die 'cause he's an undead zombie already. So it just goes like, "All right, I'll get around to this. I really like this. I really wish it had taken off better."
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And, and I, you know, I, I loved him, and I, I just wanted to keep doing it.
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And finally, I think I was kinda grumbling to another indie author friend saying like, "Well, yeah, I published the Dan Shamble books, and I love those, but, you know, it's just not really financially feasible for me to, to write another one 'cause they, they, again, earned my money back, but they didn't pay a lot of bills."
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And he said, "Well, why don't you run a Kickstarter for it?"
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And, you know, I'm a, I was aware of Kickstarters, but in my mind, I kinda had this old school thinking of, "Well, Kickstarters are for whiny authors who can't afford anything, so let's give me money so I can print my book."
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And I said, "I'm, I'm not a desperate author saying give me money to print my book." And boy, he, he took me to the woodshed. He said, "That is not what a Kickstarter is at all.
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A Kickstarter is for your fans to give them sort of a sneak preview or a backstage club that they get the books before anybody else. They get to pre-order. They get the special editions. They get...
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It's a special thing that your fans get to do before anybody else can read the book." And I said, "Well, all right. I'll try this."
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And I, and I'd been getting lots of fan letters just saying, "When's the next Dan Shamble book?" And so I put out a Kickstarter for, "All right. If you guys make it worth my while, I'll do another Dan Shamble book."
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And well, I really wanted to do one, and in fact, I had already written the first draft of it just in anticipation. But, so I said, "All right.
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If you guys want one, let's put your money where your mouth is to see if you really want it." And bam, it sold three times what I ever made from the trad publisher. Amazing. And guess what? I get to keep all that money.
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It doesn't all go to, go to... Well, and the other thing is so I raised this money from the Kickstarter, which made it very worthwhile to write the Dan Shamble book.
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I know how to publish books 'cause I've been doing it for 10, 12 years at, at WordFire.
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And so they all got their first books, and then five, six months after everybody from the Kickstarter got it, then I got to put it up on Amazon and everything as if it was just a brand-new book period. Yeah.
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And I went, "Well, this is a completely different model." Like, this is like getting an advance but not from the publisher. It's from my fans.
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And I thought, "Well, this is really good," and it introduced a whole lot of other readers to the series that I hadn't, that hadn't seen it before. And I...
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That turned out so well that I thought, "Well, I have this other series that I did the first book on it, and I loved it." Uh, it was called The Dragon Business, but Amazon had published it.
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For a while they had this thing, it was Amazon Serials, where they would publish a chapter a week, and you would subscribe to it.
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And they, they contracted with me to write this book for them because they know I'm a fast writer, and I could do a chapter a week.
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So it came out, and this was in their 47North, their print l- well, it was e-book too, but it w- they had a print line. But
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shocking, all of the, the bookstores around the country, the regular bookstores around the country, don't really want to carry books published by Amazon.
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So, you know, print sales weren't as great on that because they were just, just only from Amazon, and I got the rights back to that series.
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It was, it was like The Princess Bride meets Dirty Rotten Scoundrels or, you know, Monty Python with con men and, and I loved that.
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So I thought, "Well, most people haven't read this book, so let me put that out on Kickstarter, that I'll republish the first one, and I'll do a sequel." And again,
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bam, I made like way more than I ever got paid in the first place for it, and I thought, "Okay, this whole Kickstarter thing is going to change the way I do..." Let's put it this way.
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Kickstarter lets me do the projects that are like my passion projects, the ones that I really wanna do, that I would have a hard time selling to my, to Bantam Books or to Tor Books or something like that because they, they know what they wanna publish.
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And then so the one Kickstarter I ran a year ago was the, the epitome of the perfect Kickstarter project. It proved the principle that, that just... So I've written a lot of short stories in my career.
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I've done lots of stories for magazines, anthologies, and things.
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Turns out there's like 140 stories that I've written and published, and they're all over the place, and I had published one or two little, like the selected stories of this or the selected stories of that.
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But I thought, well, what if I just... I have them all in boxes, and I had found them all, and I dug them up. And I really kinda wanted to have a short story library just to just c- put all my stuff together.
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And I pulled them out, and I, I kind of counted everything up, and I had enough that I could do seven volumes of all of my short stories.
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There are three volumes of science fiction ones, two volumes of fantasy ones, and two volumes of horror ones. And I, I was gonna do...
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I really love it when I'm reading a short story collection by an author where they do this little intro about here's why I wrote this story, or here's where I was in life when this story came about, or here's what inspired it.
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So I, I went through all of these 130 stories, and I wrote a little, like sort of a personal here's from Kevin, here's how I wrote this story. And I put all the things together, and
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I thought this was a perfect Kickstarter story, projectBut here's another thing. So I was digging through all those boxes.
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I found, like, my old school records box that, that my mom had kept, our little keepsakes and things. I found the very first novel that I wrote when I was eight years old. It was on- Wow...
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pink paper that I had typed on my dad's typewriter about a mad scientist bringing monsters to life and stuff. Yeah. And so I included that. So I wrote that when I was eight years old, so effectively,
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by putting all these stories together, this set comp- comprises 50 years of my career. Right. Yeah. And I went...
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So I went to my agent first, and I mean, this was me kind of being snarky because I knew what the answer was gonna be. So I, I went to him and I said, "All right.
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If I, if I want to do a seven volume hardcover collection of my reprint old short stories, what publisher would you sell that to?" And he was silent, and then he laughed, and he said, "Well, nobody would want that."
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And I said, went, "Okay, just checking." And so I ran it on a Kickstarter, and we made $80,000. Incredible. I mean, the fans just went, "Boom, we want all this stuff."
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And so to me, that's like the perfect example of that's a project I wanted to do, it's my stories, and it was sold directly to my fans, and they, they came to bat. And
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well, let, let me kind of get, get to the one that's running now 'cause it's only another, another week or so. It's April 3rd is when it ends. Yeah. Okay?
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So I did a huge epic fantasy trilogy that was published about 15 years ago, and this was a... I like to say it's like Game of Thrones, only finished.
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It's this big, giant sailing ships and sea monsters and the Crusades and the Age of Discovery, and it's got 30 main characters, and each book is, you know, doorstop length.
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And, and I, I wrote it and published it, but the original publisher, they only ever brought it out in paperback. And at the time, uh... Well, I'm, I'm very connected with rock music in my, um, in my writing.
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I've always been inspired by rock music. I listen to it all the time. I don't, I don't play it or sing or anything. I'm just a music geek. I worked with the rock band Rush on, on several projects.
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Their drummer, Neil Peart, was a good friend of mine for 30-plus years, and he and I wrote three novels together.
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Clockwork Angels is a novelization of their, their last album, a big concept album, so I, I wrote the novel of their album.
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Which, by the way, was another thing, that when I'm working with Neil Peart from Rush, this is the band's last album, where they're about to go on tour. I'm writing the novel of it.
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At the time, I had 23 million copies of my books in print. Rush was the... They have more platinum albums than any other group in music history. They've millions and millions and millions of copies sold.
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They're about to go on this worldwide concert tour to promote the album, and my book was going to be sold, what, next to the T-shirts at the concerts.
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And I went to all my trad publishers, and every single fricking one of them turned it down. They said, "I don't know what to do with this book." With Rush? "How do you write a novel based on an album?" With all the fans.
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That they, quote, unquote, they said, "Do Rush fans even read?" And so they, they literally, they turned down this book that I thought was the biggest thing since my Dune work. Yeah.
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And so Neil Peart's Canadian publisher, ECW Press, they published it, did a beautiful job of it, sold like hotcakes, and you know, it was kind of a neener, neener, you should have figured that out.
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So with Terra Incognita, it was my fantasy trilogy, I was working with a, a friend of mine who owned a record label, and we wanted to do rock albums that connected to the novels.
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Book number one has CD number one, a concept album that, that goes c- connected to that novel. And then we produced the second album to go with it, and we got, like, my rock idol friends.
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The James LaBrie from Dream Theater is on it. My Steve Walsh from Kansas, the guy who sang Carry On Wayward Son sings the songs on my album.
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Michael Sadler from Saga, Sass Jordan, a v- Grammy Award-winning Canadian vocalist, and John Payne from Asia, and, like, Dave Ragsdale, the, the violinist from Kansas.
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All these people, they're on these great rock albums, and the publisher didn't quite know what to do with it. They didn't, they didn't advertise the CDs with the book. They didn't c- do any press with it.
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That, that just was very... As you can tell by all of this, I kinda know how to do some innovative stuff, but it's hard to get other people to do it with me.
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[laughs] And so- Well, you're getting your fans to do it with you, though. That certainly happened... well, but remember, this was 15 years ago. This was complete trad timeframe, and- There's no other option... so the...
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I didn't have, like, an online store, and I didn't have a... I think I might've had a newsletter then, but it just was not quite... I didn't have the direct connection with my fan base that I do now.
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So fast-forward, and this whole, all this talk about Kickstarter, the Terra Incognita project was something that it just... It's my fantasy masterpiece. It's what I've always wanted to see done in hardcover.
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And we never did the third CD because, you know, it d- they didn't, they didn't come out the way I wanted them to, and, and we never did the third CD.
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Well, fast-forward 15 years, and I've got another friend in the record business. So the original record label had, had gone out of business, so they're not even around anymore. Those two albums you can't find anywhere.
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And I got the rights back to the, the original trilogy, so I'm, I now control the print rights to it. And this other friend of mine came up to me and he said, "Have you ever thought of doing that third CD?
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We gotta do the third album." And, and I was like, "But you know, the other ones are out of print, and how do we do this?"
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And so I started making inquiries, andThat's when I got the rights back to the books, and I got the rights back to the first two albums. And so we went, "Let's go."
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So I had already written draft lyrics, and we ended up producing the third album, and we have, again, a whole bunch of rock stars on it. We've...
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Michael Sadler from Saga is again on it, and this great Northern European female vocalist who I love. Uh, her name is Anneke van Giersbergen. She... Her, her group is called The Gathering.
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But I, I love listening to, like, uh, Within Temptation and, and Nightwish and stuff, and she's, she... Their band is a- along those lines. Uh, we have Ted Leonard from Spock's Beard.
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We have Dan Reed from the Dan Reed Network. If you ever listened to a bunch of funk rock from the, the '90s, he's a good friend of mine. Um- Yeah...
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Ed- Ed Toth, the drummer from the Doobie Brothers and Vertical Horizon, he's plays on ours, and Greg Bissonette, who's the drummer for David Lee Roth and, and the Ringo Starr experience, and he's a drummer on Spinal Tap, so that's the other kind of cool thing.
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Uh, we have Jonathan Dinklage, the violinist from Rush's- Yeah... Work Angel, and, uh, Don Perry from Jethro Tull, he's on it. So we've got all these people in the, the third album. Awesome.
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And again, I got the rights back to the books, and so to me, this is, again, perfect Kickstarter project. This is a passion project of mine. So we got gorgeous new covers for the hardcovers. I hired...
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I have a Ukrainian artist who is just drop dead awesome doing interior illustrations. Uh, he did fabulous work for the Ukrainian editions of another fantasy trilogy of mine. And so- Very cool...
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I, I contacted the publisher, and they got me in touch with the artist. And so we have 20 new- Great... maps and new illustrations for it. That's awesome. It just... It's just so gorgeous.
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And, and then we're re- re- we're releasing the third CD, which has never, ever been heard by anyone. And we're reissuing the first two. We've remastered them.
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And but, but I needed to even kick it up a notch more, so we're doing these fine bespoke editions with leatherette covers and embossed and, and applied artwork on top of it and sprayed edges and little ribbon and, and endpapers and a slip case.
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And so, like, this super deluxe edition that there's only g- I'm only signing the first 500 of them, signing and numbering, and those are, like, 300 bucks for the big super fancy slip case set.
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So we ran a Kickstarter, and we funded in 14 minutes. It was my best first day that I've ever, ever had, and we're rolling on. And it...
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Like I said, it ends on April 3rd, depending on when this goes live, but there'll be about a week left in it when you hear this.
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I mean, if nothing else, just so look at the project just to see how gor- like, the sea monsters and the sailing ships- Yeah... and the illustrations.
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And this, if you're thinking of doing a Kickstarter, this is kind of a bar to shoot for. It's some really, really great stuff. And but there's so many moving parts. Yeah. And you... So how do you find?
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Well, go onto kickstarter.com and search for Kevin Anderson or search for Terra Incognita and you'll find it. I'm not gonna spout a URL for you 'cause nobody's gonna remember it anyway.
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Link will be in the notes for those- Okay... who are, who are listening. Okay. But so if you, if you look at this Kickstarter project and just look at all the... Oh, and we also have the unabridged audiobook set.
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That's over 60 hours of the audiobooks read by Scott Brick, who does all of my, my Dune novels. And they're all done.
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So that, that's another thing that I do with my Kickstarters, is I'm in a position where I can actually do it whether or not it funds, and I've been working for a year to build this Kickstarter.
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So we've already got the audiobooks done. I've already got the books done. They're already laid out. The illustrations are already done.
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So we will be able to manufacture and mail out the books really fairly soon after the Kickstarter's over.
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And by fairly soon, I mean in the next four months or however long it takes to print them and package them and ship them and stuff. But you...
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If, if you've backed Kickstarters, you know that sometimes you wait two years to get your stuff [laughs]. And I just... I don't like that. I kinda wanna get it ready to go. Have a lead time, but it's not, not, not years.
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Yeah. Right.
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Well, and but if you, if you just look at this Terra Incognita Kickstarter and scroll through, I, I want you to do that if you're thinking of doing a Kickstarter because it may scare you away because there's a lot of moving parts.
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There's a lot of work to be done with this. So don't... After Brandon Sanderson's $42 million Kickstarter a couple years ago, and he advised me on mine, by the way, before his even launched, so it's, uh...
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I got some good advice. Oh, and he even, he even posted and plugged the Terra Incognita one a, a while ago, so that's good.
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Uh, but after Brandon's big one, then kind of everybody ran off to say, "I'm gonna do a Kickstarter. I'm gonna raise $42 million."
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And they didn't know what they were doing, and they didn't know how to make a book, and they didn't know how to fulfill backer pledges, and it kinda got into a mess. So don't try this at home if you don't,
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if you don't already have the skill set about making a book and figuring it out. There's also so much more, as you described, between maps, you know, all of the audiobooks, the remastered and now new rock album.
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And I honestly think you might be truly, like, the master of collaborations as an author. But how do you go about collaborating with people who are not just...
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You know, one thing to collaborate with a fellow author, which you've co-authored many works, but it's another thing to work with musicians, to work with, you know, tons of different creatives, corral people together where all of a sudden there's this one Kevin J.
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Anderson project where behind the scenes it's gotta be at least 20 people, I would imagine, through all the different things that have participated in this.
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Well, and that's not even counting my assistant and my wife who proofreads things and the... I mean, there, there's all kinds of stuff going on there. But-We've worked out some ways to do collaboration.
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Remember, I've been doing this for, for a long, long time. My wife and I collaborated on 40 different books, and we're still married after 33 years, so that's...
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You learn to p- keep your ego out the door and respect the other person's skills. And I wouldn't collaborate with somebody if they didn't bring something to the table.
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And so if, like with the Dune books, my, my background's in physics and astronomy, and I'm, I'm really, really good at world building and really, really good at space battles and action scenes, and his background is in philosophy and comparative religions.
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And so when we're in Dune stuff and we need to talk about Bene Gesserit philosophical things, well, those are chapters Brian writes. And, and when you have the big space battles, well, those are chapters I write.
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And, and, you know, you, you just put the pieces together.
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With the musicians it's really pretty cool because it's almost a mutual admiration society, that I'm in awe of them for being able to play drums or guitar, 'cause I can't.
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And they're like, "Wow, I could never tell a story." So it, it's a respectful thing.
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And the, the only challenge with working with the musicians is I'm not a musician, so I don't really have the vocabulary to say, "But can you do this part just a little different and make it sound like, you know, that..."
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So it's a communication problem because I, I don't know how to say change the, the signature time or... Again, I don't know how to say it right now, so. But the album turned out great. I have a great music producer.
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Uh, it's, his name is Bob Manson who, who's the one who came to put it together. And, you know, that's the way, that's the way the projects work. Again, for this, the Terra Incognita Kickstarter,
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once it's done on April 3rd, you don't get to order it again.
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If you miss it, uh, you will, like in, in October or something like that when we make it available for other people, but if you want to get it in the first wave, well, then you need to get your, your sneak preview pass or whatever you wanna call it.
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So that's, that's another cool thing about it, that it gives people a window that if you want this stuff you can get it now, otherwise you have to wait.
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And like for the Dan Shamble series, I got the fans that wanna read the book now. They don't wanna wait six months for it.
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And if you want it now, well, then this is your chance to, to get in the, the early sneak preview part. No, 100%. It, it's that early access that's key. And it's really interesting to see how much now
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time you're putting into this, but also how it's changed really how you're releasing and publishing books, and it brings me to ask, where does Kickstarter sit in the Kevin J. Anderson business model today?
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Like, obviously 30 years ago your business model looked radically different than it did 10 years ago, and I also imagine now it looks quite different than it did 10 years ago.
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So what does, what does the business model look like now? How has it evolved in, you know, 2025?
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Well, the Kickstarters, I like to look at what, what is my, what's a really cool project that I really wanna do that would be like a passion project, and that'll be my Kickstarter thing.
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And I tend to run two a year, like one, one now in the spring and one now in, or one in later fall. So Terra Incognita is my big one right now. Yeah.
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And there are some people who do them every month, and I just think that there's a fatigue factor there that... Look, I'm fatigued. I've, this Kickstarter's been going on for two weeks now.
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It's like all day, every day, Kickstarter, Kickstarter, Kickstarter, and you, you feel like you're bugging people after a while. And I like to do a Dan Shamble book every year, which I run through Kickstarter.
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So, you know, I, my planning for the year is I'll try to do a Dan Shamble book, and I'll try to do some other project for Kickstarter. I will probably do a trad publisher contract.
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I have one right now with Blackstone and Weird Tales Books that's... Nether Station was, like, my Lovecraftian science fiction horror. So that came out trad published book, hardcover in bookstores and everything.
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So that was that. I'm writing a lot of comics and graphic novels, which is a different skill set that I enjoy quite a lot.
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Uh, and I just, kind of a teaser announcement, I can't do the, too many details, but along the rock music end I'm working with one of my favorite bands called Coheed and Cambria to do some graphic novels and novels based on their albums.
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So, well, based on some stuff I'm working with them together. But contracts often take longer than writing the whole book does, so we don't wanna announce until everything's kind of signed and finished.
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But because I've got such a connection to the music biz, I just love the fact that I...
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Like Coheed and Cambria, I picked up their first al- their album 20 years ago 'cause I heard a song on the radio, and I love this, and I bought it, and then I've bought everything since.
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And when one of their, their people kind of wrote me a cold letter and, and just said, "You know, I, we're, we're at this band called Coheed and Cambria, and we're wondering if you might be interested."
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And I went, "Holy cow, I love Coheed and Cambria." So it just, I have kind of fun projects. Well, another thing is I, I'm a full, full-time, I mean, quote it in quotes because I have, like, five full-time jobs.
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But I also run a graduate, a master's degree program in publishing. Yeah.
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It's for Colorado University, and I take 10 to 15 grad students every year, and we teach them publishing, and they edit a pro anthology that they publish.
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Each one of them publishes a, like reissues a, a fine edition of an, of a classic work of literature that's in the public domain, and they learn how to do it.
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And to my knowledge, I'm the only master's degree program that, that focuses on indie publishing instead of old traditional publishing because guess what?
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Not a lot of people wanna spend $25,000 a degree on how to be an assistant editor in Manhattan. I mean, there are still jobs out there, but most of them want to become kickass indie publishers.
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No, the, the tide's turned, and you're so right. Your degree is one of a kind.
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I've looked at many across many different universities 'cause I think like so many writers, you always have the dream of getting the MFA and, or, you know, studying at that sort of graduate level, and your, your program is unique.
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And also Superstars, I just continually hear just the best things about... Everyone who goes to Superstars is like, "That is a special conference, and I, I need to go. It's, it's on my bucket list of cons." You do.
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"I wanna hang out there." Yes, you need to go. So that's, that's Superstars Writing.com, you can look that up. That's every year in Colorado Springs.
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We're the OG business of writing conference, 'cause we started ours 15 years ago when there just flat out were no business of writing conferences.
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I mean, there, nobody taught writers anything about how to read their contracts or anything about copyright or about IP or any business, 'cause that was considered, you know, dirty words for creatives, that, you know, just, just, just write your poems and don't worry about whether you're getting ripped off by the publisher or whether you- you're gonna go out of print and what you do with it.
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And we just started, that was me and Brandon Sanderson and my wife Rebecca Mesta and Eric Flint and David Farland. We launched Superstars 15 years ago, and it's been going strong, so.
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And, and my master's program, we're about to go into our seventh year, and we've got applications open now. It starts, it's all online except for one week in Colorado in the summer, and you're, you're done in a year.
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And I, I am not an academic.
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I wanna do practical stuff so that when you come out of this you actually learn how to do stuff, and you actually publish books and you actually edit an anthology and you actually design your covers rather than writing theoretical papers on critical analysis of something.
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That, I have no patience for that. It's what- Anyway... it's what writers need. Writers need, we have the dream to be able to make a living doing this.
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We need actual practice in what that looks like, 'cause so often we're just kind of shared, I don't know, very,
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very unapplicable pie-in-the-sky teachings that might be really fun intellectually, but when it comes to the actual market, it's gonna be hard to, for that to translate. So I think what you're doing is fantastic.
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For the first part of my career when I was just full-on trad author, they actively isolated the author from knowing anything about the business. Mm. "You just write your books and let us handle everything else."
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And the entire indie movement is authors learning how to do every single piece of the business, how to do the marketing, how to do the ads, how to do the cover design, how to do the layout.
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And in fact, I was way better at writing my own cover blurbs than the publishers were.
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I mean, they, they would kind of get into these esoteric five-paragraph long things that are like an extract from The Silmarillion, and I went, "Well, no one wants to read that."
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So indie, indie authors really learn how to do sort of like the wham-bam soundbite bullet points on, on how to, how to sell your book.
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And it's just a whole different philosophy for writers that I can do it myself and I can learn how to do it.
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And anybody who's had a long-term career in the business and watched all these changes, I, I'll, I'll kind of end this on an optimistic thing.
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For, for my first 10, 15 years, all people ever said was, "Oh, this is a terrible time to get in publishing. This is so hard and it's such a, the worst time ever." The, I think this is the best time now.
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Every, we've got so many options and so many possibilities. And well, look, the Kickstarter, I didn't even know about that three years ago, and now it's changed everything.
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I've, I've launched, I've got a Patreon that I now have this core group of fans that I interact with every single month, and so that's patreon/kevinjanderson.
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And, and they, if, if they're, like, they join that, they get to read my manuscripts the moment I'm done with them, so they read... That's even sooner than Kickstarter.
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They read the manuscript when I'm done with it, so they don't even have to wait for me to publish it on Kickstarter. And it's just such a, a different but improved version, I think, and I'm happy with it.
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Yeah, and I think there's just gonna continue to be more great things to come. I'm, I'm optimistic as well. It's not easy, but there's certainly a lot of opportunity. And Kevin, it was incredible hearing your insight.
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I am so grateful you came on and shared with us. All right. Well, I appreciate it. Thank you, Michael. Thank you. And that's it for this episode. I hope you all enjoyed it.
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I've been so grateful for y'all's support on this podcast. All of your support has allowed me to be able to have some incredible guests on and keep investing more and hopefully making this a better experience for y'all.
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I have two amazing episodes coming up that I've already recorded that I'm really excited for. One of them actually I've been saving for a while, which was my adventure to David for Guts HQ, the Scaremail HQ.
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I can't wait for that podcast episode. I actually will give you a sneak peek of what it's like inside, which will be really fun.
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And in addition to that episode, I have another really fun episode all about how you can automate your business and be able to run things more efficiently by having better workflows.
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So that'll be a really good episode that'll hopefully save you some time. Going beyond the book to run your business better, that's, I think, a pretty wise use of our time. Now, I also have a Kickstarter going on.
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It's called Author Marketing Superpowers. I'd love if you supported it. It also ends in about six days, right around when Kevin's ends, so you could support both of our campaigns.
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If you have to choose one, you could put your vote in for Kevin's campaign. He's awesome and has such incredible things going on. But I'd also appreciate it if you checked out my campaign.
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Author Marketing Superpowers is a deck of cards to help you better market your stories.
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Gives you bite-sized actionable insights and allows you to shuffle the cards so that you can mix and match the superpowers to create custom marketing campaigns. Ultimately, I think marketing should be fun.
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I don't think marketing needs to be complicated. Marketing should be about helping you unleash your author superpower with the world. That's what these cards are all about, and I'd love for you to check them out.
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And if for some reason you're listening to this in the future and it's not on Kickstarter, you'll also be able to get the physical decks from my website. It's just gonna be higher priced than it was on the Kickstarter.
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So if you're able to back the Kickstarter and you got in early, you get a great discount and some awesome benefits.
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But if you're listening to this later, I'll make sure to link to the website so that you can also grab it there. All right. That's it. Thank you all so much for listening. Hope you have an amazing rest of your day.
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And as always, don't forget, together we are boundless.