When will Stormlight 10 come out?

Now that Wind and Truth has been published, those well invested in the Cosmere will start to look towards the destination of their journey. But how long will it take for us to arrive?

From the State of the Sanderson 2023 we know that we can expect Stormlight 6 to kick off era 2 in 2031.

Luckily this will be preceded by Mistborn Era 3 and Elantris 2 and 3 starting in 2028 and ending in 2030. That's 5 books in 2 years. Aggressive pacing to say the least, but when you consider Mistborn's initial release schedule, that's not too outlandish. So what does that mean for Stormlight Era 2?

To answer this question, we will look to the past and attempt to sleuth out an estimated date based on Sanderson's release cadence. For the purposes of this exploration, we'll be looking only at the publication of full-fat Cosmere books and novels. No novellas or short stories.

Let's begin.

Release cadence

To date, there are 18 main line Cosmere books, including the works of Mistborn, Stormlight Archive, the Secret Projects and the two standalone novels. Let's array these in order by year of publication:

When you lay it out like that, we are spoiled aren't we? A mainline book almost every year with only a major worldwide crisis to mix things up, and by which we got THREE books to compensate for? Sheeeeeeesh.

Keep in mind that the Cosmere is not the only books Sanderson publishes. Discounting 2016's Arcanum Unbounded and 2020's Dawnshard (they are in the Cosmere), we also have Alcatraz publishing 6 novels between 2007 and 2022, and the Cytoverse which has 4 novels published between 2018 and 2023, with a bunch of novellas thrown in to the mix. I could keep going... Legion, the Reckoners, and a library of other works... check out the full list on wikipedia for more. It's wild.

Time between books

Let's take this a step further - how long does it take between books to pump out the content.

Mistborn Era 1

Mistborn Era 1 started with Final Empire (now called Mistborn) published in 2006 and ended with The Hero of Ages in 2008. That's one book every year.

Stormlight Era 1

The Way of Kings was published in 2010 and ended in 2024 with Wind and Truth. That's a staggering 14 years for 5 books. The difference? Length. Stormlight books are significantly longer than Mistborn. You also have all of Era of Mistborn being published in the time it took to complete Stormlight. You ALSO have the pandemic.

Mistborn Era 2

As mentioned, Mistborn Era 2 started in 2011 and ended in 2022. That's 11 years for 4 books, but keep in mind Sanderson was working on a lot of other projects at that time, and the pandemic is in there too.

So to summarize, Stormlight books took an average of 2.8 years per book to publish, but occurred during chaotic times. Sanderson was juggling other projects, other series and global disasters.

Projecting to Stormlight 10

So we come at last to Stormlight futures. Let's assume that, by the we arrive at 2031, Sanderson is more focused on Stormlight than he was during Era 1. We would have just wrapped two major series, and many of his other works would have gotten a "recent enough" treatment that we might not expect to see a lot of content coming out there.

Assuming that he is mostly focused on Stormlight, with a couple of extra projects thrown in for flavor (here's to Warbreaker 2), I think we can expect a Stormlight book every other year. That would provide us with the following cadence:

Ouch. Brandon Sanderson will be 64 given that release schedule. I have no doubt that he will make it and still be rocking out books at that age, but it's a staggering journey to be sure.

I started reading Sanderson the year my daughter was born when I picked up Wheel of Time. I started The Way of Kings (I am a Stormlight-first reader) just after her first birthday. She will be 21 by the time we might see Stormlight wrap, so I guess we can celebrate with a beer together.