What's in the 2025 Lecture Series?

The 2025 series runs twelve full lectures, each between sixty and ninety minutes, totaling approximately fourteen hours of instruction. Sanderson structures the course in three major phases: two weeks each on plot, character, and setting, followed by two weeks on the business side of writing, then guest lectures and a final Q&A.

Plot

The plot lectures are some of the most practically useful hours of craft instruction available anywhere. Sanderson teaches the three-attempt structure (each failure reveals character or raises stakes), rising tension through progressive complications, and how to keep readers turning pages without relying on cliffhangers. He is frank about what he calls 'promises' — the implicit contract between author and reader — and how breaking those promises destroys trust.

Character

Character instruction covers likeability versus interest (you do not need readers to like your protagonist, just to be interested in them), character arcs, and the mechanics of sympathy and empathy. Sanderson uses his own novels and canonical examples — Star Wars, The Hunger Games, Wheel of Time — to illustrate every principle, making abstract craft tangible.

Setting and Worldbuilding

As the creator of some of the most intricate fictional worlds in modern fantasy, Sanderson's worldbuilding lectures are particularly valuable. He covers the iceberg principle (build ten times more than you show), magic system design (Sanderson's Laws are a foundational framework for the genre), and how setting can function as character. These lectures are valuable far beyond fantasy — every novelist needs to understand how to build a believable world, whether that world is a fantasy kingdom or a contemporary legal firm.

The Publishing Industry

The publishing lectures cover the full landscape: literary agents, traditional publishing timelines, self-publishing, hybrid strategies, and how Sanderson himself navigated an unusual path. He is honest about what traditional publishing offers that self-publishing does not, and vice versa. He also addresses AI's impact on the publishing industry directly in the 2025 edition — a rare acknowledgment from a major traditionally published author.

Guest Lectures

Each edition of the course includes guest lecturers from within the publishing world — editors, agents, other authors. The 2025 guest lineup covers short story markets, indie publishing specifics, and revision strategies. These sessions add practical industry perspective that extends well beyond Sanderson's own experience.

What Makes This Course Exceptional

Paid writing courses routinely charge hundreds or thousands of dollars for instruction of lesser depth. Sanderson offers fourteen hours of university-level craft instruction at no cost. The production quality is excellent — BYU records the lectures with professional audio and video, and Sanderson is a gifted teacher who is funny, self-aware, and deeply knowledgeable.

More importantly, Sanderson teaches from the perspective of someone who writes at commercial scale. Every principle he articulates has been tested across dozens of published novels with millions of readers. This is not theory — it is the refined, working system of one of the most productive and successful authors in the world.

The 2025 edition is also the most accessible. Sanderson has updated his examples, addressed the AI conversation directly, and incorporated lessons from his recent work. If you watched an earlier edition, the 2025 series is worth revisiting.

💡 TIP:  The 2025 lecture series is also available as a podcast feed if you prefer audio-only listening. Search 'On Writing With Brandon Sanderson 2025' in any podcast app.

Considerations

A few honest caveats. Sanderson writes epic fantasy and science fiction. While the craft principles he teaches are universal, his examples and instincts skew toward genre fiction — specifically long-form, complex, world-building-heavy work. Literary fiction authors, memoirists, and nonfiction writers will find the plot and character lectures highly applicable but may need to filter the worldbuilding and magic system content through the lens of their own genre.

The course is also lecture-format rather than workshop-format. There are no writing exercises, no feedback, no community. You watch, you learn, you implement. For authors who learn better through doing and community accountability, this course pairs well with a local writing group or an online community like the 20BooksTo50K Facebook group.

• Best for: Fiction writers of all genres, especially fantasy and sci-fi

• Not ideal as a standalone for: Memoirists, nonfiction authors, or authors who need live feedback

• Pairs well with: A writing group, Becca Syme's Write Better-Faster for process, Bryan Cohen's Amazon Ad Profit Challenge for marketing

How to Use the Course

Watch the lectures in sequence. Sanderson builds on earlier concepts throughout the series, and jumping around loses important context. Plan for approximately one lecture per week to give yourself time to apply what you're learning to your current work-in-progress.

The companion blog at brandonsanderson.com publishes detailed notes for each lecture — written summaries that allow you to revisit specific frameworks without rewatching. Use these notes as a reference when you're in the middle of a draft and need to quickly recall a technique.

Take notes on the three-attempt structure, Sanderson's Laws of Magic (even if you don't write fantasy, they apply to any 'system' in your fiction), and the promises-and-payoffs framework. These are the most immediately applicable tools in the course.

Tracking Your Results with ScribeCount

📊  Every course teaches strategies. ScribeCount shows you whether those strategies are working — in real numbers, across every platform you publish on.

Brandon Sanderson's course will make you a better writer. ScribeCount will tell you whether that better writing is translating into better sales. Once you've applied these craft principles to a new book or series, use ScribeCount's Sales Dashboard to track the launch and long-term performance. Compare sales curves across titles. Watch how improved read-through (readers finishing book one and buying book two) shows up in your Sunburst Chart data. The craft gets you to a better book. The data tells you if readers agree.

Final Verdict

Brandon Sanderson's Writing Lectures are the most valuable free resource in fiction craft education. Full stop. Fourteen hours of instruction from one of the most commercially successful fantasy authors alive, freely available on YouTube, updated for 2025. There is no paid course in this price range — which is to say, no price at all — that comes close. If you write fiction and you have not watched this series, that changes today.

✅  Bottom Line: Free, authoritative, comprehensive, and updated for 2025. The single best free writing craft resource available to indie fiction authors.

About the Author

Hello, I'm Randall Wood. When I'm not pounding the keyboard or entertaining my giant dog, I like to build tools for my fellow indie authors. In these articles, you'll find lessons learned over sixteen years spent in the indie author world. I share it all here to help you get one step closer to where you want to be.

More at randallwoodauthor.com