Interview with Hugh Howey, by Chad Huskins

Chad Huskins is the EVVY Award-winning author of the new epic military sci-fi novel Zero Star, available now on Amazon.

If you've spent enough time in the world of self-publishing, it's impossible to miss the story of Hugh Howey.  His Wool series hasn't just skyrocketed him to the top of the game, it's also kind of changed the game.

He is undoubtedly the "Cinderella story" of the self-publishing world.  Here's a fellow that went the non-traditional route.  Rather than listen to the endless sea of rejection letters that await 99% of us, Hugh Howey opted for self-publishing on the Amazon Kindle program, and then watched as the first in his series took off.  Seeing its popularity, he quickly scrambled to write more in the series, and eventually caught the attention of Ridley Scott and Steve Zaillian, who optioned the Wool series for film.

Howey has been understandably busy these days, between his duties as family man and writer, but I recently had a chance to pin him down and ask him a few questions, author to author.

HUSKINS:  Hi, Hugh.  Thanks for joining us here at Realm of Ideas.  First, just let me say that I’ve only just started to read your Wool series, and it is fantastic.  I picked up on it in an article for CNN.  It seems like you’ve had a heck of a year.  Can you tell us a little about what it felt like when it first started changing, what was going on in your and your wife’s head when this success started coming around so suddenly?

HOWEY:  It started in October of 2011. Sales began picking up and reviews started trickling in. At every stage of this wild ride, my wife and I have looked at each other in disbelief. Just when you think things have gotten as nutty as they possibly can, something bigger and crazier happens. So, in one sense, it’s seemed sudden, but really it’s been a very long upward journey full of many neat surprises.

HUSKINS:  Wool is a post-apocalyptic series taking place in the subterranean Silos.  Are you attracted to the post-apocalyptic genre, the themes in The Road and The Walking Dead, or did you have a specific story you were trying to tell and felt that only a post-apocalyptic setting could suffice?

HUGH:  The latter. I had a story I wanted to tell, and it only made sense in a wasteland setting. This isn’t the type of story I read or normally write. It’s just the world that the first short story needed to take place in.

HUSKINS:  Describe your writing process.  Myself, I prefer silence.  Do you listen to music, or write in silence?  Do you have a schedule you try to maintain?

HOWEY:  I prefer silence, also. I write best in the morning, so I get up and start immediately and try to go straight to lunch. I usually break around 10:00 in the morning to check email and post on Facebook and Twitter. My goal is to get a good 4-6 hours of writing or revising in each day. It’s just me and a laptop and my dog.

HUSKINS:  You’re pretty much the “Cinderella story” of the self-publishing world.  Can you describe how this happened?  That is, did you merely put the book up on Amazon Kindle and “wait and see,” and then just get lucky, or were you constantly promoting it on Twitter and Facebook, marketing it and so forth?

HOWEY:  I didn’t promote Wool until after it was already taking off on its own. The best thing you can do to give yourself a shot at success is to keep writing and publishing. The sort of sales you get from tireless marketing are the kind that require more marketing to maintain. In order to have a blockbuster, you need readers telling each other about the work, not you telling enough people that you get a sale or two. I know a lot of writers will disagree with me on this, but I wouldn’t spend a lot of time on marketing until you have five or six novels or a few dozen short stories under your belt. Just write. And don’t expect to make it big, that can be dangerous. Write because you love to, because you have to, not because you want to get rich.

HUSKINS:  When you were first starting with the ideas for Wool and other stories, did you find that your wife, friends and family were supportive of you?  Did anyone think you were crazy for trying your hand at writing and publishing?

HOWEY:  Nobody thought I was crazy. Everyone I encountered had mad respect for me. Writing is a very common aspiration. Very few people stick with it to completion, and so it mostly draws awe from others. It’s similar to the admiration I have for those who stick with a musical instrument or a foreign language until they become proficient. I’ve had nothing but support and encouragement from friends and family. In fact, I started writing primarily to hand my stories to people I knew!

HUSKINS:  I’ve read that you’ve drawn inspiration from some of the “awesome women” in your life.  Besides your wife, what other great women have inspired you?

HOWEY:  My sister and my mother. Both are brilliant women with enormous hearts and mountains of courage. I aspire to be more like them in many ways.

HUSKINS:  You were a yacht captain for a while, and traveled the globe.  Miss it?  Still do it?

HOWEY:  I don’t miss running other people’s yachts. It’s a lot of work and it takes you away from family. My dream now is to get back on a sailboat of my own and take it around the world. I think within a decade that I’ll be on my way.  (NOTE:  Since we had this discussion, Hugh has done just that.)

HUSKINS:  What else do you do with your time besides writing and family time?  Have any hobbies that keep you occupied?

HOWEY:  I love to take pictures, especially of people. My dog keeps me busy with long walks and fetching sticks (that would be me fetching the sticks, mostly). My wife and I really enjoy our time together reading or watching a film. We’re very boring people.

HUSKINS:  What are you reading now?

HOWEY:  The latest Jon Ronson book. This man is a genius. He’s hilarious, and I love the way he strings words together. I highly recommend all of his books.

HUSKINS:  Lots of writers and artists have that “watershed moment” when they decided they wanted to write and create.  For me, it was reading Sphere by Michael Crichton when I was like 15.  It kind of planted the seed, which grew into a burning desire.  Was there a book that did that for you?

HOWEY:  Ender’s Game. I was 12, and it was when I knew I wanted to be a writer. The fact that Card was a fellow North Carolinian made that dream seem attainable.

HUSKINS:  Wool has been optioned for film by Ridley Scott, the man behind the original Alien, Gladiator, Blade Runner and numerous other epics.  Tell us how that came about, and what was it like?  Did you get a phone call from an agent, e-mail?

HOWEY:  My agent sent Wool around Hollywood. One of the people who got a copy and loved it was Steve Zaillian, one of the top screenplay writers in the business. He loved it enough to send it along to Ridley, who also fell in love with the story. This duo bought the option in conjunction with 20^th Century Fox. They are set to produce, though I doubt either of them will write or helm the work. They have a lot in the pipeline.

I did receive an email from Ridley. He was busy with the release of Prometheus at the time, but was extremely complimentary of the book. It’s amazing that someone of his stature sat down and read something I wrote from cover to cover. That’s humbling.

HUSKINS:  Did you or your family ever have a big celebratory moment for all of these achievements?

HOWEY:  We’ve had a lot of little celebratory moments. Mostly meals out. My way of celebrating is to go get pizza and maybe splurge for a beer. Or go eat somewhere with a view of the water.

HUSKINS:  Thanks for chatting, Hugh.  But before you go, we have to ask you for any piece of advice you can give to writers out there, or artists of any kind for that matter.

HOWEY:  If you love creating, then do it. Art should be an outlet for everything except our desire to get rich. You’ll go mad with that as your motivation. If you view it as a hobby, but one you take seriously enough to generate the highest quality output possible, then the sky is the limit. But that’s just me. There are a million other ways to handle being an artist, and I’m sure most of those alternatives are superior to my way.

(To find out more about Hugh Howey, visit his website www.hughhowey.com.  To find his fabulous Wool series, go here: http://www.amazon.com/Wool-Omnibus-Edition-ebook/dp/B0071XO8RA/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1354623922&sr=1-2&keywords=wool.

Find me on Facebook, and on Twitter @ChadRyanHuskins

New Comic with Micah Champion

Some of our new work.  Micah and I are working on a pitch for Marvel, as well as a pitch for an indie comic series.  Also, check out Zero Star, my sci-fi novel is doing very well, and thanks to all of you for supporting it.  Also, I managed to sell the film rights to Psycho Save Us, so...that's pretty cool!

The Problems with Publishing Today (Part 1: Competition)

A writer's path is fraught with a smattering of obstacles, ranging from writer's block to the endless stream of people hammering away at their confidence by continually asking, "Why do you want to be a writer?  Why are you putting yourself through this?  Why not do something else that makes more money?"  While frustrating, none of these problems compare to those presented by the Beast that is the publishing world.

If you're a writer, I mean a real writer with your heels dug in and your heart set on it, then you will find a way to get through the writer's block and the people whittling away at your confidence.  That just comes with the territory.  What you're not ready for, what none of your writer's training has prepared you for, are the closed doors and the silence you are going to receive from the publishers and literary agents of the world.  Nobody tells you about that.

If you've finished a novel, or a series of them, it can be astonishing how many people you know will say to you, "Wow!  You've finished an entire manuscript?!  Why haven't you sold it yet?"  The answer they privately think to themselves is, He must not be very good.  At least, this is what you suspect.  And here's the real horror...Maybe they're right.  How would you know that you suck?  (We'll get to this topic in a later blog.)

Many almost certainly assume that because of the recent technology explosion on Earth, it can't be that hard to submit and be discovered.  Can it?

You want to tell people that there's something you have to say, that it's worth saying, but that the path to becoming published has become only more difficult because of technology, not less.  Technology has made it so that everyone--and I mean everyone--thinks their work should be read.  They've ran it through a spell check once or twice, maybe a grammar check, and, since Microsoft Office said it all checks out, it must be good to go, right?

With the advent of things such as Microsoft Office, competition between writers became fierce.  And, unfortunately, spell check--that wonderful, beautiful tool--just made things so much more difficult for us.  For, you see, there are the three spellings of "there", "their", and "they're", and the computer doesn't always know which one you mean, so...

Yeah, bad (or, shall we say, incomplete?) writers think they're good simply because their computer can find no error.

Here's something interesting to think about.  Once, when people wrote on typewriters, it was a monumental achievement just to finish a full manuscript--all that messy business with white-out made it a nightmare for editing.  If one had the patience, one was only in the running with a scant few others who had the same rare patience to finish a work and edit it.

Now, since word processors make things so much easier and faster, publishers and literary agents must wade through mounds upon mounds of would-be writers, and your piece is just another layer to that mound.

This is just one of the obstacles that hamper your search for a publisher willing to listen: competition with others.  The planet is now 7 billion strong.  Everyone wants a job doing something they love.  Computers are everywhere, even in your hand as you walk about, and they all have a spell check and grammar check that remove your responsibility to KNOW the difference between "there", "their", and "they're".

Seven billion people.  Everyone wants their dream job.  Computers making it easier to check spelling and grammar but not quality.

You do the math.

(to be continued in Part 2: Chasing Trends)

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