It’s an idea I’d come up with year earlier, about what it does to us to see nothing but bad news on the TV and in the papers all the time. This lesson - plus traveling to book conventions - motivated me to try my hand at a novel, just to be able to say I’d done it. It wasn’t until I began reviewing books for a crime fiction website that I learned the skill of writing every single day on a deadline.
I’d always wanted to be a writer, but I couldn’t get past the first few chapters of any book I started. I did that for the better part of a decade, and then I met my wife and started spending more and more time on dry land. I went through a couple hurricanes and had to take on odd jobs to effect repairs to my sailboat. I dropped out of college, where I was studying physics and English, and I sailed off to the islands for a year. TC: Who are you? What inspired you to write Wool? Not what you expect to happen as you’re working in a bookstore and writing stories in your spare time. Wool has been picked up in over 30 countries, and I’ve sold over two million books worldwide. For the past two years, I’ve been on the road constantly. I had previously dreamed of being able to work at the bookstore I was helping manage no matter how popular my books became, but that just proved impossible. I had to quit my day job just to handle all the media requests and fan emails. Within months of publishing Wool, I was flooded with emails from agents and people in Hollywood. I wrote four more stories, which turned the short piece into a full novel, and the collected work went to the top of the Amazon charts. But then Wool came out, and the sales shot through the roof. I was getting $100 – $150 in the mail every month, and the amount was creeping up. My first six novels had sold around five thousand copies between them, which was far more than I ever thought I would sell. I had been writing and self-publishing for three years. But I was happy with my career up to that point. Howey: My writing career took off with the publication of a short story, Wool. TC: So the story for you is that things were quiet for you for a long time with your writing and suddenly things ballooned? What happened? Where are you now in terms of sales? It’s been optioned by Ridley Scott and recently appeared in hardcover under the Random House imprint in the U.K.Īs part of the the Mytro Project on self-publishing for the entrepreneur, I thought I’d ask him a few questions about his books, his writing, and the business of doing it yourself. His book, the Wool Omnibus, started as a novella on the Amazon Kindle Store and suddenly blossomed into a massive, multi-volume opus that is a #1 Bestseller on Amazon and the winner of Kindle Book Review’s Best Indie Book of 2012 Award. He’s been a yacht captain, a computer guy and, most recently, a bona fide publishing sensation. Hugh Howey is a best-selling Sci-Fi author with a long and interesting pedigree.
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