Hugh Howey, Bestselling Author of Wool and Mega-Creative — How to Sell Millions with Self-Publishing, How to Find Your Big Break, Making Hit TV Shows (Silo), How AI Will Upend Your Life, Nonconformist Creative Process, Advice for Writers, and More (#726)

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“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.



Please enjoy!



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#726: Hugh Howey, Bestselling Author of Wool and Mega-Creative — How to Sell Millions with Self-Publishing, How to Find Your Big Break, Making Hit TV Shows (Silo), How AI Will Upend Your Life, Nonconformist Creative Process, Advice for Writers, and More













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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 .


#720: Life Lessons from Taylor Swift, Conquering Anxiety, Coaching Teens, Career Reinvention, Supposedly Gay Bulls, Your Shadow Side, and More — Soman Chainani



SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE




Connect with Hugh Howey :




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% 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



PEOPLE MENTIONED




Shay Londre



Dan Brown



George R.R. Martin



Kevin Kelly



Ridley Scott



Kristin Nelson



Jenny Meyer



Marcel Proust



Amor Towles



Michael Lewis



Richie Rich



Wade Hampton Howey Jr.



Matt Mikalatos



David Foster Wallace



Roland Griffiths

The post Hugh Howey, Bestselling Author of Wool and Mega-Creative — How to Sell Millions with Self-Publishing, How to Find Your Big Break, Making Hit TV Shows (Silo), How AI Will Upend Your Life, Nonconformist Creative Process, Advice for Writers, and More (#726) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss .