In March 2022, Brandon Sanderson launched a Kickstarter for four secret novels he had written during the pandemic. It closed at more than $41 million from over 185,000 backers, still the most any project of any kind has ever raised on the platform, four years on. In 2024, Sanderson ran a second crowdfunding campaign, this time on BackerKit, and raised more than $16 million from 55,000 backers. Neither project was modest in scope. Both were epic fantasy, built at the scale readers had already spent years living inside.
Those two numbers are outliers, but the direction underneath them is not. Estimates of the global crowdfunding market vary considerably by research firm, but one widely cited figure puts it at $18.5 billion in 2026, up from $16.6 billion the year before. Epic fantasy and romantasy are both named among the genres readers are actively funding, alongside cozy fantasy, a subgenre that built most of its readership outside traditional publishing gatekeeping in the first place.
What connects the record campaigns to the broader trend is not marketing budget. It is that readers who already trust a world, or want to, will fund its continuation directly instead of waiting for a publisher to decide the market can bear it. That is a different relationship between reader and book than traditional publishing assumes. It treats the reader as a stakeholder in whether the next installment gets made, not only a customer for the one that already exists.
This is worth noticing for a genre that has spent recent years hearing that its appetite for scale, multi-book commitments, and slow-building cosmology is a liability against shorter, faster-moving trends. The crowdfunding data suggests something more specific: readers will fund scale when they trust the person building it. The trust has to be earned first. The scale was never the problem.
None of this guarantees any individual campaign's outcome. Audience trust is built over years, not during a thirty-day funding window. But the ceiling on what fantasy readers will back, once they believe in the world being offered, keeps turning out to be higher than the industry expects.
Map's Edge Media publishes The Hearthlight Cycle and other books with that same relationship in mind: A series meant to be read at the scale it was built for.