From Indie Author to TV Phenomenon | Hugh Howey on "Silo" and Self-Publishing Success

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0:42And hiring doesn't have to be complicated. Realistically, when you have a business to run, you don't want to spend hours on hiring. You want to hire the right person as quickly as possible. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests immediately 25 great big candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Altature, then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find the top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash Altature. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

1:24Have you seen the excellent TV series Silo on Apple Plus? It's a science fiction series. I won't describe anything more about it, but I love it. My whole family loves it. And I am glad to have the writer and creator of the initial novel of the series, Hugh Howey, on the podcast today. I've known Hugh for about a decade. Amazon, about a decade ago, flew Hugh, me, and a bunch of other self-published writers who were doing very well with self-publishing, flew us out to Santa Monica. We all had dinner. We all talked about writing and publishing. and the next day Jeff Bezos showed us all a Kindle Fire.

2:02He launched a Kindle Fire that day and it was a fun time. I got to know Hugh, came on the podcast in 2014. Hugh has such a great story. He was initially just working in bookstores and he was a roofer and he worked on boats. He was writing science fiction novel after science fiction novel and other novels as well. And just like I found when I self-published Choose Yourself, he found when he self-published Wool, which eventually became the TV series Silo, he found this is the way to go. And we describe why in the podcast, but we talk about writing, self-publishing, science fiction, the TV series Silo and TV in general, optimism versus pessimism, AI, and so many other interesting things.

2:46He's a very smart guy filled with wisdom. Here's Hugh Howey.

2:55this isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host this is the james altucher show so q i'm just curious and i was thinking this as i was watching silo at what point when When you first watched, you probably watched many iterations of the first show, but when did you feel, oh, I'm in really good hands. They're going to take care of this story. It was actually on the set. First of all, I visited the set where they were shooting in London. We watched a take and I looked at the folks around me, the writer on set who was Eric that day and the director and the DP. And they all looked at each other with kind of wide eyes.

3:47and then Eric looked at me, and he was like, whoa, this is good. And these guys have all worked on really big stuff, and you have a hard time telling from performances and dailies and even the final cuts without all the CGI and the music and the sound. All that stuff adds so much to it, but these guys could tell just from the takes that they were getting that day that something special was happening, and that was the first time I thought, man, if these guys are impressed, then something nice can come from this. I mean, and I'm not going to give away any spoilers or anything, but really right in the first few minutes, I started wondering about this question because it was just beautiful, just the world creation.

4:29And it's so believable, and all the characters seem so fleshed out. Yeah, I mean, no one's just reading lines here. Everyone got so into it. Morton told him we got an Oscar-caliber film director to shoot the pilot, and he read the book, and he just fell in love with the story. and he and I would just geek out. He was so passionate about it. And so he would go to every single department and check what they were doing and say, no, these are the materials they would use. And we need to rethink this logo design and what kind of furniture design would they use? He got so into the details, as you should as a director.

5:04And Graham Yost, the showrunner, was the same. He was totally involved in all the character motivations and what was really happening. and then that really went down to Rebecca who dove into her character David and Rashida. Everyone was reading the books and the scripts and there's a level of commitment and involvement that was really exciting to watch. And if I remember, this was like an accidental series in some sense. I remember reading initially Wool, which if you don't realize it was a collection of books. Now it's one book, but it was really like you made Wool 1. There was like Wool 1 through 4, I think.

5:41I forget how many were in that first quote-unquote series, which is now a book called Silo, and which became a TV show. But the first Wool, you intended that as a one-off. You didn't even know there was going to be like a series, but then everybody was writing in. I mean, it's got 37 ,000 reviews. So everyone was writing in. So you said, oh, okay, I'll just continue this story. That's exactly what happened. I had the idea as a novel, but I was so busy with other books that I had just a handful of people wanting sequels. And that was all the demand I had at the time. So I was just writing more books in that series, but I had these other novels I wanted to get out.

6:19And I'd written a novelette called The Plagiarist. It kind of fell in love with this 15 ,000 word kind of link. It's about a 50 page book, which you can't market in the old world, but with the Kindle and print on demand, it doesn't matter how long something is. You know, you can, you could publish a haiku if you want. you know, the challenge is getting someone to read it or pay for it or recommend it to others. And so I took the idea of this novel and condensed it down into a much shorter story, published it for 99 cents on the Kindle store and completely forgot about it. I went back to writing my next novel.

6:53And that was the story that I don't know how to explain it. You know, there's a lot of luck involved. It's like, why does one Facebook post go viral and another one not? Yes, there's a lot of unpredictability in that. But would you agree? I kind of advise people who are writing that actually quantity is more important than quality. It really is. I'm not saying there's any, I've read a lot of your books and it's all high quality, but you have to put a lot out there because there's so much unpredictability in everything we do and there's so much competition. But if you do put a lot out there, something's going to hit.

7:30Every published work is a lottery ticket. But sitting at home and putting wax and polishing your single lottery ticket to make it the most beautiful lottery ticket possible doesn't really increase your odds as much as trying to get 20 lottery tickets out there. To your point, the quality has to be good. But I see people taking that first book they write and rewriting it, rewriting it, and polishing it, and promoting it, and trying to get something to take hold. And the time would be better spent hitting publish, forgetting about it, write the next thing. You're going to get better. You're going to find your voice.

8:04You're going to experiment with different genres. You'll find a character that right now doesn't exist because you're not giving them a chance to come to life. So yeah, I've always said that to people. Like the best marketing, the best promotion is publishing your next story. I want to get into the self-publishing and how you kind of started out because it's such this indie, almost Quentin Tarantino-ish type of story. But I just want to mention one of my favorite novels by you. who I think you wrote this maybe before, was Hurricane. Yeah. It's just about this teenage boy stuck in a hurricane, so he has no access to social media.

8:42And then what happens to him? And I just thought it was a very beautiful story. Thanks, man. You were working in a bookstore, right? And then you started writing and self-publishing books. Yeah, I've worked in bookstores since college, but after I spent a bit of my 20s, basically working on yachts and doing a lot of sailing and serving as a captain on big powerboats. And when I got out of that, I finally started getting some novels finished. And I was doing a signing for my very first novel at a bookstore, and the manager was looking for a part-time help. And it seemed like a perfect gig to allow me to have time to write and to be plugged into the industry.

9:21But I wasn't really thinking about making a living at it. I was just super excited to be writing things to the conclusion and having a handful of eager readers. Since I worked at the bookstore, I could like shelve my books with the other books and just have them sitting on the shelf in one bookstore. And that was it. That's how it all started. I had this kind of daily routine of writing and working in the bookstore and publishing. And when you say publishing, you were self-publishing on Amazon. That's actually how you and I met. It was Amazon flew a bunch of self-published writers out to Santa Monica and we all had dinner.

9:56And then Jeff Bezos launched the Kindle Fire. but you were a big proponent of self-publishing right from the beginning. And what were your initial thoughts on it? Like a lot of people at that time, this is like 2012, 2011, 2013. At that time, there was still, I don't think it exists now. It still exists a little bit. There was a stigma to self-publishing, kind of like vanity publishing, even though it's not that at all. Yeah, it's changed a lot, boy, since you and I met. I think my first self-published book was like 2009, maybe. The Kindle had just come out like the year before. KDP was really brand new.

10:33And it's just, again, more luck. I was just starting to publish at a time when these tools were becoming available. My first book got picked up by a small press. So I tried the traditional route on a small scale. And the tools they used to publish were tools that were available to anybody. So with the second book, I just decided to do it on my own. I never really looked back. My initial thoughts about self-publishing were I had no idea. I was asking people on forums, what do you guys think about that? And everyone tried to make it as a writer on these traditional writing forums said, it'd be the death of my career.

11:06Don't do it. You're an idiot. Real authors don't do this. You need a query. You need to get an agent. My publisher, my first book, when I wrote them asking to buy the rights back and told them I was going to publish on my own, they said, this would be the end of your career. It's a huge mistake. So I didn't have anyone telling me this was a good idea. Nobody. And that's why when I started having some success, my publishing career was half of what I was doing. The other half was me encouraging people and telling them like, look, you might not make a living at this and you have to get lucky, but there's nothing stopping you.

11:40Like the things that people say can never happen, all that's untrue. And those things are also unlikely if you try to go the traditional route. So I really wanted to help lower that stigma and get more people to publish rather than frustrate themselves with all the gatekeepers or learning how to write a query letter and all the other like really crazy obstacles around publishing. Yeah, and look, I don't want to put down the publishing industry, but when you say, okay, if someone says, oh, mainstream publishing is the only way to go, those people who are picking and choosing books, they're no better or worse than anybody.

12:17They're just readers like everyone else. So why not let the readers decide by just uploading your book to Amazon? And it's not just a Kindle book. It's a paperback, hardcover, audio book. It could look like every other book. No one knows the difference. Yeah, exactly. And no one asked you, like, has anyone ever asked you, hey, man, who was your publisher? Well, you know, it's funny, even beyond that, publishers think that readers care about imprints. And, you know, agents and authors and people in publishing, they care about, like, you know, who the imprints are within publishers. And they think it's super important.

12:48But readers just don't know and don't care. Like, is the story good? They care about cover art. I think a lot of self-published books, my early books included, really shoot themselves in the foot with really bad cover art. Yeah. So there are things in the packaging that are really important that publishers can help with. But what I heard were like, here are the things that are not possible if you self-publish. You'll never get into bookstores, which once we'll took off, it hit the New York Times list as a self-published book, and Barnes & Noble was stocking it, which was insane insane because this was like printed by Amazon and they were stocking it simply because there were enterprising bookstore managers who were sick of the 10th person that day saying, you know, do you have this book?

13:31And you don't want to just say like, go buy it on Amazon. They could buy the print on demand version and make a couple of bucks or they could make no bucks, you know? So there were all these things that were supposedly impossible. Like, you know, you'll never get a film deal. You'll never land an agent. You'll never get reviewed in a, serious paper or magazine. Like all the things you couldn't do. And what I realized looking around is that no one had even tried these things. That everyone had believed all the naysayers. And so it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. If everyone says you can't do it, no one tries.

14:02And then of course no one does it. I found that along the way that agents and publishers now almost look at the self-published books as sort of, that's where they're finding their books. Like agents contacted me after I started self-publishing because then they see what sells. Yeah. It's the slush pile. What's funny is that was one of the questions I asked. There was a forum back in the day called Absolute Write. I'm not sure if they're still around or not. But it was a place to go for really terrible writing advice because everything they told me was the opposite of what happened. And really early on, I said exactly what you discovered.

14:37I was like, you know, I think eventually self-publishing is going to be a place where agents will go to find talent because these are people proving that they're going to work hard. They're going to finish what they start. they have some publishing acumen and all these other things and they can read samples for free. And everyone, I actually got like so bullied for the, for putting that out there that, and trying to defend myself. They just like, like, you're not welcome here anymore. Like, this is too heretical. And it was one of the best things that ever happened to me actually was getting, you know, kind of seeing how vehemently, passionately wrong people could be.

15:15It really liberated me and allowed me to try things I think that I wouldn't have tried otherwise. If people would have been a little less ugly about their pronouncements. And you know, it also allows you to get to what we were earlier talking about, about quantity. Like you can't, if you're publishing a book every two years with this mainstream publisher, you're never going to get quantity. But if you could, you know, write a book in a few months and then put it out there, you can start the next book and so on. Totally. You know, people don't realize Fifty Shades of Grey was originally self-published before it was picked up.

15:45Yeah, it blew up. And well, there were quite a few, like The Martian started as serialized on Andy Ware's blog. You know, now I think that's why the stigma is falling. Now it's not just you can point to one person and say, look, here's the exception. Now success is happening from all kinds of places. There are people who get deals because of their blogs or their Twitter feeds, or it's just, we're looking for entertainment. We're not looking for people who survived a very specific path.

16:24Look, as a manager of people, as an employer, as an entrepreneur, and as even an investor in startups, I can tell you the most important thing for your business is the quality of the people you hire. The best part is that great candidates are already on LinkedIn. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. And I will tell you that the great thing about LinkedIn is that you're not just looking at random people. You're able to see the people who your friends and trusted peers and colleagues, who they trust and who they've hired in the past and who they recommend.

17:06And hiring doesn't have to be complicated. Realistically, when you have a business to run, you don't want to spend hours on hiring. You want to hire the right person as quickly as possible. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests immediately 25 great fit candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature, then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs new AI Assistant, making it easier and faster to find the top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash altature. post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

18:09books. Yeah, well, I was actually approached by someone who's a data scientist who was also trying to figure out how to publish his first novel in order to make a decision. He realized, like I did, there was really no good advice out there, no strong data. So he created a spider that crawled the entire Amazon book listings. It used each URL for recommended books to crawl the entire catalog. He could use data pulled from the book listing pages to figure out who published it, where was price, what its ranking was, and then polled a bunch of authors to figure out, okay, because he could even poll, like I had a number one bestselling book on Amazon for a while and I could tell him like, here's how much you have to sell in a week to reach that ranking.

18:52And it creates a very beautiful logarithmic curve of sales to rank. So he was able to figure out how much each of these books was earning, who they were published by, and then combine them into cohorts. and the self-publishing cohort was out-earning any of the major publishers. You can really get grander with what that means because there's a lot more self-published books. There's tons of ways to interpret the data. But the one thing that we were hearing was that no one was making a living with self-published books and we're able to point to people. And now we know. We know people on YouTube. There are people making tens of millions of dollars a year reviewing toys on YouTube and doing things that just don't sound like they'd be profitable.

19:37Yeah. And that's because it's all happening kind of behind the scenes. And he helped uncover that. And I was just there to host the data and help him interpret it and try to use my limited soapbox to give it a broader audience. And then, you know, after Wool became such a big hit, one of the number one science fiction books of all time, you know, many people were referring to it as, when did the idea of, I know initially you were thinking of it in terms of making a movie, and Ridley Scott approached you. What was the story there? Like how did the journey towards Silo, the TV show, begin? I started getting, I think the first person to reach out about the option had happened before the book was even complete.

20:18It was like after part three was out or something. Someone from BBC America reached out and said, hey, I want to option this. And that was interesting to me because it wasn't even finished. But once I got an agent, Kristen Nelson, she linked me up with her LA co-agent, the person who does all the book adaptations, Cassie Ewashefsky, who's huge in book-to-film adaptations. She did all the Twilight books and big successes in that realm. She sent it around, and there was all this hype because it hit the New York Times list as a self-published book. They're writing about it everywhere. And it was going to go to auction.

20:53Had some major producers interested. And Ridley Scott and Steve Zalian came in and said, we don't want this to go to auction. We want to preempt it. And made a great offer. with 20th Century Fox backing them. And it's just like too good to be true. Like I assumed nothing would ever get made. And I thought, well, if I can throw Ridley's name around, it'll help with book sales. It'll help with foreign deals. Like that's a guarantee. And so I kind of took the guarantee rather than take a chance with some producers who probably had a better chance of it getting made. Can you say what happened? Yeah, they had it for like five years.

21:28They had the ability to renew it as often as they wanted. And every time they renewed it, you know they'd have another director another script written each time it came up for renewal I just kept asking like hey if it's not going to get made this year I'd love to have the rights back they didn't have to do that they could have either paid the purchase price which wasn't a godly sum of money or they could have optioned it indefinitely and waited until the right time but to their credit I mean I love these guys I had a really good relationship with all the people involved on those teams and they really felt like they wanted to see this made too and if they were going to do it, they were willing to let me have the rights back.

22:03So amazing move on their part. When the rights came back, my team of agents and I just had conversations. Do we want to go the film route again, or do we want to try TV? At the time, TV was becoming the prestige thing it is now. And there's more money in film. You can earn percentage of the back end and all kinds of stuff if it gets big. But I've never made decisions based on money, really. Especially at this point in my career. I didn't have to worry about that. So I was like, look, let's do TV. I think we'll make a better product if it's done well. We can expand the story instead of truncating it.

22:39And so we took it out and Amazon, AMC, and Apple both were really interested. And it came down to those three parties. And I ended up going with AMC because Apple didn't even have a service out yet. I was having to sign NDAs to even discuss this with them. It was all super secret at the time. But they never gave up. Kept calling AMC and saying, hey, how are you guys doing with this? Can we partner? Can we partner? And AMC finally asked me like, hey, what do you think about combining forces? And I was like, let's do it. And that's the deal we have now. Like AMC helped all the story development in the writer's room and get the show going.

23:15And Apple came in and said, we want to create this and we want it on our channel. And I got kind of the best of both worlds. So how does it work? You mentioned how people don't make as much money in TV as movies. And it used to be the TV model. Everybody would make money because of syndication. So if a show ran for five seasons, then lesser known channels or local channels would buy the rights in that area for the show and air it at 5 p.m. forever. And the actors would make money every time the show aired. With these streaming networks, that just doesn't happen anymore. So what is the model of TV now?

23:49I have no clue. I have no clue either. It's so weird because they don't share data. This is true, I think, of all the big tech streamers like Netflix and Amazon and Apple. We don't know Nielsen ratings on any of this stuff. We see their rankings on what's hot, but it's all relative. There's no objective measure of how many people are tuning in. So you don't get paid per view like on YouTube or Spotify. It's kind of a one-time fee, and that's it pretty much. different studios are trying to do things to incentivize and but the way it looks to me it's the top showrunners the people who have all-around deals make these mega blockbuster deals and everyone else is just kind of fighting for whatever they can get with each which the each individual deal and that's what a lot of the writer's strike right now is trying to deal with because like there's so much confusion right now how to make a living at this and people trying to sort that out.

24:47But the flip side is, I would think there's like thousands and thousands of shows now. And like, as opposed to like, when we were all kids, there were four shows. It seems like every writer and actor must have a job now, but it's just not true. Like, how come everybody's not acting in a, everybody who wants to be an actor should be able to get a job. And that doesn't seem to be the case. Like, are there more actors than we all thought? But yeah, I think so. And And also, you know, the actors who are popular get all the roles. You know, it's amazing. You can shoot three films and be in, you know, in a year and be in two TV shows concurrently.