YouSaid · the spoken record

Hugh Howey

lines on the record: 122
first: 2024-03-13
most recent: 2024-03-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And started focusing on creating audiobooks and launching them with the books and making sure the production value was really high. I just thought it was like an extra format. I didn't know it was going to be one of the money drivers. So trusting your gut is often going against the established wisdom and that can be really beneficial. There's just so much change happening. And you might have an idea no one else has had. So being your own expert, I think, is one of the keys. A common mistake I see people make is thinking that readers won't follow you across genres. So you see people spread out their name amongst different pen names. So I'm going to write under this for sci-fi and under this for romance. And this is my nonfiction stuff. And the brand is you. And if people enjoy your prose, they'll follow you to other genres. So really consolidate your identity. And unless you have a reason to, not write under your real name.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The industry's changing all the time. And so even what I know might be outdated and I'm still operating on it. Like I remember early on someone telling me that audiobooks were going to be the next biggest thing. And this was way before they blew up. They saw it before anyone else. And the advice they gave me changed my career in a big way.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The number one mistake I see will undermine everything else I'm about to say because I think it's trusting expertise. Can get you in trouble”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's more than a doubling. It feels like you triple or quadruple your output. Also because now you have a deadline. You have a social deadline. They're working, so you have to work and you're doing the same thing for them”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bolts are good because, like, it's how do you figure this out? We've done both what we find now is we write an outline, like a rough outline together, brainstorming Write a detailed outline the kind of thing that you would show a producer. And then once you have that detailed outline, I just feel like too right now, like I know where that's going to go. We already have all the beats, so we don't have to debate anything. And I'll just be working on Ag2. And when you look up, Act 1 is also written, which is one of the best feelings as a writer. It's like having those little gremlins that come out at night and do like. The work”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“TV and film, and they all have a good chance of going to the next phase. They'll have momentum behind them. And yeah, that blew our minds. We're like, dude, we work on five things today. Normally it's one, maybe two things. This last week, we got a two-page pitch out to a studio that was waiting on it and then went back into a rewrite of a pilot that we're working on a brand new IP for another major studio”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We usually have something that needs our attention more than other things, but those a day a few weeks ago where we pushed five projects forward on the same day.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Personality is the number one thing. If you can just get along with your co creator and it doesn't even feel like you work anymore, you're just having fun. My co-writer and all things TV and film is this guy named Matt Mikolados, who's an amazing author in his own right, beautiful screenwriter. He's already had some TV and film stuff out there. And we started working together on a script for fun and realized this is better than doing this individually. So now we just do all of our projects together. And spending time with him brainstorming story and divvying up writing and working on scripts, I forget that it's work. It's so much fun.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or with their friends or family. Other people would see this interaction like what's this person really jazzed about? And they get curious about it. So blogging, being on social media, putting out little videos, it looks like promotional work, but it was basically therapy for me to feel like I wasn't doing this just by myself and I wasn't all alone in this.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally, and you would sit there all day and maybe sell five books if you were on a good day. So it makes no sense financially. You're better off spending that day writing. But I will say, if you can find something that you enjoy that counts as promotion, tap into that. And for me, that was engaging with readers on Facebook. I didn't realize this was promotional work until I saw how it snowballed my sales. But instead of, and I've never been comfortable asking someone who's never read my stuff to go read it. I've never pushed my book on people. But what I have done is tried to like engage with people who've already enjoyed it. And I think that it works for me emotionally because I have the feedback loop of my writing is doing something. It's got an audience. I'm getting a little positive reinforcement. So it made me feel less alone. But it also made them talk about my books more on their page.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, often both. My dad was amazing. He didn't know anything about books or book sales or any of that, but he knew every small business owner in the town that he grew up in and the town that he lived in in Colorado. And when I published, next thing I know, he's got a table in front of like someone's coffee shop. Places you wouldn't expect to see books being sold, and he's driving me around. We'll do like three or four of these in a day. And I would do this for like the week that I was hanging out with him and visiting. We're supposed to be hanging out playing Jen Rummy or Cribbage. Instead, we're just doing these books. You're in front of the”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can reach different readers. You might not reach more readers because the pricing will be less appetizing in a lot of ways. But you'll get in different distribution channels. And so it opens up new avenues. It's also for me, once the money was no longer an issue because probably two years into my self-publishing of wool, like I was going to be able to live off that for the rest of my life, then I can make decisions that were just like, what's creatively fun? I want to work with these publishers because we get to do box sets and special editions and go do a two-week book tour that I would never organize on my own, but that a publisher has all the infrastructure to set up and do.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Y'all know That surprised me that publishers weren't willing to do deals because of the stigma and the social pressure from other publishers. Do the things that they won't do, you know, and get that next Tim Ferris book when no one else will. That was kind of disappointing, but surprising. One of the things that happened, one publisher gave me a really good print-only deal with a time limit, then made an offer for the sequels. It wouldn't give me the same terms for the sequel. So they thought that I was going to be trapped now giving them all the rights. So I was self-publishing sequels while they were publishing the first book, which creates a really awkward like...”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. So the whole idea that competition exists in the marketplace, it's insane. The contracts all look the same. The terms are all the same. The dollar amounts are all the same.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two things that I found fascinating. One, I heard from people in the industry because I got to know like editors in chief at many of the publishing houses over the years go into conferences and kind of talking on a business side. I didn't get called in to talk to some publishing houses that I didn't even publish with. And one of the things I heard was a publisher who gave me a print-only deal got phone calls from all the other publishers blasting them.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's why they do that. So I can give you some behind the scenes stuff. I want some behind the scenes. I would love it.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's a genius and he works hard at it. You know, it spends the years and time it takes. That's a level of writing that it's fun to aspire to, but I know I'll never reach. But you have to have loftier goals than your expected outcome.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know it's like a Michael Lewis kind of story, like super stuff in other ways. It turns out the quality of reading that he does, and he's just one of the smartest human beings I've ever met. But his writing, there's a short story collection coming out by him this year called Table for Two. Get it on day one because there's one short story in particular in there that is the cleverest thing I've ever read. So he's another one that I'll read his works in order to remind myself like what we're aiming for.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is from a lot of people. So if you hear this recommendation and you want to read the book, get through the first like 70 or 80 pages. And I know it's like, I'd rather read something that's captured me from the first page. This book pays off. So those are recent books that you recommend.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tried to read that like five times, and it was the hottest thing. And I never gave it enough of a chance. But when I finally finished it, I was like, that's what I'm aiming for with my writing.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ren's reading it. It took me forever to read that. The prose in that book is so special and will make you a better writer. Just recently, another one that someone recommended was Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's short, and it's one of those that you could just pick up and read again to like remind yourself what writing can sound like.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think reading beautiful prose is almost like striking a tuning fork before your writing session. I think it's really awesome to pick up. There's several things you can do. You can read stuff that's nonsense, but beautiful, like some proofs, and you can just turn to any part of Proust that's all the same. The beginning of a story reads just like the middle of his stories. But the way a good translation of Proust flows, that Iambic pentameter, the run-on sentences, it's like it's you start to hear the tonal quality of good music in words and then you can start to sing in that key yourself. Some of the books I've read recently that I think upped my writing. One was, this is how you lose the time war, which is so good. Yeah, it's so good.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In order to keep up with it, I started reading and reviewing a book a day. And this is all I was doing. And I'd done this in college too. I'd gone through a period of like two years where I was reading a book a day as a challenge. And some of these are 400 page books. So you're not doing much else. Just that. I don't know how good this was going to be for my writing, but absorbing that much prose just made it so easy for me to tap into not only the ability to string words together, but all the plot elements that I was absorbing from weeks and weeks and weeks of absorbing this many books. And then I was also writing that review every day. And so I was getting a daily writing habit. And that wasn't even a job, wasn't getting paid to do this. I was doing it for a friend to try to get a website going. And because I love reading”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You mentioned the review website I was writing for. So I was trying to help a friend get this crime mystery thriller website up and running. And he was doing the film movie side of it and I was doing the books. And I just put a call out to publishers. It was a beautiful website that he had made. So I was sharing the URL of saying this is what we're doing. And I started getting a flood of books in the mail. And for a reader like me, this was like Christmas every day. I was getting more books than I could review. So I was having to go through and see which ones appealed to me. And I was building bookshelves all over my house”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a lot of words. Yeah, now if I do a thousand words a day, and what I find helpful in my Word document, whatever I'm working on, there's the word count written in the document at the end, wherever I'm writing. And when I start my daily session as I'm writing, I can see at the bottom of the Word document what the current Word count is. And I can just see the comparison. And that gives me my, like, you need to do a little more. And then once I'm done for the day, I update that number to the day's number. And so I'm always just trying to march that forward. It sounds calculated and cold, but if you just sit around waiting for inspiration and try to write a few sentences here and there, you'll never stay with the story enough to know what it's even about.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone loves to have gotten some pages behind them. And I tried for 20 years to be a writer from age 12 to 32. My number one bucket list thing in life is to write a book and no one was stopping me but myself. But for 20 years I couldn't do it. And honestly, like all I had to do was write a little bit every day and I would write a book that's all I ever wanted. And so how can you get in the way of yourself that consistently? And we all do it as writers. And once I unlock the ability to write, my fear was ever turning that switch back off. And that's where I think the daily habit is critical. Like I wrote today before I came here and it's Saturday. And I'll write on the plane and I'll write in the back of an Uber. I'll do whatever it takes to get some words in that day.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I can only speak to what works for me, but I will say that I found that I have way more in common with other writers than we are dissimilar. Like I hear the same laments like you were just mentioning. I know you and I have a lot of the same hang-ups about writing. And the famous quote about writing is, I hate writing, but I love having written.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. Here's guaranteed readership, here are the reviews, here are the people online who are raving about it. Here are what people in good reads are saying about the book. And publishers used to think a book kind of burned out. It's welcome really quickly. And now they're realizing books have really long tails, successful books. And if you can get an engaged readership on board, it's worth so much money to have like that engaged fandom. To your question, if you want leverage with traditional publishing, if you want to ask for things that will further your rights and your career, you really need to establish yourself in other ways. And it doesn't have to be from self-publishing. Have a podcast that's super successful, a website, a huge following on social media.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think when you're making money leaving them out of it, then you can say, well, I'll cut you in, but these are my demands. And publishers aren't super successful. They aren't great at picking which books are going to sell.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These are all book people, and I love the success of any writer, however they get published. If you sign with a big publisher, fantastic. It's so hard to do. It's so hard to write a book. Like, congratulations to everybody listening who's written a book because that took me 20 years of beating myself up, unable to do it. And I'm thrilled for everyone in this industry, however they move forward.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I have one primary agent in the US, and I have a European agent, Jenny Meyer, who's doing all these deals around Europe. And then I have an Asia-specific agent. They know the publishers are working with. So they'll say, okay, here are the three offers. My Asian agent came to us with offers in Taiwan and he said, okay, these two are offer more money, but this third person you've never heard of any of these publishers, but this third person is a one-man operation. He does all the translations himself. He only does one or two books a year. You should go with him. I trust my agents. So we go with this person who's offering the least amount of money. And they were right. We had the number one selling book in Taiwan that year because people buy books because he touched them. Not because of me or my story. And so having these people working on your behalf, it's enormous. People hear me talking about self-publishing and they think that I hate agents and I hate publishers. I hate bookstores. I love all those people.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Done just for wool probably 50 deals in other countries. So it's normal for foreign deals to be term limited, like five or seven year deals. And most of those who've gone around in renewed sense. So it's just a constant.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do not sell worldwide rights because audio became huge, foreign rights became huge. I was shocked the first time foreign deals started coming in from Brazil and Germany and it was way more than I thought I would ever get in the US.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It ends up being a thick novel like 500 page novel. So I'm not sure. I think I can look at this data, but I think it probably takes 10 hours to read the whole thing for an average reader.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm glad it's a great question because you're leading me towards a truth that I probably wouldn't. Admit to myself otherwise, but that's a huge part of it. I'm pricing it because I want my story to get picked up. I want to find an audience. And the proof of that is that as soon as I figured out how to make it free, I did that. Once the work was serialized and there was the five parts of wool, the first part I made for free. And that's a great way to avoid one-star reviews. And to get more people hooked on a story.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because you don't want a bad review someone to pay $2.99 for something they read in an hour. No amount of money is worth the onslaught of one star reviews from. Angry read”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Amazon tries to make you not price things that low. They don't want ebooks sold for that little. If you price it at $2.99 to $9.99, you make 70% of the cover price as an author, which is huge. Traditionally, published authors might make $15.5, $18%. So you have to sell like five times as many books to get this same kind of royalty. But if you sell it for less than $2.99 or more than $9.99, then your royalty goes down to $35%. half. It's a strong incentive from Amazon. They want ebooks to be priced at a certain range.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't have enough of them So I priced it to really be read, not to be profitable. But you make it up on volume, I guess, because next thing I knew I was making more from this 99 cent short story than all of my books combined.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think I was very lucky that I started to publish at a time when e-readers and print on demand were around. It's a short piece. You can read it in a lunch break. It's hard to recommend a book you don't finish. And it's hard to review a book you don't finish unless you're writing a really bad one-star review. So one thing that helped with word of mouth is that I was writing something that people could get through. And honestly, that once you start, it's hard not to finish. And that really helped. It's super affordable. I was charging 99 cents for the e-book. And the little paperback, which I think only like several hundred maybe got purchased before the cover change, was like $4.99. Those little paperbacks now go for like $1,000. And I wish I had more of them.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd written five novels and another noveltte, this thing that's shorter than a novella. And then Wool came out. And that was like my seventh publishing thing. And it was also in that novelette range, like 50 pages.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there were times where it was double and triple that for a single month. And you can't ignore it when it happens that big. But also say you don't have to set out to do this to have a successful career. I was super happy.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Retail distribution, but it was through create space at the time, which was what Amazon's print on demand, I think it was called. So if a bookstore wanted it, they would have to go out of the way to buy it through like Ingram, like an expanded distributor that wasn't a sales rep from a publishing house coming with a catalog and saying, we believe in this book, which is how most books are sold or purchased by bookstores in bulk. So it was the power of the reader was like too big to ignore. Because at the time, I think I was selling, you know, 50,000 or so copies a month on the low end month after month.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the weeks that I hit the list with wool, I know what I sold that week and I know what the number one author who's a friend of mine sold the week before. I think I hit the list at like three or five. And it was just the New York Times not wanting me to be number one because my sales were like 3x. So it's not based on sales. It's based on a handful of independent bookstores around the country that are called reporting stores. They do take Amazon into account, but they have a like a fractional multiplier to discount the sales because there aren't real book sales. Those aren't real book readers, all that stuff. So there's all these weird biases that go into it. I think I hit it because I got lucky that week that the people who, the gatekeepers just weren't paying attention. They saw something number one on Amazon and they gave it.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Changed over time. Other people have done it. There have been times where quite a few self published books will be on the bestseller list. It is a curated list. I might get some of these details wrong, but someone did an analysis of New York Times contributors and found that their books were higher on the list than made sense in any other statistical way.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“better than other books, but because it finds the right audience. And most writers I know have this, they feel two things at once. They feel like my work is terrible. I'm an imposter. I shouldn't publish this. There's so many mistakes in it. But deep down, they also think this is going to find the right person. They're going to love it. And I would say when you're trying to believe in yourself to listen to that voice and make business decisions based on that voice, make your creative decisions based on the imposter syndrome, because that'll make you be a better writer. But listen to that part of you that thinks this might be amazing and protect your work with that voice in mind.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think there's a bit of a Stockholm syndrome with publishers and authors. And I love my publishers. I've loved all my publishers I've worked with, even the ones who didn't do a great job. I still love working with them because they're book people and I love book people. But I've always felt like we were in it together. We helped each other get lucky. They didn't do everything for me and I didn't do everything for them. But I think some authors feel like without that publisher, they wouldn't have had the break. They wouldn't have had the career they've had. Their relationship has always been with the publisher first. My relationship was with readers first. And so that's my bedrock. I always know that I can that the readers and myself were in it together and publishers can come in and play around, but I don't feel like I need to make stupid business decisions just to think them for our past relationship. But I think a lot of other authors are in that. But to the people starting out that you're asking about, I think you have to have confidence in your work. You have to write a book that you think one other human will find this the best book they've ever read. It'll be their favorite book, not because it's a”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought that about myself as well, so I get that. But what's amazing is that a lot of big name authors who entire publishing houses structure around also don't ask for it. And they could do it.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I get to lease it to publishers. And the good thing is, I'm hoping I don't get attempting enough offer next time because I'm dying to self-publish again. I love knowing what's coming in every month, doing price promotions. I love being able to put a new cover on or create new interior content. Like, it's fun to just give new life to the editions”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did a five year print-only deal. And so after five years, we knew the date we'd get the rights back. A lot of other books, you might get your rights back because it stops selling. It goes out of print. But now that there's print on demand and ebooks, it's easy to keep a book in print just to keep the rights. So the book was still a bestseller when we got the rights back. And so we got to go to auction again. And this is where you believe in your work more than a publisher does. I guess Simon Schuster was like, look, we'll make some money for a year. This fat will go away and in five years we won't be sad to lose it. In five years later, we got to go to auction with all the big publishers and we get to do it again while the TV show is probably still airing, which will be a really unique situation to be in.”
2024-03-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #726: Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT