Hugh Howey, Revisited: "Silo" and Disrupting Entertainment

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of The Future of StoryTelling. I’m so glad to have you with me for the FoST podcast. In an industry as established and storied as publishing, it can be difficult for authors to innovate, let alone become true disruptors. However, that’s exactly what our guest today Hugh Howey has done. Starting in 2011, Hugh self-published and marketed his sci-fi novella Wool online, releasing it in serial form directly to his growing audience. What started out as a 99 cent ebook turned into a viral sensation and eventually a New York Times bestseller. Now two of Hugh’s most popular works are being turned into highly anticipated TV shows. The recently released Silo, which is based on the Wool trilogy and Beacon 23, which is coming to AMC later this year. Hugh has paved a path through what the future of publishing might look like. A future that’s more engaged with fans, more fair to authors, and all together, more creative.

Charlie Melcher:

Today on the occasion of the release of Silo’s first episodes on Apple TV, I’m excited to talk to Hugh about the unique model that he’s established for his books, the process of adapting his work to television and the new technologies that are influencing how the next generation of stories will be told. Please join me in welcoming Hugh Howey. Hugh, it’s such a delight to have you on the FoST Podcast. Welcome.

Hugh Howey:

Thanks for having me. Delighted to be here.

Charlie Melcher:

We’re meeting today to talk on the occasion of the launch of Silo. Your series of books turned into an amazing show on Apple Plus. First of all, just congratulations on that. It’s extraordinary.

Hugh Howey:

Thanks, man. You’ve kind of seen it from really early on, early days. It’s been a long, well long and strange and twisted road.

Charlie Melcher:

I want to talk more about the TV show, but I thought before we do that, it would be really fun to relive your journey as an author, how you became a novelist, a writer, how you really blew up the publishing world in figuring out how to self-publish your work. Just tell us a little bit about how you first released Wool.

Hugh Howey:

So at the time I wrote Wool and put it out on Amazon’s KDP service. I’d written five novels and another novelette, and this was just another short piece, 99 cents that I didn’t market and didn’t have much commercial potential for. And it went viral in the way a tweet can go viral or a Facebook post or something. But in this case, I started making more from a 99 cent short story than I’d made in all my writing prior to that that I was making at my day job. And within a few months, it was more than I ever thought I would make in a year, and I kept thinking the rollercoaster would stop, but it kept going. And part of that was because I started serializing the rest of the novel based off that short story, which is kind of an old tradition in science fiction. Science fiction authors used to write a lot of short stories and if one got traction they would novelize it.

Hugh Howey:

So my favorite book growing up, Ender’s Game, actually had that kind of origin story. I just kept writing and the self-published book became a New York Times bestseller. Publishers, agents, Hollywood all came at me. I said no to most of it, and that was really where things started getting weird by turning down publishers, even as the offers got into the seven figures. It allowed me and my agent to get deals that had really never been seen before where we sold print only deals for a limited term of copyrights. After five years, we would get all the rights back and get to go out again. Just got really, really interesting because we were in a powerful position which not many writers find themselves in.

Charlie Melcher:

So there’s so much you just shared. I want to unpack, as you know, I have a background in publishing myself and have always been in some ways a little bit of an outsider to the traditional publishing model as well, but the way that you went about this was just so original. I mean really disruptive. You mentioned it, you were able to do a deal where you were selling only the print rights and you were holding the electronic rights, and I think a lot of other rights too. I don’t think there had been a deal like that before you did that deal with Simon & Schuster.

Hugh Howey:

I don’t think so either. I think there were some co-publishing deals that people had done, and I think JK Rowling got lucky in that eBooks weren’t even a thing. So she still had ebook rights when Harry Potter became a phenomenon. But we kept audiobook and world rights and we were able to do individual deals wherever it made the most sense. And we still are able to do that because we keep getting the rights back and we parcel them out to who we think is the best partner in every region and every format. I think one thing we forget is that no one will ever believe in your book as much as you, the author and your hardcore fans, your agent, the people who are going to fight for you. Publisher five years later, they’re onto the next thing. They’re not going to fight for your book forever. Being able to get the rights back lets you renew that fight with the only the vigor that you can bring to it.

Charlie Melcher:

I mean so many books, they’re lucky if they get one season of support from a publishing company, if that. And then they’re just like abandoned orphan and it’s only if there’s some residual interests that they sell at all afterwards. And of course, you’re doing many things that help to support your own publishing. So tell me a little bit about how you’ve interacted with your fans and in ways that are unique.

Hugh Howey:

For me, I love interacting with my readers and in the beginning my readers were my cousin Lisa, my sister Molly, my mom, so I had to interact with them anyway. They were at Christmas, I was sharing kind of my writing journey on Facebook, which is a really huge medium for me when I was getting started. And I didn’t have fans that follow me, it was just people I knew who started reading out of curiosity. And so we would talk about things and every now and then, someone I didn’t really know would kind of appear and friend me and be part of the conversation and it just snowballed until I had this group that started calling themselves the first thousand because I got to a thousand friends on Facebook, which was bonkers to me. I didn’t have five friends in real life

Hugh Howey:

And I was like, where are these people coming from? And it was this slow accumulation and daily interactions and I had no filter. I was doing silly dances in the middle of Times Square with my sister to celebrate a thousand reviews on a book, and that was based on a dare from another reader. And I was selling signed copies right out of my living room. I would keep enough print on demand books available that people could order them over PayPal. I really wanted to have some company in this journey. I wasn’t thinking of the marketing as much as writing is very lonely, honestly. And when you could pull out of that and interact with people, friends and family and then later fans, it really keeps you motivated to write again the next day. The biggest thing for me was daily feedback was so necessary to keep me motivated to finish a book, and without that I would not have finished that novel.

Charlie Melcher:

You were turning writing into a conversation, into a two-way dialogue with readers.

Hugh Howey:

Absolutely, and that’s the way storytelling started. It started around campfires, started huddled together. And we took each other’s stories and turned them into our own, but we could feed off of the audience reaction to know how our storytelling was going. People dozing off or people getting up and walking away, or are people crowding in, they’re laughing at our jokes. We pick up on all these cues and like you said, writing kind of in the cabin in the woods, the stereotypical vision of a writer going off and doing this and then just presenting it to the world that is very new and I think it’s not as human as what we expect out of our storytelling. We only [inaudible 00:08:48] and the Odyssey because we were able to with technology later and really disseminate it. But for a long time the technology was word of mouth and by serializing my books, I’m able to have that conversation with readers during the storytelling process and I love it.

Charlie Melcher:

So I also wanted to ask, how do you think things are broken in the publishing industry? What’s wrong with traditional publishing?

Hugh Howey:

Quite a few things. I think one of the problems is the support of authors is not where I would love to see it. It’s ebbed and flowed. There have been times where publishers really believed in certain authors, and they were okay with a book selling just a few hundred or a thousand copies. And they were like, “We’re going to, the next book’s going to do a little bit better. The next book’s going to do a little bit better and we’re going to foster this relationship. They’re going to get stronger at writing. By the time they do well, we’re going to have a back list that we can pull from.” And now what I see a lot of is just falling in love with the manuscript, throwing something out there without a lot of developmental effort the way we’ve had in the past. And then if it doesn’t do well, if it misses its very narrow window, that author has a really difficult time getting another chance.

Hugh Howey:

I’m lucky that I’m in the Writer’s Guild in Hollywood for working on some TV stuff. I get some of the best healthcare imaginable through that because there’s a lot of money being made in Hollywood and they’re able to take care of their writers in a very strong union, but we have nothing like that in writing. So writers have no healthcare.

Hugh Howey:

This is a huge wake-up call for me when I was working at a bookstore is we had an amazing writer’s series and household names, New York Times bestsellers, Pulitzer Prize winners would all come and give talks and I was the guy who set up the audio equipment. So I got to be around them and talk to them and chat them up. “Hey, I’m an aspiring writer.” And they’d be like, “That’s really cool kid.” Tell me what it’s like and, “Well, it’s mostly teaching creative writing at such and such university, and I do this on the side.” They all had day jobs and this was shocking to me as someone who was hoping to support myself in my writing. And I kind of disabused myself of that notion really quickly and said, “Look, do it because you love it because no one’s making a living at this.”

Charlie Melcher:

In addition to honing your craft as a writer, you also really learned a lot about how to promote and market your own books. I mean, you were self-published. You were looking at the daily figures on Amazon, on downloads or print on demand copies. You were really learning the business side to empower your creative skills, your creative impulse.

Hugh Howey:

The great artists have that skill. They know how to make their own canvas and the way we talk about authors and what they’re supposed to know and how they’re supposed to operate, it’s like, “Look, put some words together. Give me the document and we’ll turn it into a book.” And I don’t agree with that. It took me a couple of weeks to learn how to use InDesign to lay out my own books. And a lot of writers, authors are like, “I’m an artist. I don’t do that kind of stuff.” But talk to other artists and they’re like, they know how to take care of their guitar. They know how to change a string, they know how to wax their violin. They don’t just say, “Look, I play the music. I don’t know anything about how these violins are constructed.” Why would you not want to learn the history of printing, of bookstores, of how stories came out?

Hugh Howey:

I’m a geek for all this stuff and I think passion is such a powerful tool that you can control in affecting your success. And if you don’t have that passion for this industry, your chances go way down.

Charlie Melcher:

I mean, I know you have come around so now you’ve started self-publishing or you were doing that very successfully. And you do now have a number of deals with trade houses and you also started doing your own audiobooks, but now you also work with established audio publishers. You’ve come around to find value in working with these established publishing companies. Why is that?

Hugh Howey:

Honestly, it’s because I can afford to, I no longer need to try to maximize my income and that’s been such a huge blessing. That I can do deals where I’m like, look, this will give me a different audience and help the reach in this direction even though I’ll make less money. It’s worth it just for the experience and for the product. And I think that’s what’s fun about doing yourself or being a small press or being an outsider is you get to really experiment and have fun and keep the joy in it.

Charlie Melcher:

How many books have you done now, Hugh?

Hugh Howey:

Close to 30 if I include the anthologies that I’ve edited with other people, but over 20 novels I think by myself.

Charlie Melcher:

And you go across genres, across-

Hugh Howey:

All over the place.

Charlie Melcher:

…categories. That’s not something that also most authors get the opportunity or the permission to do. Tell me a little bit about how you’re able to work across so many different genres and kinds of publishing.

Hugh Howey:

I love reading so many kinds of books. So when I think about what I want to write, I want to write a Gumshoe book [inaudible 00:14:08]. I grew up on the John D. MacDonald’s stuff. I love romances. One of my favorite novels of all time is Jane Eyre. I want to write it all. And luckily, when you are in charge of your own career, you get to do that.

Charlie Melcher:

I always used to think that it was a limitation of the thinking of publishers that they wanted to keep things in these narrow silos of types of books. And then I realized that actually the book stores are driving this because of literally having a certain number of shelves for certain types of storytelling, certain types of books. And so the bookstore was giving the feedback to the publisher, where am I putting this in the store? It’s got to go in one place in the store. And that was driving this kind of very limited set of genres and categories that was going all the way back to the creativity of the authors being pushed back onto them.

Hugh Howey:

Meanwhile, the same thing will go completely nuts on a website when someone will do the same exact kind of thing. So we know it works. What’s interesting is though with online retailers, your one book can show up on so many different shelves now. You can put four or five subcategories on a book on Amazon or the Apple book store, and suddenly it’s free shelf space. So it’s really changed the way we can market and do metadata and play around with genre mashups.

Charlie Melcher:

So I’m really interested in your creative process and how you enable an environment for your brain to allow it to come up with so many different kinds of amazing innovative stories across genres. Where’s the fuel for your creativity?

Hugh Howey:

I think it’s a combination of a few different things. One, I love to travel. I’ve figured out really young how to do that affordably. I bought a really cheap sailboat and learned the skills and just started taking it places. Unless you get to really remote places that are very different, it’s not just going from big European city to big European city where things are pretty homogenous. But living in one little Caribbean island in The Bahamas and in the Keys of, the real rural parts of Florida and all over, just start eventually all around the world. And I think travel is a great fuel for the imagination. The other is reading constantly and I really got into non-fiction. I was reading the newspaper every day. I was reading as many great non-fiction books as I could find. A lot of history, a lot of psychology and philosophy. Ideas are not my problem.

Hugh Howey:

I have more ideas for books than I’ll ever be able to write. The bigger problem is picking the idea that you want to focus on and executing on it just consistently. And that just took a lot of learning, a lot of failure to figure out how to develop a pattern of daily work so that you can get to the end of a draft.

Charlie Melcher:

You worked in a bookstore, you were also a roofer. You weren’t exactly taking on the traditional working your way up through academia or writing for a magazine. You found a different path.

Hugh Howey:

Almost no successful author works their way up through academia. It’s so rare. It’s so much more common for a Grisham to come from being a lawyer or Michael Connolly to be a beat cop. I encourage aspiring writers, if you want to be an editor, you need to go learn the ins and outs of perfecting your sentence and your grammar and all of that. If you want to be a professional writer, you need to have stories that people are interested in. And I dropped out of college and just sailed off and got a career as a yacht captain and sailed around the world on these big yachts, working for really interesting people. That prepared for me for being a writer in ways that I could never have appreciated had I not known that this is where writing comes from.

Charlie Melcher:

Your work now is in a TV series on Apple. That’s incredible. It seems like it’s one of those gold rings or an Olympic medal or something. So it’s one of those things that writers, I think particularly in science fiction, dream of, and not just getting one done, but it’s actually a really, really well done series. What’s that experience been like to see your stories, your characters brought to a screen?

Hugh Howey:

It’s insane. And like you said, it’s the miracle on miracle, on miracle to get something actually someone interested in it, to get an option, to go through the writing process, to get a green lit and then made for it to be good. Any one of those steps is so easy to mess up and almost impossible to pull off. So I’ve had almost no expectations this entire journey that something would even, would ever get made. And I’ve told people that anytime they’ve asked and when I saw that things were going to get made, I had no expectation that it was going to be any good because most things that come out are forgettable, honestly. I’ve had so low expectations going into this and we’re recording this at an interesting time for me because I think it’s in the last two days that I’ve realized this might be a big deal and it might be pretty good. Because I’ve watched the first couple episodes with people who don’t know anything about the books, know nothing about the story, and as soon as the first episode ends, they’re like, “Let’s watch the next one.”

Hugh Howey:

Are you kidding me? Come on. And while they’re watching it, they’re laughing and they’re like gasping and they’re like, what the heck? And I’m like, “Wow, they’re reacting to this way I react to my favorite show.” So it’s a little overwhelming because I’ve really been expecting this to fly under the radar, but boy, I don’t think it’s going to. When I showed up at the set for the first time outside of London and I walked in and there’s a building that’s just 200 people working construction just to build this thing out of your imagination. And I felt guilty because when my wife gets up to do something for me, I’m like, “You don’t have to do that. So sorry to put you out and to have 200 people getting up at six o’clock in the morning to go to work to make this a reality.” I was overwhelmed when I saw that.

Hugh Howey:

And that’s when it really hit me like, oh my God, something incredible is starting to happen here. And so I’m watching them build this stairwell, which is this central, literally central iconic feature of the story. It’s like the DNA that coils in the middle of the story. While we’re just chatting, I’m just helping them put steps in place and they’re massive, these things. But every time I would come back to that set over the year that we filmed, I always just look at that step, which is now covered in concrete and worn and painted and dressed to look like the old silo. And I’ll never forget just sticking that in and helping build this thing and chatting with the people who did all that hard work.

Charlie Melcher:

And how do you feel about the creative liberties that have to get taken and it’s part of a translation act from a novel to a TV show. Is that uncomfortable for you or did you appreciate the craft of it?

Hugh Howey:

I’m the opposite. I was uncomfortable with how closely they were [inaudible 00:21:37] to the source material. So when I was in the writer’s room and we were laying out the structure, I was like, “Hey, let’s do this. I’ve got a better idea. That was 10 years ago, I had these ideas, let’s do this.” And they kept saying, “Ah, let’s stick to the book.” They kept pulling me back. So I think that’s been refreshing for the people I’ve worked with. When I first met with the executives at 20th Century Fox back when this was going to be a Ridley Scott, Steve’s Alien feature, they pulled me out to Hollywood to have this meeting and two minutes into the meeting I was like, “You guys should take as many liberties as you want. Do whatever you want with the story.” And they just laughingly said, “Well, that’s it. That’s the end of the meeting.”

Hugh Howey:

Because that’s all they wanted was to have you out to see how much of a pain in as you were going to be. And we’ve adapted Beacon 23 for TV, which is going to come out later this year, and Zach Penn who, amazing writer and showrunner, wanted to make these huge changes, and when I heard him, I was like, that is so good. I’m going to go back and change the book to match that. I can’t believe I didn’t come up with that myself. So I’m that way. I think storytelling should be collaborative and people should bring their energy in, but I do think the story should be as good as possible. So when there are things that I’m like, can we make this better? It’s not because I’m too wed to the story. It’s just, I’m a lover of good storytelling and I’m bored of bad storytelling. So when I’m pushing back, it’s always because I feel like we can do an even better job at this.

Charlie Melcher:

So now that you’re looking from the other side of this, right, where you’ve had a TV show that’s come out and you’ve gotten to go through that process. How does that influence or weave its way back into your writing?

Hugh Howey:

Where I’m writing now, I can feel the challenges that adapting this would cause, the CGI on this would kill your budget. This is too many locations. They’re going to have to combine these or these two characters will probably consolidate, but it doesn’t change what I write. Again, even though things have been made, I assume that we will get no more seasons of anything and that no shows will ever get green lit again. So I’m not going to write a book thinking like, “Oh, this could be the next big hit show.” That’s just not likely. So take what you can get and be happy for it. The books I have complete control over, I know they’re going to be out there and at least one person’s going to read them. And I’m interested in giving that one person the best story that I could possibly provide them. And if I just concentrate on that, that I can control that, then everything else will just happen as it happens.

Charlie Melcher:

So now that you understand what your scenes cost, it’s not going to stop you from being expansive in the stories that you write. It’s not going to creep in a little bit?

Hugh Howey:

Not at all, because I’ll tell you, production costs are going to go to zero in our lifetimes, probably in the next five years. I’m in some really early betas of some text to video technology, where you can just write what you want and it creates amazing video. So I’ve been playing with the text to image stuff for a year and a half now in the really early betas of that. So before Midjourney was on anyone’s lips, I was staying up all night creating images, and I’ve been in early betas of text generation stuff. This is part of the advantage of writing sci-fi as you get to hang out with some pretty geeky people. We’re really close to just if you have a favorite book, hit a button, send it to a program, and then you can, do you want to watch it animated? What actors do you want to be in it? I know that sounds bonkers, but it’s already here. It just needs to get a little bit better before it’s consumer grade.

Charlie Melcher:

So you might be just releasing your own movies very soon.

Hugh Howey:

I think everyone is going to release their own movies in a way that we can’t imagine. When we see what kids are doing with Minecraft and Roblox and how they can generate their own entertainment, there’s joy in that. It’s what Tinkertoys and Lincoln Logs and Lego have figured out. Don’t just get people toys, give them the engines for creating their own toys. And the challenge is going to be who’s going to be the creators in a world where we’re all creators, we’re all going to be consuming our own and each other’s content. And I think it’s super exciting, but the world that we’ve lived in the past, we’re a handful of storytellers with big budgets, including in publishing. We’re the purveyors of story. That is going to be a blip in human history, and we’re at the very end of that small bubble.

Charlie Melcher:

My real hope, and I’d love your thoughts on this, is that as these tools continue to get better and more powerful and more democratized, less expensive, as you said. It’s going to cost very little or nothing to create your own film. That it might actually create a renaissance in imagination. That it might empower everyone, almost everyone, to be able to tell their story, to create stories, to see that the quality of your storytelling is one of the ways that you might differentiate yourself in your social life, in your community. I’m hopeful that we’re no longer going to be training people to work on assembly lines, but we’re going to be training people to bring out their most creative selves.

Hugh Howey:

I think so too. I think a lot of things that I did not think would happen in my lifetime are now inevitable, and one of those is reordering society around a post-work economy. I thought that was hundreds of years out. Now I think it’s probably 30 max and maybe sooner. We’re really close to a general intelligence that qualifies as AGI. I think we might already be there, but we’re just running out of room to push the goalposts further back. But right now we’re just inching it back as much as we can. But just in the last week we’ve got types of ChatGPT plugins that are allowing feedback loops where the chat has access to its own memory, it can direct itself, it can learn, and it’s access to the web. And now it’s doing things like you can just say, make me a video game and it will do most of the work and reiterate and debug and give itself tasks.

Hugh Howey:

It’s just really incredible how quickly things are changing. And I think as we automate more and more work, we’re all going to have to find entertainment jobs and look at how many people are employed in the video game industry, TV, Hollywood, the music industry. These are not essential jobs in the old definition, but they’re becoming essential in our new definition, which is self-actualization, creativity, entertaining each other, feeling value and celebrating a different kind of work. It’s a move towards 100% unemployment that I think we should celebrate rather than fear, and that’s going to be our next big challenge, and it’s going to impact the entertainment industry in ways that we can’t possibly appreciate right now.

Charlie Melcher:

What advice does that leave you with for young storytellers?

Hugh Howey:

I think the fostering creativity is still the most important thing. I think right now people are saying you need to learn how to talk to AIs and be a prompt engineer, but that skill’s going to go away. We won’t need to tell it how to do things. So these systems are going to get so much smarter that what’s going to be left is how the human can be quirky. I think computers are, right now they seem quirky because they fail, but they’re eventually going to get so good that they’re just precise and accurate. They’re already grammatically perfect. I just joked on Twitter today that, what word are you going to purposefully misspell so people can tell that it’s you? What grammatical errors are you going to introduce to your writing? And I was messing up the tweet on purpose to show an example. But I think our ability to be wrong in interesting ways is going to be something to embrace and develop in a future where machines are getting most things right.

Charlie Melcher:

Really interesting and very thoughtful. Hugh, thank you so much for spending this time with me. Frankly, I could spend the whole day speaking with you. It’s always so fun and I learn a ton, and it’s an honor to get to spend this time with you. So thank you.

Hugh Howey:

Same, I feel the same way. Thanks for the conversation.

Charlie Melcher:

My warm thanks again to Hugh Howey for joining me on today’s podcast. To learn more about his books and to watch Silo, which I highly recommend, please see the links in this episode’s description below. And thank you as well for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider subscribing to the FoST podcast and leaving us a positive review wherever you get your podcasts. You can also learn more about our other activities and become part of the FoST community by signing up for our free monthly newsletter at fost.org. The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partner, Charts and Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.