Hugh Howey's Blog, page 73
February 24, 2013
London Meet-Up (And signing)!
My first international Meet-Up! Enough Londoners have asked for one, so we’re putting something together. It’ll be Sunday night, March 3rd. The location has yet to be determined, but it’ll be that night somewhere in London, so clear your schedule. And start rounding people up. I want this to be the best Meet-Up yet (my editor will be there, and I’d hate to disappoint him).
Update: My official book signing will be at the Piccadilly Waterstones on Thursday at 2:00. I might be doing something there at 1:00 as well. I would call them ahead of time to make sure. Now tell everyone you know in London to be there — and to get out and buy a book! 
London Meet-Up!
My first international Meet-Up! Enough Londoners have asked for one, so we’re putting something together. It’ll be Sunday night, March 3rd. The location has yet to be determined, but it’ll be that night somewhere in London, so clear your schedule. And start rounding people up. I want this to be the best Meet-Up yet (my editor will be there, and I’d hate to disappoint him).
February 23, 2013
I Hope NYC Doesn’t See This…
…because I have a new metropolitan love affair. Berlin is amazing. It’s hip, vibrant, easy to get around, and just drop-dead gorgeous. I had last night and all day today free, and I really made the most of it. Spent last night seeing the remnants of the wall, Checkpoint Charlie, and the Wall museum, then walked through old East Berlin, which reminded me of the East Village in NY. Awesome little shops, cafes, bars, bakeries. There’s even a bookstore that ONLY sells science fiction and fantasy. My heart fluttered.
At night, the city absolutely glows. And while you can disappear underground in the U-Bahn, it’s the S-Bahn that makes this a city like no other. For much of its stretch, these aboveground trains glide through the city a few meters above the streets. The stations are huge glass domes, so even when you stop “inside” you are still “outside.” Museums fly by just a few paces away. Old buildings and new buildings. Snowy streets. Rivers. Berlin is extremely spread out, which makes it feel uncrowded, and yet it’s a cinch to get around.
The best part is the German people. Berliners, especially. Yes, they run from me and my camera, but it’s hard to blame them. What’s incredible about this place is how most people play by the rules, which means the rules are set up to reward the law-abiding rather than treat everyone like criminals. When you get on and off the train, there are no turnstiles to swipe your ticket through (which it doesn’t read, and then you bang into the bar and bruise your thigh, and the person behind you gets all annoyed, and someone else is waiting to exit from the other side). You simply buy your ticket yourself, stamp it yourself, and then walk on and off trains, subways, trolleys, and buses for the rest of the day.
Theoretically, someone could ask to see your ticket. (“Papers,” I imagine them saying). But I haven’t seen it happen. What I see are people who stand on a street corner with no traffic in sight — boulevards empty for blocks in either direction — waiting for the walk signal to turn green. Only then do they cross.
Taxis drive you around at a sane pace. There is hardly any traffic to speak of. The food is amazing, the museums world-class. I barely got a taste of what this city has to offer, but a love affair has begun. Thanks for having me, Berlin. Now I have to make sure I pick up something for New York while I’m on my way through the airport tomorrow — so she forgives me.
Aced that one…
Well, today was a blast. Four interviews in Berlin. The first was with an Austrian TV channel. I stood in front of a camera with bright lights aimed at me, a red microphone held a few inches from my face, and answered a string of questions. Interestingly, my answers are going to be dubbed over with a German voice rather than subtitled. It’s what they do here. I asked for someone husky with a touch of Bavarian. The assistant made a note of this.
I also had to walk down a hallway and make a turn without looking at the camera. Not once. This is harder than it sounds. A naked woman would’ve been easier to ignore. I concentrated on forcing my arms to swing opposite my legs, as walking gets tricky when you’re on camera. I’m proud to report the job of walking was done with a single take. They said I’m a natural. I didn’t tell them how late I was at walking or being potty trained.
After that, it was three interviews back at the hotel. What a surreal experience. I meet someone in the lobby, we go to a quiet corner of the restaurant, talk for a half hour or an hour, meet the next person. Break for lunch. Meet yet another person. Shockingly, most of the questions didn’t overlap. Even better, I knew all the answers. This is the great thing about being interviewed: they are asking me shit that only I know. I’m pretty sure I got 90% of them right today.
February 21, 2013
SHIFT Limited Edition
I thought I should post this here for the mad collectors among you. Goldsboro Books has just announced a signed, numbered limited edition run of slipcase hardbacks for SHIFT (500 copies). I get emails asking about the WOOL limited edition they did, which sold out all 500 copies in 2 days. I hate that anyone gets left out of these things, so I’m announcing this as soon as I heard about it for those of you who check in here all the time.
http://www.goldsborobooks.com/books/shift-wool-trilogy-2-3572.html
We Don’t Need No Education
My first sight of Germany comes as the pilot banks hard over Berlin. We’ve been in the air for just over nine hours, with nothing but the Atlantic and clouds below. And suddenly there’s a stark white landscape with buildings sticking up out of a dusting of fresh snow. I’ve gone from 80 degrees in South Florida to below freezing in Berlin, and I couldn’t be happier.
I’m met at the airport by my cultural attache. Okay . . . it’s a woman driving a taxi, and she’s not really there for me; she’s there for any fare. But the fates have placed us together, me and this woman with copious amounts of makeup over her wrinkles and other signs of heavy wear. She looks rough, but her rearview mirror is full of smiles. And her taste in music is impeccable.
The entire way to the hotel, she blasts American rock. The first song out of the gate, I shit you not, is Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall. As soon as it comes on, the cab driver says “Good” and cranks the knob (well, she taps the volume button on her phone, which is strapped to the dash — but there’s no tapping of buttons in rock and roll, there’s the cranking of knobs). We dart through traffic and drifting snow and bang our heads and sing much too loudly, feeding off each other’s inability to carry a tune, and I’m thinking how damn perfect this song is for an introduction to Berlin.
In publishing, walls are often spoke of. There are walls and then there are gates through them, manned by the people who we hope might let us pass. “Papers,” they say, which is to ask for a query letter. “Papers,” which means they don’t look at unagented submissions. “Papers,” or: May I see your prior publications?
The last time the walls of publishing crumbled, it wasn’t far from where I sit right now, and it was the best thing to ever happen to publishing. A man named Guttenberg perfected the moveable type printing press, an invention that many were tinkering with and improving, and suddenly publishing was open to exponentially more people. This terrified the clergy and those whose job it was to copy books out by hand, but it was liberating for readers, storytellers, educators, pontificators, and everyone else. The world was changed.
The next great revolution in publishing would come from an unlikely source. In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee invented html, an odd improvement on typesetting if there’s ever been one. With strange brackets and snippets of code, text could displayed across myriad devices. The World Wide Web emerged, and now anyone could publish their thoughts, ideas, and stories to an audience of unprecedented scope. Words could travel near instantaneously to readers anywhere. It was radio without the static and made more permanent. As access to computers grew, the cost of publication diminished to near zero. A library card and a thought — nothing more.
Thirty years later, the e-book revolution begins to etch away at yet another wall. I find it fitting that the code at the heart of every e-book is the same html Berners-Lee invented to display webpages. And while teeth are once again being gnashed, what is good for the writer and the reader will end up being good for the clergy of publishing. Publishing houses are seeing improved profit margins. Readership is up (often measured as the same people reading more titles than ever before). And writership is up (a horrible neologism. I apologize).
E-books are simply another take on moveable type. The same advantages that make it possible for me to publish and distribute hundreds of thousands of books from my pajamas makes it similarly affordable for publishers to do the same millions of times over (mental image of boardrooms full of pajama-clad MFAs). There will be quacks like me printing pamphlets and hawking them on street corners. And there will be embossed collections of Shakespeare’s works and gilded Bibles. And everything in between.
I have five interviews lined up for today here in Berlin and another handful tomorrow. I expect I’ll be asked at least a half-dozen times why I chose to self-publish. The answer is simple: I just happened to be approaching a wall the moment it collapsed. It was simple timing. The same thing happened to all those people who wanted the ability to publish articles and public journals right as html came along. Or those who wanted to crank out a thousand copies of a book just as Gutenberg’s machines were warming up. I’ve always wanted to write. A path opened up. I’m walking it.
Here in Berlin, there are only scraps of the old wall left to go see. More interesting is the outline of the foundation of the wall. It’s embedded in the ground as a band of metal that snakes throughout the city. People step over with little thought a barrier that used to confound millions. And that’s the future for publishing. There will be a period where we scream at the top of piles of rubble and rebar. Some will gather chunks as souvenirs. But a time will come when more and more self-published authors sign with major houses and more and more major publishers self-publish on the side, and the next thing you know, we are moving back and forth in places where people used to demand to see our papers.
I know what I plan on saying today. I self-published because I wanted to be published. That’s it. And suddenly, there were no walls and no gates. There was no reason I couldn’t be published. There was just a storyteller hoping for an audience. There was code that displays words on myriad devices. As soon as these tools were invented, many of us seized them. We were at the right place at the right time, approaching a wall right as it fell.
February 20, 2013
Guten Tag, Berlin!
I landed in snowy Berlin today. Or tomorrow. It’s hard to tell when it is, exactly. I haven’t had jetlag this bad before.
I’ve had a few emails asking if I’ll be doing any signings in Germany. Unfortunately, the book is not yet out, so this will be a visit for interviews and a chance to meet everyone at Piper, my awesome German publisher. Hard to sign books that aren’t available yet.
I’ve been doing a bit of a walkaround with my camera, and I’ve never experienced a more shy people in my life. 99% of the people on the street recoil in horror from me and my camera. This wouldn’t be surprising except that other places I travel, I find most everyone happy to pose for a shot. Here, entreaties to take anyone’s picture is met with more horror than if I’d asked to bed their daughters. There must be some German lore about film robbing a person’s soul. Seriously. If I end up beaten senseless and dead on the streets of Berlin, assume I asked someone if I could take their picture. Maybe “piktchur” means “virginity” in German? Expect to see a lot of shots of the backs of people from this trip.
Anyway, I’ve got today to get used to the time change and to accost strangers with my camera. Tomorrow is going to be a wild one. Five interviews lined up, back to back. The logistics don’t even seem possible, to be honest. It’ll be fascinating to see how this plays out. If I feel half the zombie tomorrow that I feel right now, there’s no telling what I’ll say. Expect nude pictures of me playing billiards in the German tabloids by the weekend.
On Sunday, I fly to the UK. I’ve got some exciting news for Londoners. It looks like a Meet-Up is in the works. It’ll probably be the Sunday after this one. Venue TBD. I’ll also be doing a signing next Thursday in London, will be at The Weekender next weekend (Friday to Sunday morning), and will spend next Wednesday in Ireland.
After this whirlwind, I have a few days at home before the US bookstore launch! Fun times. Stay tuned.
February 16, 2013
February 15, 2013
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.
