Hugh Howey, Author of Silo and Wool — A Masterclass on Writing, Unorthodox Self-Publishing, and Living in The AI Age (#726)

“You have to have loftier goals than your expected outcome.”

— Hugh Howey

Hugh Howey (@hughhowey) is the New York Times bestselling author of Wool, Beacon 23, Sand, Machine Learning, Half Way Home, and more than a dozen other novels. His Silo trilogy was recently adapted by Apple TV, becoming their #1 drama of all time. A series based on his novel Beacon 23, starring Lena Headey, also released last year, with season two due in March. Hugh’s works have been translated into more than 40 languages and have sold millions of copies around the world. He lives in New York City with his wife Shay.

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The transcript of this episode can be found here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

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What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Want to hear another episode with someone who builds fictional worlds for a living? Listen to my most recent conversation with The School for Good & Evil author Soman Chainani, in which we discussed giving stories away, the art of Christopher Marley, potentially gay bulls, career lessons from Taylor Swift, cross-collar dating, dodgy allergies, the life-changing power of ketamine, hookups, and much more.

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

• The Silo Series Boxed Set: Wool, Shift, Dust, and Silo Stories by Hugh Howey | Amazon
• Silo | Apple TV+
• Beacon 23: The Complete Novel by Hugh Howey | Amazon
• Beacon 23 | Prime Video
• Sand by Hugh Howey | Amazon
• Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey | Amazon
• Half Way Home by Hugh Howey | Amazon
• So You Want to be a Writer… | Hugh Howey
• The Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams | Amazon
• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card | Amazon
• Hugh Howey: Winning at the Self-Publishing Game | The Knowledge Project Podcast #63
• The Bern Saga by Hugh Howey | Amazon
• Celebrating 100 Years | Simon & Schuster
• A Publishing Contract Should Not Be Forever | The Authors Guild
• Ten Things Nobody Tells You About the Publishing Industry | Publishers Weekly
• What Is Stockholm Syndrome? It All Started with a Bank Robbery 50 Years Ago | AP News
• Imposter Syndrome: Why You May Feel Like a Fraud | Verywell Mind
• The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss | Amazon
• Best Sellers | The New York Times
• The Murky Path To Becoming a New York Times Best Seller | Esquire
• CreateSpace | Kindle Direct Publishing
• Dedicated to Serving the Book Industry | Ingram Content Group
• A Guide to Book Publishing Rights | Amita Parikh
• Literary Agents Discuss Foreign Rights and the International Book Market | Jane Friedman
• Power Laws: How Nonlinear Relationships Amplify Results | Farnam Street Blog
• Hugh Howey (Author of Wool Omnibus) | Goodreads
• My Advice to Aspiring Authors | Hugh Howey
• Don’t Like to Write, But Like Having Written | Quote Investigator
• What We Find When We Get Lost in Proust | The New Yorker
• This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar | Amazon
• Circe by Madeline Miller | Amazon
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: A Novel by Gabrielle Zevin | Amazon
• The Lincoln Highway: A Novel by Amor Towles | Amazon
• Table for Two: Fictions by Amor Towles | Amazon
• Why Rappers Love Grey Poupon | Vox
• Writing About My Father | Hugh Howey
• The Power of Story | Hugh Howey
• 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly | The Technium
• Who Are the Big Five Publishers? | Aspiring Author
• Highlander: The Movie | Prime Video
• The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World | Wired
• The Upside of Artificial Intelligence Development | Wired
• The Creator of ‘Silo’ Says Same-Day AI Movies Are Coming Soon | Wired
• Why I Write About AI | Hugh Howey
• The First Emotionally Intelligent AI | Pi
• The AI Companion Who Cares | Replika
• Sheila Conversational AI | App Store
• AI Won’t Replace Humans — But Humans with AI Will Replace Humans without AI | Harvard Business Review
• The Beginning to the End of the Universe: The Big Crunch vs. The Big Freeze | Astronomy
• What is CRISPR? | New Scientist
• How Cheap Drones Are Transforming Warfare in Ukraine | The Economist
• The Race to a Battery-Powered Future | The Brink
• With NVIDIA Up 80{c87e2df4b343d0515d304e127afe4653a549475791ab451641a18e09bd64e760} This Year, Are There Any AI Crypto Tokens You Should Be Buying Now? | The Motley Fool
• Surgical Sperm Extraction | HFEA
• By 02060 the Total Population of Humans on Earth Will Be Less than It Is Today. | Long Bets
• World Population Growth Is Expected to Nearly Stop By 2100 | Pew Research Center
• What to Expect at a Shabbat Dinner | Chabad.org
• How Long Until We’re All Amish? by Lyman Stone | Medium
• The Power of Myth — The Hero’s Adventure with Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers | The Tim Ferriss Show #456
• The Brains of Believers and Non-Believers Work Differently | Psychology Today
• Everybody Worships: David Foster Wallace on Real Freedom and the Skeleton of Every Great Story | Mockingbird
• This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio) | Farnam Street
• This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life by David Foster Wallace | Amazon
• Atheists Can Be Dogmatic | Discover Magazine
• Consider Revising Celibacy Rule for Catholic Priests, Vatican Official Says | The Guardian
• Married Catholic Priests? They Exist, and Here’s How | Baltimore Sun
• C.S. Lewis and Eight Reasons for Believing in Objective Morality | Moral Apologetics
• Why Do We Clean? | Hugh Howey
• Justice with Michael Sandel | Harvard University
• The Iliad by Homer | Amazon
• The Golden Rule | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude | The Tim Ferriss Show #641

SHOW NOTES

• [06:48] Breaking the formula with a literary sleight of hand.
• [11:00] A commitment to 10 years of obscurity.
• [15:02] Buying back rights and self-publishing.
• [22:04] Why authors should strive for a reader-first vs. publisher-first mindset.
• [24:22] Hitting the NYT Best Sellers List with a self-pub book.
• [27:44] Pricing logic.
• [31:00] The undersold value of worldwide rights.
• [33:57] How authors can find deal leverage early on.
• [37:07] Establishing a daily writing habit.
• [41:34] Fiction that inspires better writing.
• [45:27] Collaboration vs. writing solo.
• [46:59] Ways the publishing industry protects the status quo.
• [49:55] Why Hugh makes publishing deals at all.
• [50:45] Self-promotion as therapy.
• [53:05] Keys to fruitful collaboration.
• [55:47] Common mistakes creatives make.
• [1:01:03] AI’s present-and-future impact on publishing.
• [1:06:05] AI-generated occupational and existential crises.
• [01:10:11] Mid-term optimist, long-term pessimist
• [01:14:57] Procreation in uncertain times.
• [01:19:07] The future of religion.
• [01:26:21] Free will and objective moral truth.
• [01:31:02] Parting thoughts.

MORE HUGH HOWEY QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“It might not be your best time as a professional or a human, 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.”
— Hugh Howey

“You have to write a book that you think one other human will find this the best book they’ve ever read.”
— Hugh Howey

“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 readers.”
— Hugh Howey

“Publishers used to think a book kind of burned out its 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 that engaged fandom.”
— Hugh Howey

“You have to have loftier goals than your expected outcome.”
— Hugh Howey

“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. I’m going to write under this for sci-fi and under this for romance, and this is my nonfiction stuff. The brand is you. And if people enjoy your prose, they’ll follow you to other genres. So really consolidate your identity. Unless you have a reason to not write under your real name, embrace your writing under your real name and make sure that you are the brand. The more readers can feel a connection with the person behind the work, the better off your career will be.”
— Hugh Howey

“Trusting expertise can get you in trouble.”
— Hugh Howey

“Everything written more than a hundred years ago is all free to read and you can download them all. That has not stopped people from having amazing careers. So the idea that there’ll be too much to read and so no one will make a living, that’s always been true. I’m not sure what AI would change about that.”
— Hugh Howey

“I think there’s an existential crisis that we’re going to face when we realize what you and I do is computational. Our brains are large language models. We’re not that special. We can replicate the human soul in a lot of ways. I think people are going to have a hard time with that.”
— Hugh Howey

“If you try to decide on whether or not to have kids based on what kind of life you think they’re going to have, no one would have kids, because nothing’s a guarantee. Life is going to be weird.”
— Hugh Howey

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