Hugh Howey

Bestselling author of Wool and other books. Currently sailing around the world.

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Self-Pubbing Webinar on Monday

If you’ve been following this blog, you know how much I love NaNoWriMo. I participated for the first time in 2009, and I’ve “won” every year since. (Winning is an odd thing to call the completion of the event, unless you’ve been through it. And then you understand how very much surviving this month deserves to be called a “win”).

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. The challenge is to write a 50,000+ word novel in the month of November. It’s brutal and intensely rewarding. Three of my novels were written during NaNo (Half Way Home, The Hurricane, and Third Shift). In 2012, I used NaNo to write Wools 2, 3, and 4.

This past November, I heard from Grant Faulkner, who runs the entire shebang. He had heard that Wool was written during a NaNo, and I filled him in with the details. He then asked if I would write a blog for NaNo 2012. I was more than delighted. Once he read what I wrote, he realized the blog entry wasn’t nearly good enough to run during NaNo, but maybe he could publish it in February when nobody was looking. I was even more delighted!

Okay, that’s not really how it went. Grant had this awesome self-publishing/NaNo Webinar in mind and wanted to release my blog article to coincide with the event. Sarra Cannon, an indie superstar who has sold over 100,000 books in the past year, recently posted this excellent bit on self-publishing. She and I will be joined on the Webinar by Amanda Wilson from CreateSpace and Grant Faulkner himself. The Webinar is this Monday at 8PM EST. You can register right here. It’s gonna be awesome. And your donations go to support an incredible event for young writers.

Oh, and that blog post I wrote for Grant? It finally went up. I doubt it was worth the wait, but here it is.

6 replies to “Self-Pubbing Webinar on Monday”

Hugh, I dearly love these books and the universe you’ve created, I constantly tell friends about this series and your own success story but it seems like madness that we in Australian have to wait over a month just for someone to approve the release of a digital file from someone who is becoming the poster boy of self publishing. There’s still no sign of it on the kindle, I appreciate this is out of your hands but all entertainment industries need to see that this sort of thing drives piracy. Hugh – I want to give you money, why are you not letting me??? :)

Hey Ted, I completely appreciate where you’re coming from. It would frustrate me as well. I believe they’ve set a Feb. 28th release date for that digital file. And while it stinks to have to wait, it should be noted that no publisher that I know of would release the e-book before the physical book. Nobody does this. But Random House UK has been doing this for the Wool series at my behest and because it’s the right thing for the fans. They have to go through and edit the book for British English, and so it moves through a queue with a bunch of other books.

And keep in mind that Australia got the bookstore release before the UK and before the US! I still haven’t seen the work in a bookstore, but it’s been out for two months Down Under. It’s just the nature of a global release that it isn’t always simultaneous. And yet, we are all connected online, so it feels like it should be.

Also: I’m not against piracy. I just hope that anyone who enjoys a work will support it once it becomes available or support the publisher or author with other purchases or word of mouth. My publisher would probably hate to hear this, but nobody flies into a rage when a friend comes over to someone’s home, sees a book on the shelf they want to read, and asks if they can borrow it. We don’t go crazy over used bookstores, which cut the publisher and author out of the transaction completely. At some point, we just have to be happy to have people interested in our works and trust that the exchange will take care of itself.

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Hugh thank you for explaining that, an interesting glimpse in to the working of the publishing industry – and a logical one.

I appreciate that you still take this much time with your site, the effort you put in to your site is exceptional, you have a humility that is utterly deserving of the success you are experiencing. Keep that. It makes me want to spread the word even more than I already do!

Anyway, you *might* be pleased to hear that I now have the hallowed file and you have my word that I will also be acquiring it for a second time via the normal channels just as soon as it is on the kindle store.

Now just hurry up and sign up the video game rights alright!

…Oh the first world and it’s myriad problems eh? :)

Hope the webinar is a success. And I also hope the details of that workshop you put on in November (I think) come out of hiding. :)

PS: I’m sure you meant that in *2011* you wrote WOOL 2, 3, and 4. ;)

Mr. Howey,

I am not one who comments much on anyone’s work. Critics are to me those who have never written/composed anything but piffle, and why not let the reader make up his/her own mind? However, the readers spoke when I read comments on your work. I am only one-third through Wool (the Century UK hardbound edition), and it brings to mind one of the first “sci-fi” novels I read as a youth in the early 80’s…Robert Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky which was based on two of his novellas written more than 70 years ago. Needless to say I am enjoying Wool. Kudos!

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