Hugh Howey: Author, Storyteller, and Dreamer

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I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable people. This episode's Remarkable guest is Hugh Howey. Hugh is a very successful science fiction author. He said he had two to write a novel and to sail around the world. To put it mildly, he has realized both his dreams. His first published work, Wool, was a dystopian novella that he wrote while working as a bookstore clerk at Appalachian State University. This was in 2011. The first wool story was approximately 12,500 words long and he sold it for 99 cents. After several months he was selling 1,000 copies per month. Spurred on by this success, he wrote four more wool stories and was soon selling 20 to 30,000 copies per month of the five story series. In a whopper of an understatement, this enabled him to quit his bookstore job. Recently, Apple began adapting the book to an Apple TV series. He was much more than a successful author. He helped to change the publishing business by achieving his success as a self published author through Amazon.com's Kindle Direct Publishing program. This means that he didn't use a traditional publisher. He wrote the book, uploaded it to Amazon, and collected a far larger percentage of the revenue. He is an inspiration to anyone who can't get a book deal. If you know anyone who thinks they have a book in them, be sure to forward this episode. It will save many hours of effort, angst and expense trying to play the traditional game of publishing. This episode of Remarkable People is brought to you by Remarkable, the Paper Tablet company. Yes, you got that right. Remarkable is sponsored by Remarkable. I have version two in my hot little hands and it's so good. A very impressive upgrade. Here's how I use 1. Taking notes while I'm interviewing a podcast guest. 2. Taking notes while being brief about speaking gigs. 3. Drafting the structure of keynote speeches. 4. Storing manuals for the gizmos that I buy. 5. Roughing out drawings for things like surfboards, surfboard sheds, and office layouts. 6. Wrapping my head around complex ideas with Diagrams and flowcharts. This is a remarkably well thought out product. It doesn't try to be all things to all people, but it takes notes better than anything I've used. Check out the recent reviews of the latest version. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is remarkable people. And now here's the remarkable Hugh Howey. Do you think it's ironic or logical that a bookstore employee achieve success with self publishing in the ebook format? I. E. Selling a book not through the bookstores?

I think it's 100% logical because everything I learned about what's wrong with the publishing industry that made me want to self publish, I learned from working at a bookstore. I'll tell you two main things that really jump out at me and jumped out at me then and jump out of me now. And one was seeing that a brand new book might sit on a shelf for six months and then disappear. If it didn't sell, it got returned to the publisher and it never got another chance. You had a six month window to achieve success and if you didn't write the right kind of story at the right time, like vampires, when vampires were hot, the werewolves were hot. If you didn't nail it, you were SOL for the rest of that book's existence. The publisher would never give that book a second chance. So with self publishing, your book is available forever and it can sit there and wait for the market to come around to it or develop a slow following. So that was one reason that I was really kind of scared of traditionally publishing my works. The other one that jumped out at me was meeting a whole bunch of authors who had come to talks at our university where my bookstore is located. And I would get to talking to them. And they all had second jobs, New York Times bestselling authors, household names. Very few of them could support themselves the writing. And so I realized like, you know, names that I recognize and have won awards, they're lucky if they turn out one book every two or three years and they might get a 50,000, maybe $100,000 advance for that book. That's not a, that's not a living. Yeah, they're not getting health benefits. Authors are terribly paid. It's only the big name, the handful of the people at the very top that are making a fortune. So I realized my books weren't going to get much chance and if they sold, I wasn't going to make much money. And that made the decision to self publish quite easy for me.

And basically you never look back. But wasn't wool your seventh book? It Took a while, right?

Yeah, yeah. I went into it though, really thinking of it as a marathon. My first book was with a small press and I was kind of in between self publishing and a big traditional publisher. They had these small publishers that pay you peanuts, but at least it's not like a vanity press. Like you're not paying your own money, they're paying you and they're covering all the cost of production and editing and cover art. And then after that I did not look back, I did not think about traditional publishers. I just was happy to write a book and within 24 hours of having all the edits done, it would be available to readers. And I was having direct relationships with the readers and chatting with them and building up a, a small following. And yeah, I wasn't concerned with like making a million bucks off my first book. I was concerned with trying to write maybe over a 10 year period trying to write like 20 books. And, and I thought it would take that long to see if I was any good at this or not.

I've been traditionally published, I've been self published or I have self published. And there are so many advantages to self publishing. But, but most first time authors have it stuck in their head that they're going to write this amazing proposal and New York is going to fall over itself because they've never heard of a book like this. And then next thing you're on Oprah.

And yep, I remember thinking that like it was a buried thought. But I remember when I wrote my first book I was like, Oprah's probably going to be interested in this. I need to figure out how to. But that was another thing I learned from the bookstore is how many books are published. We would get these catalogs to order the books from and we would only order a fraction of what's in the catalog. And this was like quarterly. We would get these calendars that are like phone books full of all the books that just got released. And, and those were the books that made it out of the slush pile or made it out of the agent's hands. And those were the books that made out of the slush pile. So every one of these gatekeepers was winnowing it down by factor of 10x to 100x. And even when it got to me at the bookstore, I wasn't ordering every book in the catalog. I was only ordering a handful of them. The chances of making it that route is just astronomical. And I think people who aren't aware of how many books are being produced and how many Manuscripts are going to. Agents think that what they wrote is really unique and it's usually not. There's plenty of books that could fill that void.

I straddle two industries, both book publishing and high tech entrepreneurship, venture capital. And the same is true in high tech venture capital. People think that they have this widget, this idea that venture capitalists are just going to jump up and down and ask for wiring instructions after five minutes in a pitch and they don't understand how it's such rarefied air there that a venture capitalist, an active venture capitalist, might do 10, 15 deals a year having looked at 10,000, and they just don't get it.

A lot of those ideas overlap. I, I have a friend who's a full time inventor. Like all he does is invent stuff. He's got a couple hundred patents. And I had this idea of a luxury vehicle should have little cameras looking forward and adaptive shocks to smooth out bumps predicting when they would get there. And so you could just go over a bumpy road and it would be like you're on air. And I sent him this whole proposal. I'm like, we should patent this. He was like, oh yeah, that's been patent. And Mercedes is working it into there. This was a while back. Yeah. And all these car manufacturers are working it into their technology, their high end stuff. So a lot of it comes from people not being aware of how people are having the same idea or that it's already been done.

I think you're brave to say this kind of stuff because most people won't admit this, that how hard it is and what the likelihood and how much luck plays into it and all this kind of stuff.

I think it takes courage to say I'm a genius. And I'm like, I did all this on my own. Like that's brave to put yourself out there. For me, the humility is much closer to the honesty. I was at a dinner with a bunch of tech people once and one of the guys there is a multi, multi billionaire. And everyone just thinks of this guy is super brilliant, successful. And I was shocked that he had read one of my blog posts and he said, you know, I read somewhere that you attributed at least half of your career to luck. And I, I really respected you from when I read that because I know that most of my career is luck as well. And it was really humbling to hear that someone that I would have assumed would have had that kind of CEO sociopathy, you know, the narcissism that you often see, the thing that they said that really stuck with me was that trust. Anyone who's had success, who doesn't attribute a lot of it to luck, that that's kind of like a hallmark for whether or not they want to have a conversation with the person. I think if anyone says, I can control this, here's another thing I learned from the book publishing world and working in bookstores. You cannot manufacture success. You can't prime the pumps, you can't pay for it. There's. You can't fake your way to a bestseller because I watched Random House spend a million dollars promoting a book and watched it flop. And so I took that experience into talking to traditional publishers when they were like, we're going to spend $100,000 on marketing. We're going to do this, we're going to do that. Man, I've been on the other side of that before where they sent me the big cardboard stand that goes in the bookstore. People have to like, yeah, that. People have to walk around. You put it right in the middle of the aisle. It's just full of hardbacks. And people would walk right around that to go get something that no one thought was going to be successful. And so I just never trusted anyone who thought that with skill and ingenuity alone, they could appeal to the fickle public. No one knows what the public wants.

A pessimistic or negative view of what you just said is there's no way to determine your own fate or at least enhance your fate. It's just dumb luck.

Enhance it for sure.

How?

You can 100% enhance it. You can produce work that's as free of error as possible. So if you're self publishing, get it edited. Typos and egregious mistakes will pull even a dedicated fan out of a story. So you got to make sure the polish is there. You got to tell engaging stories. You got to know what. What stories people want to hear. You need to study story so that you understand that your character has to be an agent of change in the plot and not just a vehicle through which the plot takes place. And they have to. They have to change themselves because of the events. They have to struggle. A lot of people want to write kind of fantasy fiction, and I don't mean the genre. I mean the fantasy of everything that protagonist needs, they get. And everything the plot needs happens in a perfect, linear fashion. And that's the first way that we all write our stories. We write them very lazily. The protagonist doesn't really have a past because it hasn't been written it's not imagined. So they don't have an ex lover that they're thinking about. They don't have a job, usually. There's nothing in their pockets. They don't have a middle name. Like all these. All the details that are true in the real world, like beginning writers don't often put in their characters. So that's just like one of a million technique things that I could tell you you have to learn in order to increase your chances in the world of fiction.

How do you keep all that stuff straight? Do you have a little cheat sheet that says, all right, So I said this is his middle name, this is where he went to school, and so that it's consistent through the book. Or do you just remember?

No, I do make notes, but like, only things for, like names, like proper nouns. But for most things, you have to ask questions of your characters in your story and make up the answer pretty quickly. And the key is to remember which questions to ask. You'll notice the weather doesn't change a lot. In a lot of very beginning basic fiction, people never eat. They never go to the bathroom. That's not the story that a lot of authors want to tell. They want to tell the story of the kid who finds the sword and slays the dragon. And it's just those bits. And they don't remember the confusion of puberty. They don't remember the way they got the scar on their elbow, you know, from when they were eight and did some stupid thing. So it's not just like keeping up with them. It's creating the chaos, yourself as the author, in order to make all this believable and real and rich and vibrant. And that means observing the world around you in your own life and trying to take as much detail from that into your story so that it all makes sense, you know, and having believable relationships. And I think all of that's critical. I think if you look at the successful fiction, you'll see that it has those elements in it.

I can tell you, as someone who's only written business books, that it sounds much harder to write fiction than business books.

No way, dude. Because I can't be wrong, especially if you're writing science fiction. I had a science fiction story that had I mentioned a coffee shop in Washington, D.C. and some reader emailed me and said, that coffee shop is not where you said it was. And I emailed them back and said, yeah, they moved in like 2028. What are you telling me? Like, I. It's my world. Don't Tell me where that coffee shop is. They shut down, they expand it. Make up your own world if you want that coffee shop to be. You know, I was wrong, of course. Like, I had screwed up, but, like, the beauty of it being my world is I have an excuse for everything. I think the best research tool authors have ever been handed is Street View by Google. I use it all the time. Authors used to have to travel to the places that they were writing about to try to get the feel of it. Yeah, but if your story's jumping between cities, you can drop into Vegas and go down the strip and like, yep, just see this, the, all this, the concrete jungle and strip malls that lay outside of it. And yeah, I think tools like that have really helped.

One of my friends and past guests on this podcast is Paul Theroux, so I'm going to ask him. So Paul, are using Google Street View, you don't have to travel anymore. You can just use Google Street View and write your travel books. Life is good.

Don't screw it, because he's probably getting everything compeder. I'm gonna get him in trouble.

Yeah, every, every novel set in the Maldives.

Yeah. All mine are based in Tahiti now.

Mine are based in a closet in Santa Cruz. While we're in this tactical level, can you just explain how you write? Time of day setting, computer, longhand software, what's the tools that Hugh uses?

I use a MacBook Air, and it doesn't matter where I am. I can get some writing done. I, I, I write better in the morning and I edit better later. First thing in the morning, before breakfast, before coffee or exercise or anything. I start writing because my brain's a little mushy still, you know, and things aren't concrete, and so I can kind of tap into a more, a more poetic side of my brain. And then later in the day, everything's starting to get a little more solidified and, and, you know, logical. And that's when I'm better at going over and correcting the nonsense that I wrote in the morning. And the combination of those two times of day, I think generate the best drafts for me.

Let's say you go through the whole day. Is what you wrote for the day basically done, or do you go over it over and over and over and over again?

I go over it a bunch. I just finished a book a couple of months ago, a sequel to sand, and I think it was version 15 was what I handed in. And so every time I do a full pass, I save a copy and number it it's like starting with a tree covered in bark and getting it down to polished wood. Every pass just gets rid of more and more.

It's a mistake, I hear when people ask me how I write, I tell them so I consider I get it out on the paper as fast as I can. So the metaphor that I use is I barf it out as fast and as much as I can. And then I spend the next 12 months picking out the little choice morsels of food from the barf. And that's all you see.

I love that I'm gonna use that now. I. So I've always likened it to. To throwing clay. You have to have the clay on the wheel before you can make your vase. You don't like. Try to make your vase one piece of polished porcelain at a time. You've got to first have every bit of clay that you're going to need for that vase on the wheel. And you might end up getting rid of a lot of it, but you got to have it all there. And that's how I have to write.

And do you have any tricks? I mean, I'll tell you some stuff that I do. So when I'm editing my own writing, I search for every word that ends in ly because I'm trying to kill adverbs. And I look for every instance of the word be because I'm trying to kill the passive voice. Do you do stuff like that?

My editor is pretty good at picking that stuff up. But I've gotten really diligent about those. Those two especially. I avoid them. My very first draft, I worked with an editor at the small publishing house, and when she set back the first few chapters, I realized how many of these mistakes I had done throughout the whole book. And so I. I started editing ahead of her and sending her chapters that at least didn't have those mistakes in them anymore. Yeah, and then she would send me the next chapter, and it'd be some other thing that I was doing wrong. And I would rush ahead of her and edit that mistake out. And because of this, it got more granular. And she was teaching me finer and finer details about the writing, good writing habits as I went. And because I was applying them to. Through an entire novel, it was like the best education I could have ever gotten. And a lot of that stuff that I learned through there. Now, my. My first drafts don't have those issues.

In them at all, I'll tell you after. I probably print 30 times each manuscript. And when I turn it in and I've had dozens of people look at it and also give me suggestions, corrections, even at the level of commas and stuff. And so when I turn it in, and I've done this 15 times in my mind, I'm turning in something perfect and I expect my editor to call me back and say, guy, in my 50 years in publishing, I've never had a perfect manuscript until today. And every time, I swear to God, every time they find a thousand mistakes. Like literally. I'm not exaggerating. A thousand mistakes. I don't know how it's possible.

I'll tell you, some of that is like as we're make. As we're making repairs, we introduce new mistakes. Exactly. We put in a typo that everyone who looked at it before, then that typo wasn't there. Yeah, it went in on version 15.

I'm glad I'm not alone. And.

N. And the reader finds all of them.

Yeah. And then there's still more, right?

Oh, yeah. Go to your Amazon reviews and you'll see every typo that's still in there.

I know, I know, but that's one of the. Getting back to the beauties of self publishing, which is you can make that correction and 24 hours later it's correct. But if it's a publisher, they're waiting till the warehouse empties if there's ever another edition. Right.

And they might not even. There's times where they go to a new edition and realize, yeah, it's not worth it. Yeah, they do a time cost analysis and they won't even fix typos. I've seen egregious errors in like classic works of science fiction. I'll turn to the front. It's like the 21st printing of this paperback and the mistake is still there. There's no way. It hasn't not been seen. They just decided, yeah, people live with it.

Maybe they lost the file.

That's possible. But so I don't understand. I think Amazon should have. Because so much of the self publishing runs through kdp. I get notices from Amazon. Hey, there's a typo on this page. Yeah, I'm like, all right, you know the page and you know the typo. Can I hit. I accept and just update the file on your side. You would think you have to like, you have to download that file, make a change, do all this conversion, make sure you don't break the formatting, re upload it. It's such a nightmare. There should be some easy way of just fixing this.

You would take. Do you think book Reviews matter at all anymore. Professional book reviews?

No, not professional book reviews. Reader reviews matter. Like critically. It's the most important thing for a, for an author. There's nothing more important for the success of a book than a ton of positive, honest reader reviews. But I know from working in a bookstore, we would see what was on the COVID of the New York Times, the Sunday book section, and we wouldn't see a bump in, in sales at all. And a lot of people have done studies on this now. So here's the exception. A professional book review from in a place where there are no book reviews is amazing. So I got a book review like on the front page of, of Boing Boing. And that put me on the, in the top 10 on Amazon immediately because Boing Boing Boing had a lot of traffic at the time. And they were saying, this is one of the best books I've read. And you're getting a lot of readers who aren't reading any other book review except that one. You know, that was like, they probably do one book review every month or two months.

So just to be perfectly clear here, are you saying that Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, New York Times and Washington Post, a book review in those things will not move the needle anymore.

It's a blip. It does almost nothing. And you can, you can Google all the people that have, that have done the studies on this. But yeah, it does not sell many books. Getting, getting nominated for an award or winning an award is the best thing. If you can get shortlisted on the Booker or the Pulitzer or the Hugo or win one of those. That badge on the COVID of a book will sell a lot more books than any critic or review.

But wait, you said that badge on the COVID of the book. Who sees the COVID anymore? They're not in Borders looking at jackets.

Yeah, but they'll see it even on a website. Like if you go scroll through Amazon, you'll see these round. Like, I think every book should put some kind of round element somewhere on the front cover because, like, we're just. There's rewards are always round. You know, I'm gonna start making the, the O and Howie like look like. I'm gonna put little frilly edges on it. And it's always silver or gold. It's gonna look embossed.

You should have just a round thing that says written on a yacht.

Yeah, whatever, man from. You know, your brain will just be like, that's probably a good book.

So let's talk about the overnight success of wool and how it's now going to become an Apple TV series. But my research says that this is the third time somebody said it's going to be made into a TV series. So can you walk us through how it took all these years and three attempts?

Yeah, so it's more than three. Not everything gets announced. And this is why I try not to announce a lot of Hollywood news. Because you hear all the time that this has been optioned and this is with so and so. It doesn't mean anything. They might not even start writing on it. They might not hire a writer to start adapting it. They might just be grabbing 10 things and then they choose nine of them to push forward to the next level. And yours might be the thing that they don't even touch. Again, I think there's been some news about one of my books sand being optioned by Amazon, and they went and hired a couple of writers and they made this amazing pilot. And we just found out recently they're not going to do anything with it and we're going to get the rights back. So we could have made all these announcements about what was going on and it just would have been a big tease. So I generally don't try to make proclamations that are unduly optimistic. A lot of my writing friends, I see it all the time. Someone will say, hey, this has been optioned. This could be a TV show now, and you never hear from it again. So I'll tell you what happened with Wool. The. The first deal we did was with Ridley Scott and Steve Zalien and 20th Century Fox. And when I did that deal, I assumed it would never get made. But I was happy to have Ridley Scott attached because he's a household name and I can use that to sell books and get foreign deals. And I probably doubled the advance on all my foreign deals by having Ridley Scott attached. Maybe more. Because publishers get so excited when a book gets any kind of adaptation. They sell a lot of copies. So that was, you know, purely market manipulation on our part to go with Ridley in that deal.

Okay.

But I assumed it would not get made. And. And we had two amazing scripts written by incredible screenwriters. We had directors attached. They were looking at what studio they were going to, you know, where the sound studio was going to be and where we're going to shoot. And through all of that, I just assumed that something would fall through and it wouldn't get made because I'd seen it happen to my friends. And sure enough, we went through, like five years trying to get this film made with 20th Century Fox and the guys who worked on it were amazing. Like the. I've heard from so many of those executives and producers when they heard about the, the recent news last week, they, they were the first people to email me and congratulate me, and they're super excited to see it because they, they love the book and they believed in it and they were sad they couldn't make it happen. When I got the rights back, the TV world had become more interesting. But also the book sales were so good at that point that I thought, now there's a decent chance someone makes this. I'd say there's a 20 to 30% chance that this gets made wherever we landed. So now what kind of show do we actually want to make? Forget about names and Ridley Scott and whatever. Who has the right vision and where do we want this to appear? And Apple and AMC were both two of my three finalists. When I had to make this decision. Apple hadn't released their service yet. I had to sign an NDA to even. To talk with them because they hadn't even announced Apple tv. And so the hesitancy there was, am I going to release this on a service that doesn't do anything? So we went with AMC because they have done some of the best TV in the history of tv and they were so passionate about the project. And we got a great writer lined up, we wrote many versions of a pilot and just never got the people two levels up to say, I'm willing to spend tens of millions of dollars making this. We never got that level of confidence. And about that time, Apple heard that things weren't just going perfectly and said, why don't we partner up? And more and more studios are doing this now where there'll be like two different kind of competitors working together on something. And that brought another layer of hierarchy, but also deeper pockets and bigger budgets. And we went out and hired another showrunner. And it's not like one showrunner is better than the other, but if you keep trying enough times, you're going to get lucky. And we, we had a good. A good writer's room, put together a good outline. We got permission to write 10 scripts. We got the go ahead. And now we're at the position of actually building sets. And we've got the cast set. People are memorizing lines. It can still fall through, but, like, it's supposed to start filming in July. So if things are going to derail, they got to derail pretty quickly now.

And what do you think is going through these movie executives or Film or whatever executives heads. Are they thinking like, oh my God, we need our Margaret Atwood, we need our Handmaid's Tale. We got to find me a dystopian novel about people living in silos and oh, there's Hugh. Is that how it goes?

That's some of it. So in my case, I think every case is unique, so it's hard to make generalizations. In my case, the Wool became a New York Times bestseller as a self published serialized book from this kid working in a bookstore. And that was a unique story. And that was why the book was like, talked about in business circles as well as literary circles. There were business websites and business magazines doing stories on how this was possible because it broke the mold of the economics of it all. That was how, like the front page of the Washington Post art section had a full page spread about this because it wasn't supposed to happen like this. Now if I'd been a bestseller and I was with Random House or any of those major publishers, that's how it's supposed to happen. So I wouldn't have gotten that kind of recognition. So that's how we got Ridley Scott to outbid several other interested parties. And then once Ridley Scott's detached, then if you get the rights back, he's had his imprint on it, like he, you know, that he okayed it. So it just becomes this kind of snowball thing. I can't say it's because the book is like better written than anything else, because I'm reading one of my favorite writers of all time, Neal Stephenson, has got like so many works that would make great adaptations. And I've met people who actually own the rights and want to do this. And people just haven't figured out how to make it happen yet. So it's not the quality of writing, it's just so many other little factors.

What a way to run a business.

Okay, it's crazy. So fewer things are getting made and the budgets are getting bigger. And that's where TV is really saving the writing world. Because so much more is being made in TV that didn't used to. So as the film industry becomes more sequels and adaptations and superhero stuff, TV is filling that void. And I've got a friend who's getting all kinds of offers to write kind of Hallmark made for TV movies and serialized TV stuff. That's lower pay, but keeping him employed.

I'm old enough to remember the day there were three TV networks and movies. That was it. And now there's probably 200. How many?

How many Times does someone tell you to watch something you have to go Google what streaming service you have to boot up to find it, you know.

Yeah, well I use Roku and if Roku can't find it I just give up. I gotta ask you, so do you have any insights into the Amazon recommendation engine?

I used to, I. Because I used to watch it close enough that I got a sense of what was going on but I haven't looked. I don't even look at my Amazon page anymore. I don't know I can tell you the ranking of any of my books or how many reviews they have or anything. I don't even look at my sales dashboard anymore because you just go crazy watching that stuff. And that's been, that's been true for probably five or six years. But back when I was first, I can tell you that I think we underestimate how much data they use to recommend stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if they use completion rates or they use what time of day that you're like if you stay up late reading. I'm not saying they do this but if I, if you told me like Amazon knows that you stayed up till 2 o' clock in the morning reading this when you usually stop reading at 10, that they, they're using that data on self published books to go look at that book more closely and make an offer to that author. And I've met enough engineers at Amazon who were super smart and if I can come up with ideas for how you would find out which stories are most gripping before any competitor could tell and they're not doing that, I'd be very surprised. But it's a lot of also bots, people who bought Dune who buy my book and if they finish Dune and they give it five stars and then they finish my book and give it five stars then the Dune page is going to start popping up with my book. I think if you price it the way Amazon wants you to price it, you're more likely to get recommendation. They're not going to recommend free books or 99 cent novels. They're going to recommend books in the 499 to 999 range. They'll be explicit and tell you that's where we think these books should be be priced. So there are ways to game the system but I think they're pretty transparent.

This is a whole new world. I'm just trying to wrap my mind around this thought that Amazon is tracking my use of my Kindle and figuring out that I read late into the Night. So this tells them something about the book I'm reading. It makes perfect sense now that you.

Explain it and they do it. I'm saying if they, they should don't do it. If they don't do it, they're missing an opportunity and they should hire me because I'm. I'm somehow smarter than the Stanford grads that they're paying half a million a year starting. So I know that I'm not smarter than them. And hopefully they're using that kind of data to. People are so scared of being recommended a good product and I don't understand that. I want targeted ads, like, take all my data and go find for me the thing that's going to make me the happiest. I don't understand this, like, fear of my privacy being invaded or my data being used. I don't want ads for things I'm not interested in, Hugh. I don't want book recommendations for things I don't want to buy.

Hallelujah, Hugh. I feel the same way. Like everybody's so paranoid about privacy. Of course now I'm going to get attacked or something. But I would love target advertising. And I wish it was more targeted in my news feed. I wish. I don't know why. My Google News feed, for example. Google, the smartest company in the world. Why did you keep sending me stuff about MMA and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers? I have never clicked through on any story about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers or Tom Brady and they keep sending me that shit. I don't understand that.

But I think my Google News feed thing just got worse. Like four or five months ago, it just got really stupid almost overnight. I felt like they flipped a switch on some thing they were testing and it's just awful now. And it's one of the best things that's ever happened to me because now I don't look at my phone anymore. I'm getting so much more writing done because Google has created this engine that almost is the anti stickiness, like the opposite of every other social media company. They're like, we want you to go have your life back. They maybe grew a conscience over there and they're like, put your device down. Here's a bunch of shit you're not interested in. I guarantee you're not going to look at any of them, but you also have a feeling like, what's going on out there? Like they're showing you a bunch of headlines and you're like, none of that's interesting. Okay? The world's boring today. I'm Going to go, you know, write a book instead.

Oh, my God. Using the theory of Occam's razor, I would say that that thinking is probably false. That's wrong.

I don't know if he thinks that. I had, I, I saw Neil Gaiman was saying the same thing on his feed. He was like, how did Google just stop learning anything about me overnight? And it was about the same time I was seeing the same thing. So I, I don't, obviously they've made a mistake.

Maybe they're preparing for some Senate hearing in the future when Mitch McConnell says, I'm getting such shitty results. And they'll say, because, Mitch, we respect your privacy.

Yeah, we know nothing about you. We can prove it. Right?

We're sending you the autobiography of Hillary Clinton. Yeah.

They would think he was definitely being targeted.

I don't know who this quote came from, but you quote in a story. I love this quote, quote unquote. These books that everyone talks about as being important for literature are the ones no one finishes. As a bookstore employee, former and an author, is that literally true?

Someone does a release like every year, I think, on the most unfinished books. And it's the books that everyone says they're reading that no one gets to the end of. And one year the number one book on the list was Goldfinch, which won the Pulitzer. And yeah, I think like Capital was this economics book that came out a while back that everyone carried around with them and pretended to have read and almost no one read. So, yeah, I think it's generally, I think it's generally true that the, the most important works are the ones that no one reads and the genre works that are considered garbage, people read them in a single day.

I would, I wonder where, you know, when Bill Gates came out with his book the Road Ahead or something, I wonder how many people actually finished that book.

I didn't.

I never got past a dust jacket.

And Bill should have foreseen that.

He's got bigger problems now that he should have foreseen, but that's another. So as you look forward in the future for an author, do you think the future is purely self published, traditional hybrid? What's your prediction for how it works out?

Are you thinking more just like novels and non fiction? Because I'm starting to think more writers are gonna have to go into writing for video games and TV and virtual reality and immersive theater experiences. I think there's all these opportunities for writers out there that are not in book form. And if, if you want to make a living with your creativity. I just got a virtual tour of this place in Vegas. It's a shopping. It's a grocery store that you walk into. And every product is kind of a meta joke of some sort. And there's a mystery to solve as you go through this supermarket. And then if you go through a drink refrigerator, there's a tunnel that takes you back into this world that just keeps opening up and telling a story. And the supermarket is like one tenth the size of this whole building. There's slides, there's laser projection things, and there's a narrative through it all, there's a mystery to uncover. And there's a team of writers, a whole room full of writers that had to put this all together, and they're compensated for it. And thinking about writing the story of a supermarket for this immersive experience is not what I thought of when I thought of becoming a writer, but it is an opportunity out there. And I think being a writer to write novels is going to be more and more limited as time goes on. More people are going to be reading serialized fiction on their cell phones, which is what they do in Korea and China now. And it's coming to the US it's been more and more popular here. People are going to read in a browser, they're going to be scrolling on the Internet, reading, reading stuff. They're going to be reading a Reddit thread. So what it. What it takes to be a writer keeps changing. But I think the future of books is eventually AI is going to be writing almost all of it.

What?

So, yeah, enjoy it while you can.

Back up here. So how does wool number 25 get written by AI?

AI is already getting really good at. I can't remember the name of this one program that I got to like, beta test just last year. And you could just start giving it a couple of prompts and it would just write paragraph after paragraph, perfect grammar, great dialogue, it would come up with the names of. It was the best I've seen so far. And we're just at the infancy of this stuff, and literally infancy, like we're listening to babies kind of mew. And we're judging it for its, like, literary qualities. But this is just an easily solved problem that just requires a whole lot of data in back learning. But machine learning will come up with ways to be creative and come up with stories that start with no seed at all, just its own story, perfectly written with amazing characters and plot, and it's just a matter of when, not if. It could be hundreds of years from now, but that's the long term future of fiction. Eventually you'll read a book that's being written for you while you're reading it. Oh my God, it'll be just for you. If you loved it, you might have to tell if you make save a copy and send it to a friend so they can read what you wrote. But they probably won't be interested. They're like, nah, man, I like the stuff the AI writes for me. It knows what I like. Devices will be reading your pulse. It'll know if you're sweating during scenes. It'll track your rate of reading and your eye movement and everything. And stories will just get better and.

Better so everybody can have their personal dystopia.

Yeah, but this sounds like a utopia for me. Imagine every book you pick up, you can't put down. You can say, like, hey, I only want to be in this world for two more days and the AI is going to wrap it up in two days of reading time. Or you could say, man, I love this world so much. Like, I would live in it for the next 20 years. Just keep, keep it changing and keep it going with these characters and there's not going to be any more, like waiting on George R.R. martin to finish this series, or whether that's a series that's too long or a series that's too short. Like, those are all problems to be solved.

I was on the board of trustees of Wikipedia, and Wikipedia has this question of who is the Wikipedia customer? Is it mankind seeking knowledge, or is it the Wikipedian who is writing the entries? And many people believe inside the Wikipedia community that the audience is the Wikipedia editor as opposed to mankind. And so one day I said, what happens when AI can now write every Wikipedia entry? You don't need Wikipedia editors anymore. And I think that's when they decided that maybe I shouldn't be on the board. But that's true. If they. If you're saying that a novel can be written in real time, certainly a Wikipedia entry can be written in real time.

Yeah. I think it's funny the things that we think AI will do in the next 20 years that are much more difficult than like writing a novel. And we don't realize that this isn't going to stop this. The pace of improvement of technology isn't going to stop until we're extinct. So whatever you think is crazy in 200 years, like, what do you think 2,000 years is going to do? What about 4,000? So whenever people say AI will never write a book, I'm like, what's AI doing 10,000 years from now? And they're like, oh, in 10,000 years? Of course it's writing a book.

Yeah.

Michael, you just told me it was never going to happen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It might not be your lifetime, but, like, all this is inevitable.

Okay, my head is exploding about writing. So now let's go to a more simple subject. So this is life. Like, what exactly is your lifestyle anymore?

My lifestyle? Ah, man, I don't want to make. I don't want to make listeners jealous by talking about how great my life is. I have a dream lifestyle. Like, I, I just get to engage in my art all day long if I want, and if I don't want to, I don't have to. I've got enough income, I don't even need income anymore. I live a simple enough life that what I have in the bank will sustain me for the rest of my life. But the books continue to sell and projects keep getting made. So I've been super fortunate in that that means that I took five years off and went sailing around the world. And now I'm getting up every day and working on stories and having lunches with friends and hanging out by the pool and reading books and whatever I want to do.

The sailing phase of your life is over.

It's on. It's definitely on pause. It was lucky timing. I, I put it on pause more for working on TV stuff and having access to Internet to be able to get to LA and, and try to give this a couple of projects the best chance possible. But then the pandemic made it really fortunate timing because you couldn't sail from country to country the way I've been doing for years. And a lot of my friends were kind of trapped in countries where you couldn't go ashore except for basics. For a long time you couldn't move between islands, even within a country. So it was not a. It was not a great time to be on a boat. But yeah, now I'm designing. Put a deposit down and been designing the next boat. It's got a lot of improvements from things that I learned from my last trip. And in the next year and a half or two years, I'll be taking off again.

And. And so what is driving you anymore? Because if you have enough money and you have these series coming down the pipe, why write at all?

Oh, man, when I wrote my first book, I didn't think I was going to make any money. I just am a lover of, of books. Since I was a little kid, I Wanted to be a writer since I was about 12 years old. And you've written enough. It doesn't even have to be in the fiction space. But the satisfaction of putting an idea in someone else's mind that's clear and communicates what you're thinking or what you're feeling and then them absorbing it and having some empathy for what you've created is like a magical power that we take for granted because we're used to it. But if I were to describe it to you in like this delayed telepathy, that's really happening. It's just supernatural. So for me just using my imagination to create a world and people that don't exist and writing it in a way that someone reading it believes just for a moment while they're reading it, that this is real and it's happening. Like I'm giving you a waking dream. There's just nothing to me more enticing than that. And so I would. I was doing it when I was a kid in middle school and no dream of any been getting published and I was doing it when I was working in a bookstore and no dream of getting rich. And I. I'll keep doing it probably till I can't think straight anymore. That may have already happened.

Yeah, right. As long as you're questioning if it happened, it means it hasn't happened. It's when you stop asking that question, you should get worried. Right.

I think that's a. That's like a law that should be named after you.

That's kind of catch 22, but yeah, there you go. For someone who sailed all over the world, I got to ask you this question because I haven't sailed anywhere. What's the most interesting place you sailed to? What's the can't miss? You gotta sail there once in your life.

Yeah. I'm going to say this and then everyone's going to sail there and just totally ruin it. But I'll say it anyway because it's so hard to get to that most people will never see it. It's called Fulanga. It's a small island in the south east corner of Fiji. And it's right into the wind, the trade winds from all the inhabited parts of Fiji. So it's very difficult to get to. And it's the most pristine, remote, beautiful place I've ever seen. And it's. There's three villages there with the most incredible people you've ever met. But it was like sailing into a different time. There's. There was caves there full of Human skeletons from their cannibalism that only ended 50 or 60 years ago. And the chief there, who had passed away since I was there, but he was in his 90s, so he was in his 30s, still eating people. When you hear those stories and you're the only white person within 500 miles and they're inviting you over to dinner that night, that starts to get to be a little adventurous travel.

That gives a whole new meaning to the term you're invited for dinner.

I was getting shut around the island by the. It's the. The most. The most laughing, funny, warm, kind people you've ever met in your life. You wonder if it's an act that this is true of all of Fiji. You just keep thinking these people are just being nice to like Loris, Laura, the tourism dollars in or something. But I spent two, you know, years around these people and they never let up. And you finally realize this is who they are. They are this friendly and generous and caring. And it makes it an intoxicating place to be around, that kind of positivity. But the young people were showing me around like they were. They were joking about the cannibalism that was a serious part of their past. And to them, now they realize the hilariousness of it to me and my friends. And so they would totally prey on that and give us, Give us grief, these teenagers. It was a wild place. Definitely my best place I ever sailed. For sure.

When you're sailing, just. Is it, you know, just you on a boat or you got a crew of 40?

I don't understand those big boats. I don't. I don't see the allure of being on a floating Hilton where everything's taken over. No, I'm. I'm by myself or, or I have a girlfriend or maybe one friend with me because I. I want to be naked most of the time and I don't want a bunch of crew around. No, I'm being. I'm being mostly facetious, but.

No, you're not.

No, no, I'm not. I. I think I did want to be naked most of the time. No, for me, the allure is like doing it yourself. Something breaks, you have to fix it. You and you're not surrounded by strangers. I don't want to. I don't want to have employees stuck on my. In my home 247 and have to worry about their needs and taking care of them.

One of my past guests was a guy named Chris Burdish, and he paddled across the Atlantic on a sup. So that's talk about being alone that.

Yeah, I've seen his boat. It's amazing. It's a sup that you can actually kind of crawl down in the nose of the flat part of the middle.

Yeah, he's quite the guy. Going back to self publishing because I'm just so curious, do you write in Word and then just upload to Amazon or do you go to word to InDesign to Amazon or what's your. Like, what's the last mile in your self publishing?

I write in Word because it's terrible and everything is worse. And then for my ebook, I sent it off to a formatter who it's so affordable, they strip everything out and create an HTML doc from scratch and then convert it to an epub and a mobi and everything you need.

Okay.

For the PDF, which you need for the print book, I use InDesign and I do that myself because no one will spend the time on it that I will.

Now we're really getting down into the weeds and so do you. If I looked at your Word document, is every paragraph set to a particular style so that when you import into InDesign, it says, okay, so for this style, it's this font, this size, this spacing, this whatever. I mean, does it just roll in because you're so disciplined using word styles?

I do none of that. When I flow it in, I actually flow in raw text.

Oh, my God.

Yeah. And because I want to go through the book, that's the last pass that I do. When I set up the PDF, I want to go through the book and. And even change the spacing so that sometimes dialogue ends at the end of one page, and the answer to that dialogue requires you to turn the page because just. Just that. That breath that you take while you're waiting for the answer, while you're turning the page can change the reading experience. So I don't want any widows or orphans. I control hyphenation because I don't want the kerning to be compressed on some lines and too much space in the other. I've even rewritten pages in order to have things land where I want them to land on the page. I think of it as a painter. You should stretch the canvas so the canvas is the size that you need it to be. You should tell the museum what kind of lighting to use and what warmth that lighting needs to be in which direction to paint. Right side up or upside down. I think you can't just write words. And that's the story you're gonna hand Someone, a book. And it's everything. It's the COVID it's the. The font choices. And if you're not into that stuff, you're not thinking about the whole experience. Like, how can you be a painter and not know about pigments or how paint's made or how light bounces through layers of paint and scatters? If you're not studying optics as a painter, I don't know, it's like you're just dabbling.

See? So Hugh. That's why you're Hugh and most people aren't. That's the bottom line. This podcast called Remarkable People is sponsored by the Remarkable Tablet Company. And I'm going to send you one. If you want one, I'll send you one. But this tablet.

You can send me a tablet?

Yes, I'm going to send you this tablet. This remarkable tablet.

You didn't have to. I was going to do this for nothing, man. Now I'm excited. Tell me all about it.

Well, so it's a tablet and it has a pencil, and this pencil doesn't need to be charged. And you just flip it around and you can erase with this side of it. And it feels like you're writing on paper. It's not like the iPad pencil experience at all. And it's single purpose. So it's not for checking email and looking at YouTube videos and checking social media. It's for writing and note taking. So in every episode, I ask the same question, which is, how do you do your best and deepest and most focused thinking?

I. I cannot believe the coincidence of this. The one errand I ran today was to a bookstore to buy a notebook and a pen. Because the. The story I'm working on right now requires so much kind of graphing the plot and creating tables of people and what their physical powers are. There's so many things I'm having to keep straight, and there's no way to do that for me except through blank pages that I can write on. So this such a weird coincidence. I'm sitting here looking at the. The notebook that I ended up with, which is like a big moleskin, one of the large moleskins, and a beautiful pen. So I will use the heck out of that thing.

Well, and the benefit here is that as soon as you write it down and it syncs to the cloud, there's a backup copy. If you lost that Moleskine, you're screwed, right? Or for the moleskin burned in this case.

And you'll be able to go through your notes for, like, years and Years. The way you use them, you could.

I don't mean to turn this into a sales pitch, but let's say you print your notes. Then you can have it OCR converted to text so we can digitize your handwriting for you.

That sounds amazing. Yeah.

Anyway, anyway, back to the question. Your best and deepest thinking is done while I'm walking.

So walking my dog used to be the best thing when I had a dog, but then it became like walking on a beach, walking around a city. There's something about having my body in motion and changing my environment, you know, stimulating my vision that helps me work on plot. But it's probably also because while you're walking, you're not tempted to stare at your phone or be distracted by other things. You're just in your thoughts. But that's definitely where I solve most of my creative issues.

You'd be walking and you'd be thinking, okay, so I, like, have to make this silo do this and kind of.

Yeah. Or listening to dialogue. Like listening to characters debate something and thinking, oh, that's what this person needs to say that gets them to think they should do this. And. But also just story idea, like, yeah, I want to write a story about a ninja falling in love with a pirate or something. Just start. I use that example a lot. I'm eventually going to write that book because I love this idea of like, ninjas and pirates in the same world together.

Apple TV is going to listen to this and buy the rights right now.

Sold.

Yeah, sold. Right?

Sure, man.

And 10 years from now, it'll be out there. I love your whole approach to writing and publishing. It's so contrary to what everybody thinks, how publishing works, because they have no clue.

Yeah, I agree. I love your approach to gift giving. I'm a huge fan.

So there you have it. Hugh Howey, legendary self publisher, working his way up from a bookstore. His is an inspiring story for anyone who can't get a book deal. If you can't get a book deal or know somebody who can't get a book deal, be sure to forward them this episode. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. My thanks to Jeff C. And Peg Fitzpatrick for another remarkable episode. Until next time, mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable people.