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

“Say that, but her incentive was she wanted to have these conversations with publishers to help her other clients. She was like, the deal that I want to get, you will never get because it's too soon. She told me that early on. But we need to start having these conversations so a future author can get this deal. And what we didn't know is that it would change quick enough that we would get that deal. And so we were turning down these huge offers from publishers until, and we just told them, like, we want to do a print-only deal with a time limit. And I get to keep all the digital rights, all the audio, the rest of the world. But you publish it the print only as if it's a major book, book tours, major distribution, all that. And finally, Simon Schuster said we'd rather make some money than no money. And of the big five, they're kind of the smallest, most nimble.”
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
“Is all self published Had an agent at this time, Tristan Nelson, the best in the industry, who was so cool because she was like, I'm not sure you should do a deal with a publisher, which leaves her out of the money too. Right.”
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
“Crazy. When we went around to the big publishers, Wool was already a New York Times bestseller. We had Ridley Scott on board in 20th Century Fox to do a feature. It was making a lot of money, selling a lot of copies, crowding out books in the bestseller list from the major publishers. And so people were offering seven figures plus for the rights. And I was showing them my monthly sales and saying, you can't compete with what I'm already doing, which was a power imbalance they'd never really.”
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
“Gut in you. Here were these characters that was already hip deep in the sequel. I was planning on writing, you know, at least a trilogy with these characters. And I was given the IP away. I was given the rights away. And what I was giving it away for, I was like, wait, I would spend that amount of money to own this for the rest of my life. I'll never forget that sensation. And ever since then, I've never done a deal where I'm giving away rights for my lifetime. Even major deals with big publishers as far as my agent and I know we're the only ones in the industry who get this is 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
“People were emailing me as Molly, which is like my character's name. And two small presses saw my blog post and my Twitter feed and asked for a partial read and both asked for a full read after reading the partial. And then both made offers. And so I kind of circumvented the agent route. And at this point, they were paying me money, which it was like not even in the tens of thousands. It was in the thousands, but they were going to do all the editing, cover art, all the production cost. I wasn't going to have to spend a penny to publish my book, which was already better than I thought. My ambitions were so low that I thought this was a huge win. But then the night we went out to dinner, me and my ex-girlfriend, you know, signed this contract to celebrate it, I felt sick to my stomach.”
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
“Getting a publisher. How do we do this? Go in the library, reading books on queering, how to write a query letter. Here's the book of agents. This is like, there was a lot of online resources like there are now. Now there's apps to help you keep up with who you've queried and the responses and all this stuff. So I'm figuring this out, but I'm also signing up for Twitter as soon as Twitter launches. I have a blog on BlogSpot. This is like way back in the day. And on Twitter, I created a Twitter account under my character's name. I'm tweeting as her, which led to a lot of confusion and emails.”
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 you're expecting people to pay you for the pleasure. I was like, okay, I'm about to pay my sister $20 to read this. That's how this was going to go transactionally. So I was going to give it away. People who were reading it were like, you should get this published. It's great. And everyone's dream was to get a publisher. And so I was absorbing that dream secondhand, even though it really wasn't necessarily my dream. My dream was just to get people who wanted to read this to read it, not even force people to read it, but just anybody who thought this would be a fun story. Here it is. And the day that I signed the contract to sign my rights over to that publisher was one of the worst days of my life. And it was everyone else's dream.”
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 got really lucky there. So I was going to give my first book away. I was going to publish it on my blog like a chapter at a time and just use it to get feedback on my writing while I worked on more stuff. I was already sending the Word document to anyone who wanted to read it, like Strangers on Forums. You know, people who are worried about piracy and protecting their stuff. I was like emailing this to every cousin I had, all my family members. Because what you realize is, yeah, you spent so much time and energy making this thing you love convincing even a loved one to take the eight hours it might take to read it is a huge ask yeah most people won't 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
“I don't want to do it to find it. I don't want to do it. I don't want to do a lot of heavy lifting. I give away my ideas all the time. If I think of an invention that I think will make a lot of money, I just try to convince someone else to make it because I just want to own it. I don't actually want to 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 hope to put books out that weren't already there. I think when I was 12 or 13 years old, I read my first works of science fiction. I think it was Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Inders Game. I read them back to back. And I'd never read books like this before. There aren't many books like this, two books. A lot of people rate them in their top 10. And I just wanted more of that. And I wanted more newness. Things have just tickled me. And it's hard to find that. Again. something I learned as a bookseller is there's all these books on the bookshelves but for any reader who walked in there were very few that were actually going to blow them away so I wanted to feel some of that void my first attempt to write was right after I read those books and it's basically terrible fanfiction like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fanfiction and yeah I was trying to fill this space that I thought was on the bookshelf which is why to this day when I write something if I feel like it's similar to anything else”
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
“But your best time as a writer is when you're doing it for yourself and no one's looking over your shoulder while you're doing 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
“Totally, all that stuff gets in the way. I hate giving this advice to writers because no one wants to hear this. But the time that you just get to write because you love to create, you're just trying to write one or two books a year. You're not thinking about sales is the best time you'll ever have as a writer. It might not be your best time as a professional or a human.”
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
“But it's beneficial for not your first thing to take off because I'll tell you it's much harder to write once you've had some success because you have other demands on your time. You have many more people watching and anticipating”
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, it's insane how little writers make. And I knew that going in because I worked at a bookstore. And so I was spending time with a lot of writers. So I had low expectations going in. I told myself I would write two books a year for 10 years. And then after 20 books, I would know if I had what it took to be a writer. And it basically lets you just get out of your own head. You don't market that first book. You don't wonder why success hasn't happened to you. You just work on getting better, producing content. Because what I've seen as a bookseller is that these writers who broke out who had three or four books behind them like Dan Brown, when Dan Brown broke out, he already had a few books out that weren't that huge. Same with George R. Martin. And that backlist takes off. So it's almost like you instant published six books at once.”
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 was writing in obscurity, but it's amazing. My first book did better than a lot of first books that come out with a very small press, I ended up buying the rights back to it in order to self-publish the sequel and then sell publish the first book as well. And within a year of writing, I was making a couple hundred dollars a month off my writing, which might sound like really small, but”
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 it was really cool, but it was because I was trying to engineer what would have tickled me as a reader and thinking about that emotional roller coaster and not being beholden. Because when I published the book traditionally, publishers were not up for this. They were like, no, we don't sandwich. Yeah. And you had to follow the formula. In my case, breaking that formula really worked to my advantage.”
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 it worked in a way that I didn't anticipate to work so well that the year that wool came out, it was the most reviewed and highest reviewed item on Amazon, which I didn't find out about until I was at a conference with some Amazon people and someone on stage mentioned that. Without knowing that I was in the audience, it was news to me. I was like, is this a real thing? And it was a great way to.”
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
“After the interview. And I think the last thing they remember in this roller coaster of emotions, like they hate me. Oh, this guy's not too bad. Oh my gosh, that's exactly what I wanted. I love this guy. Oh, he asked me to write a review. I'm going to go do that right now.”
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 didn't mean for it to work this well, but I was intentional about asking for this. One of the questions was, hey, I love this book. How can I help other people discover it? And share the word. And the answer was, tell everyone you know about it. Write reviews. Go on Amazon to write reviews. Share it on Facebook. And that year, so what happens? You finish this book. You're happy. It's a good book. But there's a little thing that's upsetting you. You read this Q&A and you're like, okay, it's hard to be mad at this guy. He's pretty funny. And then right after you're not mad at me anymore, I give you the thing you really want deep down after that. And it's up to you to find it. And not everyone does.”
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
“QA with the other. Yeah. And I think the last question and answer is Did you write all these questions yourself and the last answer is yes. So I'm very upfront about it. But it's the first time after spending 500 pages with me that you're spending time with me in my own voice.”
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 was trying to figure out well, what could I put at the end of the story that's not part of the story? It needs to be acknowledgements, like thanks to my family and whatnot. It needs to make it feel like the book is over. And what I came up with was an interview, a series of questions and answers. And of course, I'm writing the questions as well.”
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
“Most of what I've figured out as a writer I've learned as a reader. There's things that tickle me. And this actually, and this happened before when I'm going to talk about, sounds a lot like the Marvel teasers after the credits. This was before any of that. But I had the same gut feeling that there are some things that you don't want to just turn the page and get hit with, that you really need to ask the reader to step away, have some emotional response, maybe even get upset at me as the author. And then after that pause, have that little extra nugget that they've been waiting for. You want to make them feel like you're not going to get what you want out of 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