How to Sell Millions with Self-Publishing — Hugh Howey, Bestselling Author of Wool

Hugh Howey walks Tim Ferriss through the deliberate craft and business decisions behind Wool, including the emotional roller-coaster Q&A he placed at the end of the book that helped make it Amazon's most-reviewed item the year it launched. He explains how he committed to writing in obscurity for ten years, hit the New York Times list as a self-published author, and broke industry norms by insisting on time-limited, print-only deals while keeping all other rights. The conversation covers his daily writing habit, collaboration on TV and film projects, and pricing psychology around avoiding one-star reviews. Later they range widely into AI's coming impact on publishing, existential risk, population decline, religion, free will, and objective moral truth. Throughout, Howey balances short-term optimism with long-term pessimism while reflecting on starting a family.

• Howey engineered an author Q&A at the end of Wool to create an emotional roller coaster and ask readers to leave reviews, which made it the most-reviewed and highest-reviewed item on Amazon the year it came out.
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• He decided to write two books a year for ten years in obscurity, reasoning that after 20 books he would know if he had what it took, and that having a back list before breaking out is a major advantage.
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• Instead of selling all rights, Howey insisted on a five-year print-only deal with Simon & Schuster, keeping digital, audio, and all foreign rights, so he can re-auction the IP every five years.
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• He hit the New York Times bestseller list with a self-published book distributed only through CreateSpace, despite selling roughly 50,000 copies a month, by slipping past gatekeepers who weren't paying attention.
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• Howey priced the Wool ebook at 99 cents and later made the first part free, prioritizing readership and avoiding angry one-star reviews over profit, yet it out-earned all his other books combined.
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• Publishers told him a colleague got phone calls from rival houses blasting them for offering Howey a print-only deal, revealing how uniform and collusive the industry's standard terms are.
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• When Howey offered to give publishers print rights for free in exchange for keeping digital, they refused and instead offered a million dollars for all rights, exposing that they privately knew digital's true value.
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• Howey frames humanity's real existential risk as building a 'button' that could end everyone, citing basement-level CRISPR genetic engineering, dormant simultaneous-activation viruses, and infinite-capacity batteries enabling cheap global drone warfare.
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• Howey's first works of science fiction at age 12 or 13 were Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Ender's Game, read back to back, and his first writing attempt was Hitchhiker's Guide fanfiction.
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• He signed away his first book's rights to a small press for thousands of dollars, then felt sick to his stomach the night he celebrated, and bought the rights back to self-publish.
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• He circumvented the agent route by tweeting in the voice of his character Molly, which led two small presses to discover and make offers on his blog and Twitter feed.
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• The original Wool paperbacks, of which only a few hundred sold before the cover changed, now go for around $1,000 each.
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• Amazon pays 70% royalty on ebooks priced between $2.99 and $9.99, but only 35% outside that range, versus the roughly 15-18% traditionally published authors earn.
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• Howey has done roughly 50 foreign-rights deals for Wool, and in Taiwan chose the lowest bidder, a one-man operation who translates himself, and got the number-one selling book there that year.
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• Howey tried and failed to write for 20 years, from age 12 to 32, before unlocking a daily habit; he used to write 2,000 words a day and now targets 1,000, tracking word counts in his document.
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• His writing breakthrough came from reviewing a book a day for a friend's crime/mystery website, building bookshelves all over his house to hold the flood of free review copies.
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• Howey and writing partner Matt Maddox once pushed five TV/film projects forward in a single day by writing outlines together then splitting acts to write in parallel.
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• Howey and his wife started embryos two days before the recording; he had a vasectomy ('forced extraction') a week earlier and joked he could still feel it.
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