#63 Hugh Howey: Winning at the Self-publishing Game | The Knowledge Project

I think the feeling that we know we should have made these better decisions earlier, for some reason, instead of learning from that, it actually paralyzes us.

It makes us feel like all the moments in my life where I could have seized the opportunities ahead of me are all gone, and I guarantee in another five or ten years, you're going to look back at today as the day that you had the free time, the inclination, the talent to change your life.

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On the show today is author extraordinaire and world sailor Hugh Howie.

We're going to talk about wayfinding, the ancient art of navigating by paying attention to natural signs, the benefits of travel and what people have in common all over the world.

And in the last part of the show, we're going to deep dive or geek out on the publishing process.

Hugh has sold millions of books and he knows the ins and outs.

If you wondered how to go from the writing process to publishing and what some of the pitfalls are, you don't want to miss this.

We're also going to talk about some of the things that Hugh does differently with his books, including giving away a book like wool and what that means and what the implications are.

It's time to listen and learn.

You're on a boat in Australia, is that correct?

That's correct. Isn't this a remarkable world we live in where I can be in Ottawa, Canada in the middle of a snowstorm right now and you're halfway across the world literally and on a boat and we have this connection.

It's kind of neat. Yeah, that's weird.

I've forgotten that snow exists, but that sounds awful.

I wish I could forget that snow exists.

How did you - I've been following the summer for a while now.

How did you fall in love with sailing?

I think I was probably about nine or ten years old.

We used to go to the beach.

I grew up near Charlotte, North Carolina, so a bit inland, but we went to the beach every year for a couple of weeks.

One of the first things I would do is drag this little - they're called sunfishes.

There's little dinghies with tiny little sails.

But for a kid my age, I felt like I was launching the Titanic.

This thing was really a pain to move around by yourself.

It was kind of like a Herculean task where my brother and sister were running around, choosing which bedroom they were gonna have.

I was dragging this thing down to the sound and launching it and trying to get the mast in by myself.

Yeah, I would just spend all day sailing around the sound in this little thing and even then was dreaming about sailing to the other side of the world, which at the time was always China.

We used to dig holes in the sand and pretend we were digging our way to China as little kids.

Yeah, it's been a dream of mine for, man, 30 -plus years to do this.

It's kind of crazy that I've made it this far on this trip because it was just a fantasy for so long.

And you're sailing around the world?

Yeah, the goal was - I figured it would take about five years.

I started in South Africa over three years ago, about three and a half years ago, and sailed across the Atlantic and Pacific so far.

Of course, I'm not doing it direct.

I'm really meandering when I went across the Atlantic, I hit the Caribbean, I went all the way up to Maine and then worked my way back down.

Spent about six weeks in Cuba and then went down to the Panama Canal across the Pacific.

If I was trying to wrap this up, I'd keep sailing north along the Australian coast and across the Indian Ocean to South Africa.

But I've fallen in love with this part of the world, so I'm going to do a couple little loops between here and New Zealand.

I'm going to try to get back to Fiji in the next month or so which has been one of my favorite stops so far.

And are you on the boat alone?

No, I've got a girlfriend on right now, but I've done some long passages by myself, which is pretty fun.

But I have friends and family members join me here and there.

For New Year's in Australia, we had seven of us living on the boat and anchored out right in front of the Sydney Opera House.

With that in the foreground, the harbor bridge in the background and all the fireworks, it was unbelievable.

I've always got people who are eager to come and join.

It's actually more of a challenge to keep the boat semi -empty.

Do you work better when it's empty or do you work better when people are around?

As far as writing or the...

As far as writing. I write better with zero distractions.

I can write with background noise, I could sit in a cafe with a lot of clatter and chatter and write really well.

And I can write in pitch black with absolute silence.

But if I'm in the middle of writing and someone asks me a question, it sucks me out.

When I'm writing, I'm actually seeing the story.

I'm watching a movie, I'm just trying to describe the action and transcribe the dialogue as I'm hearing it.

Anything that captures my attention away from the story makes it really hard to dive back in.

I want to come back to writing a little bit later because I really want to do not only a deep dive on writing and your process, also on publishing.

But before we get there, I want to dive into a little bit more about sailing.

I think you called it wayfinding.

What is wayfinding?

Wayfinding, specifically, it's the art of navigating across the oceans using natural science and not using a GPS or even a compass, but using the stars, the direction of the setting or rising sun, cloud patterns, the temperature of the water, signs of migration from wildlife.

We now know that that's how all the Pacific Islands or the general progress of migration across the Pacific was very deliberate and skill based.

Because of the terrible assumptions we have about primitive people, even though they had the same brainpower that we have and a lot more free time and less distraction to employ it.

We assume that they just drifted downwind and settled the islands accidentally.

There's even someone who set off from South America to try to prove this.

Can't remember his name now, but he built a raft and drifted on the currents and made it to, I think, the Galapagos.

But we now know another guy set out from New Zealand with a boat to show that you could sail into the wind without any navigation equipment and find any island you wanted to find.

And he proved that these people could have done that.

And since then, a team left from Hawaii with a traditionally built boat and used only the stars to navigate and sail around the world, and actually ran into them several times on this trip, shared a couple of harbors with them.

And yeah, so wayfinding is basically just relying on observing what's around you instead of a reliance on technology.

And for me, it's always there's been some significance to that as like a self -betterment principle, you know, like just trying to put the technology aside every now and then and say like, okay, where do I want to be in life?

What are my relationship connections right now?

What am I feeling? What am I doing?

What mistakes have I made?

What am I proud of?

How do I want to realign?

Which direction do I want to go?

And be really deliberate about the choices we make in the direction that we go in life.

Because honestly, I realized for myself, and I think it's quite true for a lot of people that I was just kind of drifting with the currents, like the guy who left from South America all those years ago, and kind of doing whatever came naturally next, and I wasn't employing a lot of free will.

And I think I think most of us know, if we analyze it very hard, that that will is definitely not free, you know, we make a lot of promises to ourselves around January 1st, every year.

And by February, you know, we were exhausted from trying to budge our natural inclinations and our bad habits.

So, you know, learning that that will is very expensive made me want to be a little more observant about, you know, what I was doing, and where I want to go, and push that direction.

So there's a for me, there's a lot of parallels between this sailing adventure, and also the adventure of navigating through life.

What are some of the other things that you've learned about yourself through sailing and a lot of time in solitude, and a lot of experience with different cultures around the world through your travels?

Yeah, the cultural experiences have been amazing.

I've always loved to travel, but there's something about when you travel to Paris, and you, you know, get out of the airport, and you have maybe have some friends with you or a loved one, you spend a lot of time with that person, and you dip into the culture, and you have some of the food, and you,

you know, have encounters with strangers, and you kind of get a sense of what that culture is like.

But if you have to go study abroad, and you live in a dorm or an apartment, and you spend months there and you start picking up the language, and you're grocery shopping and cooking with whatever's available in that place instead of eating out, that extra time, that deep immersion gives you a much better

sense of the the flavor of the culture.

And the crazy thing about traveling like this is that I'm taking my home with me, you know, I have my kitchen everywhere I go.

So I'm always, you know, buying groceries and learning local recipes, and I'm having locals, you know, come stay with me on the boat.

And like in French, let's see, in Fiji, I had a big large family come on and do a a kava ceremony, like right on the boat.

And a lot of these What is that ceremony?

kava is this root that they grind up with almost like a cheese grater into a powder mixed with water.

And if you drink it, it gives you a bit of a buzz makes you your lips go numb.

And it's strange. It's the opposite of alcohol in a way that the more you drink it, the more sensitive you get to instead of developing a tolerance, you actually develop a sensitivity.

So yeah, the people who grow up, and it's actually spreading around because you can't, the FDA has as a, like said, this, this is very safe, like you can't OD on it.

And what's weird about it is if you get drunk on kava, your brain is completely lucid, like you do not get a mush, you know, mushy thoughts, but your body goes completely numb.

So the people who are like, I've met a lot of expats, people who've moved to Vanuatu specifically, because their kava is like 10 times stronger.

And they move there basically because of how much they love this kava experience.

And if they if you live there long enough, you get what the locals get, which is this incredible sensitivity to it.

And if you drink it with an empty stomach, which is like necessary, if you have any kind of food in your stomach, it dilutes it and you get very little effect.

But if you've done it for a while and you drink with an empty stomach, it only takes like two little half coconuts of this milky, muddy looking fluid.

A lot of people say it tastes like mud, I think it tastes fine.

But I guess it's one of those things that's, you know, very individual based, but yeah, basically just separates your brain from your body and leaves your brain intact.

Do you remember these things?

Like after like when your body sort of like comes back?

Your brain is completely clear the whole time.

There's no blacking out.

There's just like complete.

I don't know how to, it's like an out of body experience in that your body just kind of disappears.

Like you lose motor function, but your brain is the same as it is right now.

Like you and I would have, it's like force of meditation is the best thing I can say because you can't do anything except be alone with your thoughts.

Kind of cool. I don't know.

But I've only, I've only experienced it to that level a couple of times.

Normally when you first start, you're just going to get like a cotton mouth and tingly lips and your brain, you're going to feel like you had a glass of wine, maybe.

Right. That's crazy.

People are, yeah, people are really getting into this and now there's cover bars popping up in other countries.

I've seen them in the US as well.

And so how does that aid your perspective on yourself and sort of like maybe our existence if we want to go up to a philosophical level?

Oh, you know, yeah.

You say you started asking about what have I learned from different cultures?

The craziest thing from these deep immersions in these cultures is like how universal human nature is and how similar we are everywhere.

And we really focus on very slight differences in order to try to group people or make it easy for ourselves, you know, to assign labels to different groups.

But the things that we have in common are so numerous.

I think we take them for granted.

It's almost like if you look at the body plan of most mammals, like even a human and a dog, the similarities are crazy.

Like you can spend days just making lists of all the things that are similar in the bone layout and number and structure and the way you go down to the cellular level, the way mitochondria powers us, like we have so much DNA in common.

And what we make really a big deal out of is that 2 % of us that's different.

And I think that's what I found with these cultures is like, you know, I was raised hearing, you know, Americans are overweight, we have terrible diets.

And it turns out that's just what happens when you're wealthy enough to afford basically unhealthy foods when you have an unlimited basically budget for food, you're going to eat too much.

And, and every country is going to have to figure out how to deal with this as their population gets out of global poverty.

And so some of the biggest populations like physical size wise are like these these islanders that used to be in great shape until they got access to our kind of diet.

So and then what's what's interesting is that we end up blaming the first cultures that experience these things instead of realizing that it's a universal challenge, and that we can learn from each other instead of blame each other for the way these things spread.

And so there's, while there's some sadness to that, like you see the same disdain for the environment, you see pollution in some of those beautiful places in the world, some of the Caribbean islands have the worst and saddest levels of pollution that I've ever seen.

You also realize that there's this the universal of people who are learning from mistakes.

And so the younger generation and almost every culture I've been to is better than the previous generation.

And they're going to correct a lot of these problems that their parents and grandparents have made.

And of course, their kids and grandkids are going to be even better than them.

So I in some ways that universal human nature makes me sad, but it also gives me a lot of hope.

What are some of the other ways that you've found that were like in sort of like a counter intuitive sense things that you wouldn't have maybe anticipated or didn't realize or, you know, love of home is something that really struck me.

I'm a fan of open borders, I think people should be able to live wherever they want to live in the world, as long as they observe the local laws and pay the taxes, you know, if you if you obey all the codes of conduct of of the place that you choose to live, whatever those people choose, to set as the rules,

you should be able to live anywhere.

It's no different than the freedom we have to, you know, if I want to live in the US and have like 20 kids, that's that's legal.

But one person coming in is illegal, it's kind of a weird, weird distinction that we make between population growth, you know, as long as it's not the other than we celebrate population growth.

If it's the other than we fear it.

But I think if we had open borders, the amount of people that would actually move would be much lower than people realize, because I've visited some places that are just life is so difficult there.

And the idea for most of the people that they would leave is crazy to them.

This is their home, they feel rooted to the soil, they all their memories and their family connections are there and convincing everyone in their extended family to all leave at the same time is so difficult that no one even considers it.

So I think that's been really surprising to me because for those of us who have wanderlust or who dream of living wherever they want to, I think we forget that most people aren't like that most people are really happy to have to be more grounded and more sedentary.

And honestly, like I don't want other people to be like me, I think that's a weird human.

It's part of human nature.

We all kind of want to be people similar to us and we want to change people to be more like us for some reason.

I think maybe because we're we feel scared and alone with our our thoughts or our insecurities.

Do you think we've always felt scared and alone of our thoughts and our insecurities and technology maybe accelerating that?

Or do you think this is like, in part due to technology shortening our attention span and distracting us?

And how do you think about that?

I think technology is changing us quite a bit.

But the insecurity thing I think comes from, most of what our brain is built for is theory of mind.

It's like the reason we had, the reason our brains are so much larger compared to our body size than almost any other animal.

Most of what that computing power is doing is trying to figure out what other people are thinking.

And then second level, third level theory of mind, like what are they thinking, I'm thinking and what does Tom think Jane thinks about me kind of stuff.

And we're constantly computing this because we're supposed to be living in a small enough tribe that we know everybody.

If you see someone you don't know, you should probably like, you know, run and get enough of the people you do know to help defend against this person you don't know.

And we can we can look at chimps and the great apes to really figure out a lot of like, what are where we came from, and what our natural income inclinations are.

So trying to figure out what everyone's thinking since you live in this tribe that's connected, and you all know each other, you want to know what your place is, and you want to figure out what everyone else's place is, and what are their motivations?

And why are they doing that thing?

And what might they do next?

And how are you going to plan for that?

And the source of so much of our anxiety comes from this constant computation of what is going on at everyone else's heads.

And there's a lot of game theory involved.

I love studying game theory, because so much of there's so much overlap between that and psychology, and trying to understand like why we make really silly decisions sometimes, when you peel back the game theory, there's a little bit of maybe some uncomfortable logic, but there's some logic behind a lot

of these weird decisions that we make.

So most of what we're doing is this theory of mind, and that anxiety of like, convincing people to think more like you, I think comes from that.

And just wanting to know for sure what people are thinking and having connection and trust and honesty is so rewarding.

And I think the reason it is is because it takes away some of that constant computation of what's going on in people's minds, when you know that you can trust someone, you no longer have to do those sorts of things.

Now you have a partner and uncovering information.

And that's why we love spreading stories and gossip and things like that, the water cooler talk would have happened around campfires and latrines back in the day.

And I think those things are universal technology is just allowing us to use them in a way that's probably unhelpful.

And it's like the same thing.

Technology is for our brains, what sugar is for our gut, our bodies have a natural craving for cheap calories, and our brains have a natural craving for connection.

And what sugar is doing to, you know, fatness up because we weren't prepared for this bounty of cheap calories.

Well, we weren't prepared for this bounty of free connection.

And I think that's like, there's an equivalent to fat for our brain, that we don't really have the vocabulary to figure out or discuss, like we haven't been doing this long enough to figure out what this mental obesity epidemic is like.

But I definitely think it's happening.

And it's going to be something we have to figure out how to dial back from.

I think you're already seeing that you're seeing people go on technology diets, because we understand that something bad is happening.

Were you an avid user of technology before you started sailing around the world?

Yeah, I'm still I'm like the biggest geek.

And I am like an early adopter on everything.

I love gadgets and upgrading stuff, love reading manuals.

One of my first career is in computer repair.

So I was like building computers in high school out of spare parts.

And, you know, down to like the soldering level and in like chip level stuff and haunting Radio Shack and building things out of LEDs and anything I could scrap together.

So but like one of my one of my very favorite people, and I'm lucky now to call him a friend and travel and spend a lot of time living with him is Kevin Kelly, who was the first editor of Wired magazine.

And Kevin wrote a great book called What Technology Wants, which I think everyone should read.

It's really a primer on what technology is and what it's trying to do if we want to anthropomorphize it.

Kevin is one of the he knows more about gadgets and technology than just about anybody.

And he has this like podcast called Cool Tools, where he's always telling people the best, like three things for anything you can imagine.

And he's been writing about technology for decades.

But he's also so removed from technology, like he analyzes every new piece of technology that he puts into his life and how it's going to impact him and whether or not he should adopt it.

And this is something I think we should pay attention to like the there's people, we've had these stories come out about people in big positions in tech companies who won't let their children use the products that they make and that made them wealthy.

And it's very similar to like a football players not letting their kid play football, because they know the brain damage and the terrible effects that this could have on them physically.

And these engineers who have come forward and said like, Look, I realize we're trying to make this as our product as addictive as humanly possible.

And seeing the links that will go to that makes me like tell my kids, you're not allowed to use it.

And that should give us pause.

And it should highlight the fact that some of the people who like Kevin who spend the most time with technology and the most time thinking about it, and its impact are the people who are most wary about it.

I think that should give more of us pause about what did they know that we don't know and what can we learn from them, you know, without having to spend the time that they've spent, you know, that's what what's great thing about expertise and sharing it as a shortcut to someone else's wisdom.

And, you know, I've, I've listened to Kevin about this stuff, like, the technology is fascinating and his primates who love inventing and exploring, we should totally geek out about it.

But we should also be wary about what happens reforming with this.

Do you think that we end up in a play?

Like, what do you think the future looks like in five years?

I don't want to lead you with my question.

But like, can you give me like, fast forward in your mind five years from now, and the role of technology on people?

Does it become almost socio economic?

Does it become pervasive?

Is it increasingly like embedded in us as humans?

Like, what do you think?

I think five years, we won't see much change, we'll recognize the world in five years.

And I think that's true probably of any five years in history.

And I'm not sure that things are changing as drastically now as they were 100 years ago, which is, everyone thinks that we live in the craziest of times and things are changing the most, because we're going through them.

But I think going from horses to, to flight, and you know, trains in a very short period of time and the electrification of the world was even crazier than adding internet as a layer on top of that.

So I think there've been crazier times, but even then, any five year period was recognizable because change happens, you know, incrementally and slowly.

I think the biggest things in five years will be will probably see more regulation of social media, especially in Europe, I don't think it'll happen in the US for a long time.

But we'll have countries, especially the EU saying like you have to make your product safer, which it's a long time coming.

And I think we'll have more conversations in five years about the the worth of our personal data, and how we should have more ownership on how that data is used.

I think that what's one thing that's really scary is knowing what's real and what's not like these deep fake videos are getting really, really good.

And impersonating people and stealing identities is getting very easy.

And I think proving we are who we purport to be to strangers is something that we'll have to figure out in the future, and that's why I think self driving cars become a rep they're, they're pervasive enough to alter the way that we interact with transportation, like globally.

And I think we'll just start to see the first glimmers of that in five years.

And in 10 years, that will be the world will look completely different.

The same way that you know, the iPhone is only a little over 10 years old.

And that made the world completely different.

I think self driving cars will be the next thing that will just change everything like it's hard to even like, we'll do more reading and more listening to podcasts because of this.

And it's hard to appreciate that because the idea that we'll free up all these transportation hours to do other things, like, it's just going to ripple effects in so many different directions is going to be incredible.

And car ownership is going to even own a car because of the way they'll even they'll never be parked really, because every car that can drive itself as a robot, basically, that can go earn money by running Uber routes.

So maybe car ownership would be 10 % of what it is now, which is going to decimate some industries while concentrating more wealth and power into a handful of tech companies, which we've already cities basically freed up, so you can have more bike lanes, and parks and pedestrian friendly areas.

Lives are going to be saved, it's going to be incredible.

But I think that might be 10 years out and not five years.

Do you mentioned, just something I want to hit on there a little bit.

I mean, it sounds like in that theory, it's almost a capital intensive business model where if you own the cars, you'll be able to own the fleet.

If you own the fleet, you'll have a lot of influence not only in the city, but you'll just generally have a lot of influence.

How do you think that plays out?

Do you think it'll be individuals owning cars?

And they contribute them to this common fleet?

Or do you think it's like Google owns a fleet of cars?

I think it'll be both.

I think Google and we probably don't even know who's going to come out on top of this yet.

It's always someone you don't expect.

It's never the first mover.

It won't be that it could be a big player who pivots.

Well, it could be a GM, which would be surprising, but it's possible.

Building cars is very different from building apps.

The disruption is much more difficult.

I think there'll be a company that will come along, kind of like a Tesla that will improve self driving, we'll learn to trust them, like the way we trusted Apple's operating system over Windows.

Imagine if 15 years ago, Apple and Microsoft were both building self driving cars, the blue screen of death would actually be a blue screen of death and no one would put their life behind those product.

So there'll be a company that comes along.

And all it will take is a handful of crashes.

And there's already been a few with widely publicized deaths, even though these cars are probably a lot safer than humans.

We don't have enough data yet to say that because we've driven billions and billions of miles as humans.

And these things, while they've done a lot of miles, there's been some accidents and some deaths.

So the numbers right now are a little fuzzy, but it looks pretty similar.

But the potential is for self driving cars to be vastly safer.

And I think we will achieve that potential.

And whoever has a reputation, the way Saab used to have a reputation for building these tanks that you could, like the other person in the other car would definitely die, but you would walk out unscathed.

We're going to have the self driving equivalent of that kind of trust.

And that company is going to take off.

But you're asking if people sold in cars, I think there will be individuals who are always tinkering and offering, you know, bespoke kind of options or people who don't trust the big companies.

Because if you think people are tracking your location now, when we're using self driving car fleets, they're gonna know exactly where you're going all the time.

And there's going to be people, I'm not one of these people.

I'm too, I'm naive when it comes to data.

And I've probably been burned by it by a few times.

But I don't worry about people having access to my data.

But there will be enough people who have that fear that they'll want to own their own car, but they're also not going to park it and not have it make the money.

There's not going to be enough people who want to, you know, not have that income.

But then there'll be people who need a car that they can leave stuff in and have it be accessible.

And we'll have to redesign cars around that.

Well, there'll be an owner compartment where you can't get into the trunk, even though it's this car is shuttling you around.

There'll be a compartment that you can get into and apartment compartment you can't and we're going to have to redesign vehicles based on this community share mode.

Thank you. You've thought about this a lot more in terms of the future than I think I have.

And I appreciate you going into so much detail.

I'm curious as to how you think the ways in which we're going to consume information is going to change in the future as well from books to magazines to how does information consumption?

How do you see that changing?

I'm a little worried about that, to be honest, mostly for myself.

My book reading has really dropped off.

I've been an avid reader my whole life.

And there've been periods in my life where I was reading a book a day.

It was two long periods of my life where I was keeping up that kind of pace.

And I don't understand how I was doing that now.

There's just so many other things to distract my time.

And I was doing this while I was in university and had full time jobs and stuff.

So I fear that when I got a smartphone and started using social media that my attention span started changing.

And part of what's been great about sailing is that it's gotten me completely disconnected.

When I take off and get out of range of a cell phone tower, I have no connection or access for long periods of time.

And I've loved that.

And then I get back, I'm laying in the islands and reading a lot.

But when I get plugged back in, I guess you could say, my ability to sit and read for hours at a time is diminished.

And there's been great books on this and how our brains are being kind of rewired.

There's still a healthy reading population out there.

I know that just from spending time in bookstores and talking to owners and watching my own sales and hearing from other authors who are doing well.

There's always new people being born, going through their own process.

And kids and younger people are always more voracious readers.

And I think in late in life, we find time to read.

But yeah, do worry about our attention span.

Then again, I think over time, we're going to keep freeing up more and more free time and more leisure time.

And hopefully we'll spend a lot of that reading.

But I have a hard time separating large trends with what I'm going through personally.

And right now, finding time to read is very difficult for me.

And I should not extrapolate from that, that it's a universal thing.

Just try to look at the actual numbers and data and see what's going on.

Is reading time going up now?

Because I mean, in theory, all this technology should be freeing up time over the last 20 years.

And wouldn't that bear out in sort of the I don't know what the numbers say, but wouldn't we already be seeing this increasing reading time?

Yeah, we are. And we're filling it with Netflix.

So we're getting a lot more free time, but we're also getting a lot more stuff to fill it with.

And there's just so much, you know, so many sports to watch and so many things to do with your with your kids and, you know, hobbies and activities.

There are things that we can do now that didn't exist, not that long ago.

So we keep inventing ways like, you know, go to a trampoline park.

Like, when I was a kid, like you were lucky if there was someone in your neighborhood who had a trampoline, right?

Most cities have these parks full of trampolines, we can go, you know, feel like Magic Johnson and like, you know, fly off these trampolines and dunk basketballs and play dodgeball on trampolines and games that like, you know, we just keep inventing new stuff to do with our time.

And these businesses are doing well.

So people are obviously engaged in it.

The video game industry has become bigger than, I think the music industry, it's crazy how much of our free time, and I'm one of those people, I love playing video games, and it's a different way of telling a story and you're more engaged in it and have more control over the story.

So that's really cool.

But you know, any hour I spend doing that's an hour I spend not reading.

And actually, when I started writing, the way I freed up time to write was just cutting out all video gameplay, I realized, man, I'm spending a couple hours a day.

I wasn't watching a lot of TV, but I was spending a couple hours a day playing video games.

I was like, what if I just spent that time writing?

How long would it take to to write a novel?

And it turns out, if you take a time consuming habit and change it into like, you know, a second job, there's a lot of productivity time that we're squandering, or, you know, one can say just enjoying.

But yeah, we have a lot more free time, but man, there's a lot more we can do with it.

You make it sound so simple.

You're one of the most popular published authors in the world.

And what I just heard was the key to this was stop playing video games and just write.

That's man, that's the best writing advice you could give somebody like, and it's the writing advice that I heard that finally broke 20 years of not being able to write a novel.

I had an advice wasn't given to me, but I was in the room while the advice was given, you know, to a larger audience to one person asking a question in particular, I was at a writing conference in Virginia.

And I was there as a at the time I was reviewing this is one of the periods of my life.

I was reading a book a day I was getting flooded my door, stop it, my sleep every day was just like a pile of books from publishers that weren't out yet advanced reading copies.

And I was writing book reviews for a website.

And I would like every day read a book, write a review and try to interview the author.

And I was going to book conferences and and covering them as well.

And this is because I'd given up on ever writing a book of my own I tried for 20 years since I was 12 years old and wrote my first Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy ripoff got two or three chapters in and realized I didn't know where this was going.

I didn't believe in myself.

I didn't like what I was writing.

I felt like an imposter writers had to be people who are much smarter than me and went to university to learn how to do this or they had to be born, you know, with a writing gene in them because their parents were writers.

I had no idea how any of this word.

I just knew that I wasn't good enough.

And for 20 years, I thought that.

And then the mother half of the Charles Todd writing duo, they write these historical crime fiction books.

And I just read one of them and I was in this in on this panel to basically get more insights into them for what I was writing for the website.

And someone in the audience asked like, you know, what's how do I write my first novel?

And like blew our hair back just kind of yelling at the room like you stop talking about writing, you stop dreaming of writing, you stop telling people you're gonna write and you sit down and you write and she was like, you know, hand clapping between each word basically as you slap on the table.

And and I realized like all the excuses that I give myself and all the the doubt and everything was right in that advice.

Like I just needed to sit down and write.

And basically the only thing stopping me from being a writer was myself and my insecurities.

And I went home from that conference and I finished my assignments, the things I had to do, but instead of picking up the next book to review it, I started I sat down and started writing my first book.

It wasn't the first time I'd done this, but it was the first time I completed it.

And man, it was I just didn't have the fear of of how good it was going to be.

And if anyone was going to read it, if I was going to make a career out of it, none of that mattered.

I was just going to sit and write until I got to the end of the story.

And I was able to do it.

I give that her writing advice, all the credit in the world.

I give the quality of that book, which turned out much better than it should have to the fact that I was reading and writing reviews every day that was giving me in the habit of writing every day, but it was also filling my head with like good story and good prose.

And so yeah, that's, that's how I finished my first novels just by someone yelling at me, basically yelling near me to just write and replacing a lot of other things I was doing with my day with that daily habit of writing and accumulated a lot of words and maybe a little skill and in about a five or six

year period, I read about 15 novels and some of them did well enough that I'm now doing my other dream, which is to sail around the world.

I think most of them did well.

I want to come back to the writing in a second here.

This sounds like another sort of universal maybe core to human nature, so much of life is just living it is just doing the thing that you're you're wanting to do.

And we get in our own way so often about not making time, not being conscious, maybe about where our time is going and where we're putting our effort in or being scared of sort of failure or, and it gets really hard, right?

If you're, if you're in your late twenties or thirties or forties and you've never really had a setback, I mean, the ability to put yourself out there and have confidence that you can overcome whatever's going to happen is it's hard to acquire.

Yeah, it's hard to acquire and it gets harder with time, but also we get really pot heavy with our lost time.

I think in my writing group in North Carolina, there was a lady who published her first book when she was like 86 published her second book, you know, when she was, you know, a couple years after that was still writing in her nineties.

And that really woke me up, you know, there's a lot of a lot of our calcification, you know, the inability to like break our status and get launched our lives in a different direction is the feeling that we should have done it 10 years ago.

And we've lost our energy and now we can't do it.

But 10 years from now, we're going to think the same thing about this very moment today.

And like, so whoever's listening to this right now, I think you've told me you get like over 100 ,000 listeners.

I bet half of them have already turned off because I don't know what your shows probably usually a lot better than this.

But no, this is awesome.

I write with that same insecurity every day, by the way.

But you know, whoever is listening right now, like whatever you think you could have done five or 10 years ago to change the direction of your life, like you can do that right now today, and make that deflection point that decision, like, you can't get there in one day, but I'm going to start nudging.

It's like, there's a if there was a meteor coming towards the earth, you don't need to blow it up, you just need to get like a rocket up there that can just put a little bit of energy into this massive amount of momentum heading this way.

And if you can just maintain that consistent energy in one direction, it's incredible what you could deflect over a long period of time.

And for me, like just one hour a day of writing, you'll write a novel in a year guaranteed.

And if you don't care about the quality of that novel, it'll be better than you think.

And then you'll learn that an hour of editing a day can make that novel into something that a lot of people want to read.

And you don't sit down and do that in a day, just like you don't sail around the world in a day, you just look at the horizon and be like, I'm gonna I can sail that far.

And even as even as a young boy, in a sunfish, I could sail to the horizon.

And sailing around the world is just doing that over and over again.

And writing a novel is just writing a paragraph that is legible, that tells a story is nice and clean is in your voice, which is how you write emails to your friends.

You do that one paragraph at a time and you will write a book.

And I think the the feeling that we know we should have made these better decisions earlier, for some reason, instead of learning from that, it actually paralyzes us.

It makes us feel like all the moments in my life where I could have seized the opportunities ahead of me are all gone.

And I guarantee in another five or 10 years, you're going to look back at today as the day that you had the free time, the inclination, the talent to change your life.

And it's, of course, not going to be writing for most people is going to be learning a second language, exercising, getting a better relationship with your mother or brother or sister or whatever, whatever thing that you think is missing from your life.

Learning to cook, I mean, it can just be something enjoyable that you've been putting off forever, you're putting it off right now.

And that history of putting something off just gets worse over time until we realize that, hey, what's the what's the me from in 10 years going to think about what I did today?

And that gave that gives me a lot of power to think about that future self.

That works in a lot of things, too, like relationships that are terrible for you that you know, maybe they're they're sort of like too good to leave, but too bad to stay in at the same time.

You know, you're gonna look back in five years wondering like, why didn't I do anything five years ago?

And I think it reminded me when you were talking of the French proverb, I think it's French anyway, which was like the best time to have planted a tree is like 10 years ago, but the second best time is today.

I love that I've never heard of that before, but that totally sums up.

Yeah, a lot of my thinking about this stuff.

What's your writing process for a book?

So you get an idea walk me through all the way until that becomes something that I can read in my hands.

Most of the most of my writing takes place away from the keyboard.

So it helped working in a bookstore for years while I was writing because I was, you know, having to walk around in dust shelves and reshelves books and, and do very like quiet wrote tasks, and the whole time I'm doing them, I can daydream about my story in the world that I'm thinking of next.

And often, I'm building out several worlds and stories in my mind at the same time.

And I'll just seize on whichever one's interesting to me in my head, and kind of think about that world and those people and what's going to happen next.

And the first time I started doing this was when I was working on yachts in my 20s.

I was a yacht captain for about 10 years.

And I would have these really long days of just staring at the horizon with the boat on autopilot looking at sensors and the GPS to make sure nothing bad happened, and gives you a lot of free time to daydream.

And so it's much easier to write when you know what's going to happen when you've built out the world ahead of time and had all these conversations with your characters ahead of time.

So that's the first part of my writing process is basically daydreaming that the very thing that used to get me in trouble when I was in school, when I was actually preparing for a career.

Oh, man, there's so many things that we used to get in trouble for in school that turn out to be like huge advantages in life.

Totally. Yeah. There's a really good TED talk.

One of my favorite TED talks is about a guy.

It's a British guy who's I'll try to send you the link in case you want to add it to the podcast or whatever.

But he's talking about how we need to have more freedom in schools to let people figure out what their strengths are.

And if we see someone dabbling in something, and we're like, no, you're supposed to be learning this, like, no, they want to be learning that.

Let's push them in that direction and see how far they can take it, and how much more effective our school systems would be if we had that kind of attitude towards learning.

And someone if someone saw me as a kid that had been like, you know, give this kid implements of art, let him draw and paint and and make up stories, because we need storytellers, you know, and someone else who's just like playing on the monkey bars and never wants to leave the playground.

Like that guy's going to be a girl is going to be an Olympic star, a gymnast.

And let's embrace that, like the idea that in some of that's the bias of teachers, right?

Like the people in charge of school or all people ended up teaching.

And if you think about what they're trying to generate, they're trying to generate a whole classroom full of teachers.

They want us all have well -rounded knowledge and be really good at at school stuff.

And that's because the people that we've left in charge of instruction are people who ended up valuing teaching as a career.

And and I say this, my mom was a teacher.

So I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it.

I'm just saying this is the natural bias.

If you put someone around me, they're going to start picking up like a love of board games and comics and sailing things that I'm into.

So I think, you know, having a school system that had more diversity in our expected outcomes would be a great thing.

And I don't know how this is this is how my brain is so flat.

I daydreaming and look at where we are.

But this is this also how my storytelling process works, where I don't know where my story is going to go.

And you'll wander off away and be like, okay, that's not leading someplace interesting.

Where was the last place my story was fascinating to me.

And I'll dial back to that.

Are you doing that as you're writing or you're doing it like as you're daydreaming, like you're backtracking as you're daydreaming, or you've actually like written stuff on the page and like yo, yeah, a lot of both.

But it probably happens more often while I'm in the daydreaming part, because that's where things are just so amorphous, you have a lot of freedom to break things and change things.

I think the hardest part about writing, and the thing that stopped me from finishing books before is that making decisions in the moment while you're writing, I think part of you knows you're making the wrong decision, like even if the book should be in first person or present or past tense, like these

are very big decisions that if you haven't thought about them ahead of time, once you start writing and you make it, you realize, Dang, I wish I could go back and change the gender of my protagonist or change the person or the tense that I'm writing in, making that change is very difficult later.

And that makes it really easy for us to abandon the project.

And so the more the more of the story, the more the decisions that you have ahead of time for me, anyway, everyone, everyone's writing process is different.

Some people can sit down and write once upon a time, and then a whole novel can flow out.

Some people have to outline really heavily.

And for me, I like to basically have a movie that I've seen that no one else has seen.

And it's my favorite movie of all time.

And I want to describe it in such vivid detail to someone who can't watch a movie, they can only read a book.

You know, that's my writing process, like I want this person to see what I've seen and enjoy it as much as I've enjoyed it, and tell that story as clearly as possible.

And yeah, that's that's worked for me.

But man, every time I sit down with a blank page, write another book, I'm like, how did I do that last one?

And it feels daunting.

I'm not sure how I did it and how I'm going to do it this time.

And am I ever going to be able to do it again?

So how many books have you published now?

I don't know, probably close to 20, I would think.

And you still have that, eh?

Oh, yeah. I like each book, I'm like, I don't know how I did the last, you know, 19.

And so how am I possibly going to do this?

Because the last experience that I have with the previous book was searching for typos.

It was done. And the experience before that was just minor revisions.

And the experience before that was a little bit of a rewrite.

And so that rough draft is like, so far removed.

And my rough drafts are much rougher than my finished products.

So as I'm sitting there watching myself write a new rough draft, I'm like, this is terrible.

This is like, worse than anything I've ever written.

How's my mental faculties declining this rapidly?

And it's because I'm, it's been a long time since I've written a rough draft.

It's been like many rounds of revisions of seeing the polished work at the end with with editorial help and other kinds of beta reading.

And my mom giving me advice.

So I'm seeing the last thing I saw my writing was a basically a team effort over many iterations.

And going from that to a rough draft is difficult every single time.

One thing related to that, I think that's the hardest part about being an avid reader and trying to write is that we compare our writing to the great stuff we've been reading.

And we have to not do that.

We have to realize that this the books that we love also existed as rough drafts and just embrace the mistakes and the rough nature of our writing.

Don't try to polish that first page to perfection before you move on, you might end up starting the story somewhere different.

So the first the first advice I would give someone about writing is to sit down and write every day.

The second advice I would give is to don't read your writing critically.

That's not what the rough draft is all about.

The rough draft is getting to the end of the story before you start polishing it.

And that's the mistake that I was making for 20 or so years.

I would sit there and just fiddle around with my first chapters over and over and over again and not really improve them any.

I would just be terrified of moving forward and feel like my writing wasn't good enough.

But that's the point.

And then so you take your rough draft, you edit it and revise it.

And then do you send that out to your friends?

Do you send it to your agent?

Do like how do you get feedback on that?

Or do you get feedback on that?

Or do you just go? No, I'd get lots of feedback, I think.

And we can talk about the storytelling tradition and more in depth.

But writing and telling stories was really never done in a vacuum.

For me, my first, when I'm happy with my story, and I can let someone read it, it goes to my mom first, then she would like disown me if I did anything differently.

She bugs me more than my agent does about when am I going to send something new for her to read?

And she'll print the whole thing out, get a red pen and just go through and demolish it.

And mail me a stack of pages.

And I'll get through and incorporate these changes and try to make the book better for my mom.

And then it'll go out to some beta readers and my editor.

And each book's been a little different with how many beta readers I'll use or if I'll use them at all.

And eventually my agent will get it once it's pretty much ready to publish.

And she's actually gotten, I think I get on her nerves some because I assume she's too busy for me.

And so I don't bug her with almost anything.

And she's always telling me, you should bug me more.

Let me know when you've written something.

Sometimes I'll publish something and forget to tell her.

And because I don't think it's good enough for her to shop around and she'd be like, why didn't you tell me?

We can go get a film deal with this and we can get foreign publishers to publish this.

But eventually my agent will get a copy and then usually by then it's already in reader's hands of self -published and people are already devouring it.

What sort of feedback do you seek from beta readers?

Are you asking them what works but it doesn't like where they get lost or confused?

What specific questions are you asking them for?

Yeah, I've been a beta reader for other people and they've sent a document that's very detailed about what they want.

And I haven't really done that with my beta readers.

I kind of want them to share what they're good at spotting.

And I don't want people to say I'm looking for typos when someone's really good at spotting plot holes and terrible at seeing typos.

So like here's a book as I would publish it and like what do you think?

And some people will come back and be like, I think it's great.

And I ignore that advice.

I assume that they're too easily pleased.

And then I'll have people say like, just send me a list of all the typos they find and someone say I was confused in this spot.

And someone say, I was kind of bored.

And for those people, I might be like, do you remember where you got bored or when you stopped reading and when you lost interest?

So for each beta reader, I'll get something different.

My mom is really good at highlighting passages that she thinks I need to make clear.

She'll also highlight stuff she says I'm not allowed to change like things that she loves.

And she doesn't give out.

She's probably my biggest fan.

She loves my writing, but she doesn't hold back like she demolishes my stuff.

Moms are the best. They're the best.

It's like unconditional love.

But here's what I think unfiltered.

Totally. Totally. Yeah, my mom's great about that and has been since I was a kid, like very permissive, like the letters do stuff.

But if we messed up, we'd make sure we knew that we messed up.

So great, great parenting style, I think.

So yeah, I get something different for everybody.

And I think that's I learned that from being a part of a writing group, which I highly recommend any aspiring writer to join a writing group.

If you don't have one locally, see if you can start one.

If not, there's plenty online, but you learn that everyone, every other writer has something unique to contribute to your process and try to embrace that and get as many people involved as possible.

And then so talk to me about publishing, like you are one of the actually, you're the only person that I know of that keeps their electronic rights.

I want to dive into this publishing world, which is largely, you know, a black hole to everybody else.

And you know, I probably have a toe in it now.

And you're fully immersed in it.

So I'm hoping I can learn a lot about this conversation about the publishing industry.

But walk me through sort of like some of your, some of what's available, your decisions, and why you've made those decisions.

Yeah, I was very, very lucky that I started writing, I finished my first novel, I think, in like 2008 or 2009.

And I think that Kindle came out the same year, just a bit after I'd written a book, I think maybe the first Kindle come out just before I'd, I'd published my first book.

So the first publishing contract I got was with a very small press.

And the tools that they were going to use to publish were very different than the tools they would have used a few years before they were going to put an ebook edition online, which they could do through the Kindle direct publishing system.

And anybody can start up a small press, you can just, you know, incorporate a name and publish under this publishing imprint.

And you're now a small publisher in addition to being a writer.

And so I was publishing with this press and they were using not only ebook distribution, but print on demand technology, which has really matured.

And used to be if you wanted to publish your own book, you'd have to order this massive printing of thousands of copies and they'd sit in boxes in your basement and how are you going to distribute them?

You know, you got to like either mail them out directly or go to bookstores and try to get them placed.

It was just a nightmare.

And now there are several print on demand companies, Amazon being, I think, one of the best because they're integrated with the biggest bookstore in the world.

And you there's no upfront costs, you just upload a PDF, which is a type of document that prints exactly as it looks on the screen.

There's no flowing of words on different pages, like every page is fixed, even to the size that it's going to print on.

And when someone orders your book, and think about it from the perspective of the shopper, they don't know any of this is happening.

They just go to an Amazon page, here's a book with some reviews, or some friend has told them about it, they want to copy, they click order.

And what happens in the background is there's a big printing press, but the biggest one is in Charleston, South Carolina.

But a lot of the Amazon distribution centers have these printing presses inside them as well.

And a little electronic code gets sent someone ordered this book, they all have the PDF in their machines, they print the pages, bind them, print the cover, glue the cover on and ship that book out in the same day that it was ordered, which is just unbelievable.

And the quality is very similar to what you would get if you did a massive offset print run in China, and ship these books overseas.

And I just when I found out about this, I fell in love with the process actually went and toured the printing facility in Charleston, which Amazon doesn't let a lot of people do it, but I'm I can be very annoying and get my way if I'm persistent.

And I'm just fascinated with the because I was a bookseller for years.

And I've had a hand in pulping unsold books, and just the waste of this book was like shipped from China to the US, to a distribution facility, then to a retailer like me, then I would send it back to a place where it would try to be sold as a discount book, and then it would not sell there to be sent

to another place where it'd be pulled.

And it used to be there would be burned, like you people were boxes of unsold books that were thrown into furnaces.

That's how the book industry worked for a while.

So I'm looking at this print on demand technology, it's like, oh my god, this thing, the only thing we move around is the ink and the paper and you get the exact book you need, where you need it, as efficiently as possible, with no upfront cost to the writers.

It's unbelievable. So learning all of this stuff through publishing my first book, I realized, man, there's nothing my publisher is doing, I can't do for myself.

Most of these services are one time costs like editorial, cover art, the pagination, the layout of the words on the page, they do that once and then they keep more for every sale than I get as the writer.

And that just seemed crazy to me.

So when I got an offer for the sequel, I said, actually, I think I'll publish it on my own.

And if I could, I'd like to buy the rights back to my first book, which is what I did.

And from that point forward, just the economics of it didn't make any sense to me to go with a major publisher, I didn't think I was going to write a book that could blow up because I've been a bookseller for years.

And I saw Random House put a million dollars into the launch of a book and it just be a dud.

I knew that no publisher could guarantee me that I would have a hit no matter what they sell you when they sign you.

If they had that ability, they'd have hits all the time.

And they're very rare.

So I knew I didn't have the hubris that I was gonna write, you know, the next Harry Potter, which is what a lot of writers have and why they want to get a publisher, they feel like their book is gonna be that big.

I never believed that about any of my books, which helped me in the long run.

And yeah, so I started publishing my own stuff, because I get to keep more of the money, I had more control about what I wrote next, I didn't have to get trapped into, you know, writing about this one character over and over and over again, I could write any kind of genre without a publisher saying,

Yeah, we're not sure that'll sell and never had those conversations, which was the creative freedom that provided was worth, you know, going on on my own alone.

I've been able to write in a lot of genres, I started writing young adult space opera.

And and it did well enough that if I had been with a publisher, they would have insisted that I only publish that stuff, when what really took off for me was an adult dystopian novel called wool.

And I never would have been had the freedom to write that book.

Even JK Rowling didn't have the freedom to write under her whole name, her own name when she wanted to change genres, she had to write under this Galbraith student M.

So it's like creatively dampening to to be with a major publisher.

There are advantages, I'm not saying publishers aren't good at some things.

I'm just saying that for starting off her career and figuring out who I was as a writer, and learning the ropes, there was nothing better than than self publishing.

What are some of the things that publishers bring to the table that maybe you wouldn't have thought of going into it?

Yeah, that's difficult because almost anything like they're great at distribution and reaching bookstores.

But that's only true because of how the relationship with publishers and bookstores that's evolved over time.

bookstores are hesitant to order self published titles unless they see history of sales or, you know, see them on bestseller lists in the on the ebook side or the people are walking in saying, Why can't I find this book, they'll eventually order it, but they won't do it ahead of time.

They order from catalogs and they have sales reps who come in and say like, this is the title we're most excited about.

And the shell's up kind of pressures bookstores into stocking certain things.

And then bookstores end up restocking the things that are selling well and not taking a chance on other stuff.

So publishers are good at getting a book a book a chance in a bookstore, where it might not get that chance, if it's self published.

But that doesn't really guarantee anything.

And that chance is a very small window.

Usually, we would leave a book on the shelf for three to six months before we would take it off, send it back and put something else on the shelf.

So if you if you spend years writing a novel, and you think like this is my one shot, and you go to publisher, you're only going to give it a three to six month window to make it before no one will ever touch it again.

And because of the lack of sales in that very brief window, maybe no one ever publishes you again.

So anytime I can come up with like a positive for a publisher, I can think of the way that there's a weakness inherent in that and an advantage to self publishing.

I've done deals with publishers though, like I love the relationship that I have with a lot of my publishers.

One thing they do really well is handle their local markets in a way that I can't if I'm just publishing for the US market.

Like I'm here in Australia, my bookstore, my book is in bookstores here in Brisbane and Sydney, and most of the places I go into, I can find a copy of my book to sign for the bookstore.

And I would never be able to do that from a distance or translate it into German or Japanese.

And that's an incredible service that publishers provide.

But honestly, anything I can think of as a benefit like the editorial process, I would much rather choose my own editor than sign with a publisher and just get stuck with whatever editor they assign to me.

And I think freedom of choice is better than economies of scale.

I like that saying freedom of choice is better than economies of scale.

That's going to stick with me for a second.

Walk me through, you sell your books now, but you don't sell your electronic rights.

Do you sell audio and physical distribution and foreign translation, or how does that work?

Yeah, that's kind of the thing that got me on the radar from the publishing side.

The people are really geeks about publishing news.

When Will took off, I was working in a bookstore, and this short story I wrote went up the charts.

And I fleshed that into a novel by writing four more parts and combining them into stories like serialized novel and the way Dickens used to publish, I guess.

And when the novel hit the New York Times bestseller list as a self -published ebook, I started getting a lot of interest from agents and publishers.

And I was lucky in a few ways.

One, I was living a very simple lifestyle.

I was debt free, had a very small house.

I didn't need the money.

So I wasn't going to be swayed by an advance.

The second thing is I didn't need the validation from a publisher because I was already getting it from readers who were writing reviews on Amazon that I would read every day, like how much they loved this story, and people were contacting me by email.

I had my email in the back of the book, and I was hearing directly from readers all over the world.

And so having an editor tell me, I love your stuff, which probably would have done that would have worked on me if I hadn't had anyone else tell me they loved it.

And that's just part of the self doubt you have as a writer, you just like getting my mom to love one of my books is such a great feeling.

And I think a lot of new writers get trapped into publishing contracts, just because like hearing from someone who's an expert in industry, how great their work is, is very enticing, right?

I was able to avoid the money trap and the ego trap, and continue enjoying my stream of sales, while publishers were always missing the boat with their advance offer.

So the way it works is a publisher offers you a lump sum of money to get their lifetime rights in all the rights, they're going to get the print rights, the digital, the audio, the foreign rights, by offering you a typical advance might be like 15 to $25 ,000 for a book, a $50 ,000 advance would be a big

deal, six figures is like crazy.

And then, you know, the seven figure deals that everyone dreams about are so astronomically rare, it's not the time I was getting like a $50 ,000 advance, I was making so much from self publishing that that was like an insult to me and my agent, you know, I was, I would, I would earn that in a month

from my ebook sales.

And I got I was really lucky that publishers were behind on what the potential was of the digital rights.

And if anyone had made the offer that they made later early, I would have buckled.

And I'm only so strong.

By the time we got six figure offers, I was making six figures a month just on the ebook sales.

And by the time a publisher finally made a seven figure offer and offered over $1 million for the series, I'd already made $1 million of my own.

And I really fortunate that it happened that they were that they were slower than readers were to cop on to the series, because I seriously would have not been strong enough had those late offers come early on in the process, I never would have assumed that the book would have continued to sell the way

it did. So what I was able to do from all of that is maintain my ebook rights as I was seeing how powerful they were.

And basically, they got too valuable for me to ever sell.

And I jack up the price to protect their other ebooks.

And this is something a lot of authors don't think about your competition for them, like the people that own your book, your book competes with their latest greatest thing that they want to do well.

So they're not going to promote it as heavily later, they're not going to discount it, because they don't want a cheap book of their own to compete with an expensive book they just released.

And man, that's an eye opening realization when these people that you sign your lifetime rights server don't have your best interest in heart for the entire length of breath of your career.

It's only during that launch window, really.

I just sort of discovered this whole kindle pricing thing where if your book is priced above 999, your royalty rate changes to 30 % instead of 70%.

So if it's 999 or under, you get 70 % of sort of if you're self published, you get 70 % of the price.

So any book basically, any Kindle copy price between, you know, $10 and basically like $21 is a lot like people are losing money on that compared to pricing it at 999.

If they're self published, the publishers have a different pricing scheme.

So they'll continue to make the same royalty.

But what Amazon is so they get the same royalty, they get the 70 % through Amazon the whole way.

So it's just self published that Kindle treats differently.

Yeah, but those publishers don't get 70%.

They it's a completely different structure, they get like a wholesale price.

And so, yeah, it's very, very complicated the difference between what publishers get and what self published authors get.

But they have a fixed percentage.

Where what Amazon what Amazon would love is for no publisher to to charge more than 999 for an ebook like they've they decided that 999 was the max that you should pay for an digital book.

And publishers was a huge fight over this this like was consumed the publishing world for a couple of years and led to an antitrust suit against Apple that Apple lost and the publishers that colluded with Apple lost as well and had to basically uh yeah change their their policies for a while.

But they're back to where they wanted to be where they have control of pricing.

And what Amazon can control is how they incentivize the the pricing process for self published authors because we signed a contract with them and we're not gonna we don't have enough power to collude with an apple and and and try to change that.

But it's logical to me so I don't I don't begrudge Amazon at all.

They think ebooks should be between 299 and 999 and if you price it there they'll give you 70 percent.

If you price it below 299 hey you're welcome to do that but they're gonna pay you 35 percent which is half.

If you price it over 999 again your royalty is going to get cut in half.

And so it's just an incentive for for from them for you to price the ebook where they want the customer experience to be.

And I think it makes sense for a company to have those kind of guidelines and still allow you the freedom to make the choice however you want.

But it does it does really compress all the self -publishing price to be in that 299 to 999 range.

You've sold millions of copies.

What have you learned about pricing on the Kindle or electronic pricing in terms of selling books?

I haven't learned as much as a lot of other self -published authors because there's so many brilliant self -published authors out there who do spreadsheets and they they price pulls, they experiment, they they'll do AB comparisons over time.

Really some brilliant people especially in the the romance and erotica realm where you've got some of the savviest business minds just making a killing because they treat this as a business and they're very logical about it.

I use sorry about that background noise that's a a pump in my boat going off.

I've always devalued my work which I think is work to my benefit because I would rather someone take a chance on one of my short stories at 99 cents or even a you know I've done novels at 99 cents before even though I'm not making much money on it I want to get a chance to get hooked on my writing and my characters

and my story. I found somewhere in the 499 range what I remember paying for a mass market paperback when I was a kid and I know you know the dollar is not what it used to be but I still feel like like five bucks isn't a big ask for someone to get a novel's worth of reading.

I have books all over the place but like between 299 and 699 is where I'm comfortable asking someone to take one of my novels.

And I think you just made wool free didn't you or was that like in the last year or something?

The first part of wool which it's the short story that that launched my career that's been free for years now probably seven years you can read the first part of the book and there's a lot of and I do it's not like I don't think about the things I I spend a lot of time thinking about the psychology

of pricing and reading.

I would rather someone read something for free because if they don't like it they don't feel like they're not likely to write a bad review because what can they say like I'm I feel ripped off like I didn't pay anything I didn't enjoy this.

And so there's a bit of a sifting mechanism there if someone enjoys it they're likely to buy the next part of the story which is only 99 cents and they're inclined to write a good review and tell people about it and convince their friend like what do you have to lose it's free you know give it a try.

Have you noticed a major sales increase in all the other books in the series?

Yeah I did when I first started doing this but then I had I think it was just one one email from a reader who was like you know I have to click five times to read this book like why don't you just put them into one file and make it a novel and so when I did that more people started saying just pay the $4

.99 or whatever for this for this ebook and the the freemium kind of system that I'd set up for wool initially kind of fell out of the wayside and the individual parts just fell down the charts as the novel climbed up the charts.

So I don't know how much effect it has now I don't look at my sales dashboard at all anymore.

It's a trap you fall into early on self -publishing like watching every sale and tracking your weekly and daily and monthly streams but then I found if the stream goes up a little bit you feel it puts you in a good mood but it doesn't last if the sales dip at all for whatever reason the the despondency

that kicks in is just paralyzing and getting hooked on that cycle of checking your sales I think it's it's probably a process that every writer has to go through but I encourage writers to like get off of that as quickly as possible.

If you needed to know for income reasons just like look at your statement at the end of the month and plan your expenses and your and everything accordingly.

If you're trying to do a promotion and you need to track sales just try to do it dispassionately but now I can't even tell you what how many people are downloading my free book versus individual books because yeah I just found it healthier not just to ignore all that stuff honestly.

Are you purely an artist when it comes to this or are you also a businessman like are you you mentioned some people in the romance and sort of erotica space are a little bit more savvy about how they go about positioning the book or maybe selling or marketing it do you do any of that have you done any

of that and you just don't do it now?

Yeah I would say it's a pretty even mix I'm probably more the business and marketing side I'm so fascinated by that I probably do more of that than I give myself credit for.

Yeah I think about everything like just as I think I know and really early on when I was just starting my career I knew more about publishing than publishers who were the biggest in the world who had been doing it forever because I was questioning everything and they were very ossified in their thinking

for instance when I published with Simon and Schuster they categorized my one of my books under just science fiction on the Amazon store and I knew from experimenting that the way the categories worked is the parent categories were inherited by the child categories which sounds confusing but the way

it works is if you put your book in you know general books dash science fiction dash general dash dystopia then your book shows up in every one of those categories they're all inherited so if you're browsing the general books bestseller list and if your book is in the top 100 it shows up on that list

it also shows up in the science fiction list and the general science fiction list and the dystopia list and this is a a free way of making your book show up on multiple bookshelves in a bookstore which anyone would want if you could do that for free where you walk into a bookstore and and as shoppers

are turning their head everywhere they look there's a copy of your book this is an unqualified great thing and I had like eight emails back and forth with Simon and Schuster trying to explain to them and I had no this is because I'd done a deal with them now they have access to the metadata on the back

end and they can control how this appears I cannot get them to understand that by making this one change they would make basically duplicate copies of the book on all these other virtual bookshelves absolutely free it's going to keep doing what they want it to do but it's going to do more stuff and there's

more opportunities for people to stumble upon it and this was eye -opening for me because I realized like this was really early on in my career I realized that I couldn't get not only did I know more than them and I'm a pretty clear writer and explainer like I was really laying out why this is a good

thing and I could not convince the people of this publisher to to do this thing that like I think you understand even after me talking about it briefly that this is like it'd be crazy not to do this and it took like getting my agent involved and getting kind of like if you don't do this you know we

can't have a business relationship and now they understand you know now enough time has passed and they've experimented and they would do this with all of their books and then all publishers now fight with Amazon to get extra categories even but early on I realized man I'm just using logic I'm more

savvy on the business side and the marketing side than these major publishers so yeah that's always been I was a bookseller for years I was always trying to sell strangers books and when I everything I learned doing that was something I was able to employ with selling my own books.

What do you do with audio rights?

I used to sell published audiobooks and that's been that was really lucrative.

It's amazing the growth curve on audiobooks.

Now I'm happy to do deals with the publishers and sell them off.

It's actually it's might be counterintuitive but now that I don't need the money I can do more deals with publishers because it's it might be more lucrative if I like put all the extra work into it myself but I don't need the extra money and I'm happy to have publishers do the work for me even though

I'm going to make less per sale so it's it's weird how my my success has allowed me to use publishers even though it's probably it's not the best thing to maximize my income but it maximizes my free time and it still gets the story available to readers so now I deal lots of deals with publishers and it's

mostly because I can afford to which is kind of a weird it's a weird situation like you would think it'd be the other way around.

Is there anything weird that you like put in your contract that would be non -standard or somebody would look at and go oh man I wish I would have thought of that?

Yeah really crazy stuff like probably the thing that I don't think many people in the publishing world realize what I did with what my agent really did with with wool that we've now done with some other books is we've put a time that the rights revert back to me and rights reversion is a really tricky

thing in publishing most of it's based on whether or not the book is still in print and now publishers can so what rights reversion means when publishers take your rights they get it for like your lifetime plus another certain number of years you're never going to see your rights back unless there's

a reversion clause and most publishing contracts have them but they're laughable they usually just say as long as the book is in print the publisher retains the rights and we talked about print on demand earlier now publishers can just move this book from an offset print run of thousands of copies at a time

just to make it available as a pod a print on demand book and then it's still in print and now yeah it's in print forever and you'll never get your rights back so the change people said made was like well we want to see it actually selling so they made the clause say the book has to sell a certain number

of copies over a certain time period to show that it's still a active product for us and we get to keep the rights well those numbers are ridiculous it's like I've seen contracts where it's like if we sell 25 copies over six months we get to keep the rights and at some point especially now that self

-publishing is a viable competitor to publishers it makes sense for them to buy 25 copies you know to use as door stops around the office or just give away to a school or burn to keep a competitor off the market and so a lot of these reversion clauses are just terrible for the writers and writers aren't

thinking about this when they're signing contracts they're just excited and they think this publisher wants to sell millions of copies the way I do so they're always going to work on my behalf instead of realizing that hey in six months they're gonna be working on someone else's behalf more than yours

if you didn't get lucky so one of the things we did we set up like the book reverts on this date and we were able to say no to every other offer and meanwhile we're selling lots of copies and making lots of money and publishers are being left out so eventually publishers are like okay we'll do this deal

and we get the book for five years say well wool is still selling really really well in print in by Simon Schuster in bookstores and next year I'm gonna get the rights back and it doesn't matter that the book is selling well it doesn't matter that it's still in print like we have in the contract the date

that I get the rights back and when we did a print -only deal with Hoofden Mifflin Harcourt for shift and dust the sequels to this book we timed it so that we get the rights back to those books at the same about the same time we get the rights back to wool so I don't this has happened in publishing before

but in a year I'm gonna have the rights to three books that are still selling really well and how that's gonna play out I don't we don't know because no one's really done it but like the book is gonna be on the shelf and now I own the rights and we can take it to other publishers and say like who wants

these three books and I can say like I've worked with publishers that have treated me really really fairly and they're gonna have like first crack at getting these proven perennial sellers and do another deal and maybe we do another five years but this has been a dream for a lot of writers and agents

to get these kinds of like limited time deals I think has another another author who told me really early on that this is the future of publishing these kinds of deals we hadn't seen them so we fought for them and we were able to get them so that's that's just one example of something that is non -standard

that by having success in self -publishing and being able to say no to every contract we were able to get something that really hadn't been done before what are some of the other examples of terms or clauses that you might tweak in a contract that wouldn't be so obvious to other people price limits so I

negotiate like what the e -book pricing it can be in the contract again assuming the publisher is gonna do the best thing for you at all times it's just a mistake you have to be like loving and trusting on one side but very adversarial when it comes to actually setting up the contract you don't even

know who's gonna own that contract down the road there's so much merging and acquisition in the publishing space that saying well I really have a good feeling for this editor and I'm going to trust that person I've had three editors on wool at Simon & Schuster over the years because people leave and go

to something else so don't think with your heart when you're making these contracts like lay out what you the decisions that you would make if you're a self -published writer so for the price I don't want my ebooks price so high that people will take a chance on them and there's a lot of pushback with publishers

on it they want to be able to have the freedom to make it $14 .99 which I think is a crazy price for a digital book that you can't resell or hand off to a friend or dog ear you know it's not it's not printed there should be ebooks should cost less the physical cost from like virtually nil for ebooks

right so you would think the difference between the e -book and physical book the price would be a lot but it's actually you know maybe a couple of dollars with the printing and shipping and all that the most of the cost is the overhead they have for their you know stupid building in in Manhattan which is the dumbest

place to set up a publishing empire but that's what they've decided to do it and the editorial costs and the promotion and marketing and all that take up a bunch of the budget but the physical cost is there and the fact that you can't treat it into a bookstore or sell it or give it to a friend you know

that should be priced into the value of the e -book so in contracts I'll say like I don't want but it's a high number for me and that's part of the negotiation process and I think it should be for most authors I think price limits should be in every publishing contract but I think there almost none of them

is there anything else that comes to mind farming out things individually giving worldwide rights to publishers now is crazy because the the world market is getting more and more lucrative so I'll do deals just in North America basically and that lets me do separate like wool is with Random House in the UK

and here in Australia New Zealand and basically worldwide English and the book is different the it's localized for the for the for Queens English basically instead of American English and they know the market better and putting them in charge of it instead of having someone in America shop that out

to subsidiaries it's not only make sure a better product it makes for better business sense so I've done like amazing deals in Brazil you know sixty thousand dollar advances which I would have been gaga for in the North America with my first books and here I'm getting it from a country that is exploding

with interested new readers and I had no idea that was a market and we've done we've now done deals in over 40 countries and doing them individually has maximized the decisions we made for instance in in Taiwan we went with a very small publisher it's a one -man operation literally like one guy runs

the whole business and does the translation everything he's a dinosaur yeah he's amazing one does like two books a year and he he was offering the least amount of money but I had a foreign agent who just works the Asian market who said like we're really lucky to have this person involved he's he's considered

a poet by the publishing industry there and by readers and though people will buy the book just because he's the one who translated it and he's in my agent my Asian agent said I we've got bigger offers from other people but I would recommend we go with this person now if I was with a publisher they

would have gone with the biggest offer but I was at the freedom to take a chance and sure enough my agent nailed it a year later I get invited to be like flown first class to Taiwan to go to book fairs and sign books and riff we're like why is why in the world am I going to Taiwan and we found out like

wool was the number one selling book that year in Taiwan and easing yeah it became the best -selling work of science fiction in the history of the Taiwan market so I had no idea this was happening like I landed in Taiwan and there's people like with books waiting for me to sign them my my driver like

had a copy and people at the hotel waiting I've never had this level of success comparatively anywhere in the world and that never that experience and and my popularity with Taiwanese readers never would have happened had publishers been in charge of my foreign rights so again it goes back to that freedom

thing and self -publishing used to be thought of as the last resort for writers now publishing contracts are the last resort because as long as you own the rights you have the freedom to make any decision you want down the road you can still sign with a publisher if you want but once you do you no longer

have any choice once you've signed with a publisher they own those rights for whatever the contract stipulates and your decisions are now over so if you think about your decision tree what used to be the last resort self -publishing because no one else would take it that's now the place of the most freedom

and most choice and all you can do from there is winnow your decision tree down till you have no choice and and just from that reason alone forget the economic advantages the creative advantages just from the decision tree self -publishing makes the most sense for where to start your career and then

there could be factors that make you decide to give up those rights like you write that first book and you're like I'm going to self -publish no matter what because I've read all these blogs about self -publishing it's the best thing and then someone reads your rough draft and says I'll give you 10 million dollars

to publish this if you still self -publish you're crazy like you're right there's there's always a reason to go with a publisher you know if if it makes sense but to start there is basically saying I don't want any more freedom over what happens with my artwork for the rest of my life plus years after that and that has never

made sense to me thank you for being so open and honest about what it's like behind the scenes here this has been an amazing conversation I want to thank you so much for your time and I know you're sitting on a boat watching the sun come up in Australia right now so yeah it's pretty cool yeah maybe

uh if I come back on we'll talk about the sailing part oh yeah man I can I can geek out about anything thanks for having me on man it's been awesome really appreciate it Hey guys this is Shane again just a few more things before we wrap up you can find show notes at fernamstreetblog .com slash podcast

that's f -a -r -n -a -m -s -t -r -e -e -t -b -l -o -g .com slash podcast you can also find information there on how to get a transcript and if you'd like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food go to fernamstreetblog .com slash newsletter this is all the good stuff I found on the web that week

that I've read and with close friends books I'm reading and so much more thank you for listening

[Wayfinding, Creative Freedom, and the Future of Publishing with Hugh Howey]-[#63 Hugh Howey: Winning at the Self-publishing Game]

📋 Summary

Navigating Life and Literature: Insights from Hugh Howey

The Art of Wayfinding as a Life Philosophy

Universal Human Nature and Cultural Immersion

The Paradox of Technology and Connection

The Writing Process: From Daydreaming to Discipline

Mastering the Publishing Landscape

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript