Hugh Howey's Blog, page 86
August 1, 2012
July 31, 2012
Featured on the iBookstore!
What an unbelievable honor! I’m being featured on the front page of the iBookstore this week:
Not too long ago, someone from Apple got in touch to congratulate me on the success of Wool. The book had caught their attention when it appeared near the top of some genre categories, and after doing some digging they decided to spotlight me as an up-and-coming author.
It’s almost enough to make a kid feel legit.
Of course, as soon as I heard this would be happening, I worked to get more of my books on the iBookstore. By the end of the week, all of them should be available. I’ve heard from readers in the past that my website needed links to other outlets other than Amazon, so I’ve worked to add iBookstore links to my Books Page. I also added a nifty widget over there on the sidebar
I can’t thank Apple enough for all they do for independent artists and developers. It’s unbelievable that we are able to self-publish on the iBookstore and be available for hundreds of millions of iPad and iPhone users. Now, I’m wondering if this is finally the excuse I need to get myself an iPad. I mean, it’s product testing, right? Right? Someone help me out here.
Featured on iTunes!
What an unbelievable honor! I’m being featured on the front page of the iBookstore this week:
Not too long ago, someone from Apple got in touch to congratulate me on the success of Wool. The book had caught their attention when it appeared near the top of some genre categories, and after doing some digging they decided to spotlight me as an up-and-coming author.
It’s almost enough to make a kid feel legit.
Of course, as soon as I heard this would be happening, I worked to get more of my books on the iBookstore. By the end of the week, all of them should be available. I’ve heard from readers in the past that my website needed links to other outlets other than Amazon, so I’ve worked to add iBookstore links to my Books Page. I also added a nifty widget over there on the sidebar
I can’t thank Apple enough for all they do for independent artists and developers. It’s unbelievable that we are able to self-publish on the iBookstore and be available for hundreds of millions of iPad and iPhone users. Now, I’m wondering if this is finally the excuse I need to get myself an iPad. I mean, it’s product testing, right? Right? Someone help me out here.
July 30, 2012
That little something extra…
Earlier today, we revealed the awesome cover for the UK release of WOOL, and I mentioned at the end of my post that the jacket was missing that extra little . . . something. It’s like a crisp suit that needs a splash of colour, one of those squares tucked into its breast pocket. And that splash of colour, dear readers, should come from you.
My peeps at Random House call these things “straplines.” They’re those short phrases that grace the cover of book jackets and film posters. THE HUNGER GAMES probably had something about the Odds Being in One’s Favour. The two examples my editor gave were JAWS 2 and ALIEN (apt, eh, with the Ridley Scott connection?) On the JAWS 2 poster, we have:
“Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.”
With ALIEN, it was:
“In space, no one can hear you scream.”
Man, that last one is killer. There’s a physics lesson, a sense of setting, and the promise of impending horror. Hard to top that one, but if anyone can it’s you people!
What I love about Century Publishing and Random House UK is that they value the method of WOOL’s success. They know it has a lot to do with you all. Normally, this task would fall to a marketing team. Not all of them would have read the entire book (much less loved it like you all). Random House wants to do something different. This is what I love about working with these people.
We are going to let you decide what the kick-ass phrase at the top of the book should be. Yeah, one of you will come up with the hook. Your words will be emblazoned on the cover. And get this: after Random House UK picks the winner, that person is going to receive a set of the unbelievably hot and impossible to get proof copies! ().
You’ve come up with awesome t-shirt ideas, great bumper stickers, incredible art, even fan fiction. I know you’ll come up with the perfect strapline for WOOL. Here’s what you need to know: It has to be under 15 words (test your work out in Word. It’ll tell you how many words you’re using). And it should fit in with the mood of the back copy, which will grace the rear of the book:
WHAT WOULD YOU DO
If the world outside was deadly,
And the air you breathed could kill.
AND YOU LIVED IN A PLACE
Where every birth required a death
And the choices you made could save lives – or destroy them.
THIS IS JULES’ STORY
THIS IS THE WORLD OF WOOL
Submit your entries in this forum thread. Let’s say no more than three entries per person. You can put them all in the same post and edit to your heart’s desire. At some point, we’ll collect what you’ve come up with and send them off to Random House. And someone will have some bragging rights and a cool set of proofs to call their own!
Best of luck to everyone!
Wool Gets a Fancy New Jacket
Ladies and gentlemen, the new face of WOOL:
Now, I’ve spent a solid five years of my life as a bookseller, staring at and judging jacket art all day long. I’ve spent thirty years reading voraciously. And in all that time, I’ve never seen a cover like this anywhere. Never. Do you know how difficult it is to stand out and be unique? Well, Random House UK has managed to achieve that. I love this cover. I think it is absolutely brilliant. And the longer you stare at it, the more you realize there could be no other cover for the hardback release. It is bleak and powerful. It is both iconic and timeless. This cover will be recognizable from a distance. Like the title, it raises questions and piques curiosity. It demands to be handled, but perhaps carefully. Warily.
Random House UK also has a few tricks up its sleeve with the fabrication. They are going with a matte finish, which I think is brilliant. Gloss and post-apocalyptica do not mix. There will also be some raised features, which I’ve always loved on quality hardbacks. This will be a treasure to own. I’m speaking for myself, here. Holding this will likely move me to tears. I couldn’t be happier with the design, not one bit.
I immediately wanted to know the process behind this, the committee, how such things are done. I’ve long created my own covers with almost no direction or help (though my wife is a fine hand and foot model!). Who came up with this, and what were they thinking?
I asked Jack Fogg, my editor, some of these questions. He said it was the vision of one of their artists, Jason Smith, and that even though this was one of several mock-ups, everyone loved it straight away. I wondered if I could email Jason and thank him. Jack welcomed the idea.
In chatting back and forth with Jason, I found out what his inspiration was. Jason read WOOL as it made the rounds of Random House (even people who weren’t supposed to be reading it were picking it up). He loved the story so much that he asked if he could be attached to the project. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the sort of people you want involved with your work. Jason brought the same sort of passion, as a fan, that so many of you have brought to this series. And there was this feeling, this particular mood that he wanted to capture with the cover. He couldn’t stop thinking about one particular fiery ordeal in the silo’s airlock. And so he came up with the bubbled glass and the red flames, the feeling of a thing melting down, of a dire view through an airlock porthole or even through the wallscreens at something at once terrible and compelling.
This cover frightens me. It moves me. I can’t wait to see it wrapped around the story, to hold it in my hands. In fact, it’s just about perfect. Maybe there’s one little thing missing, a final touch, the cherry on top. I think I know what that is.
Stay tuned. Tomorrow, another big surprise, a way for you to help, and a way for you to win something truly marvelous.
Why do we clean?
This morning, I will have the pleasure of Skyping with two classes of rising 9th graders who have read WOOL. I only have thirty minutes with each class, and I’m already bracing for impact. There’s a question I expect to hear from them, one that could consume hours of boring philosophical dialogue, so I’m heading that off at the pass with a little blog entry for anyone to read and fall asleep to at their leisure.
In the WOOL universe, the most confounding mystery (even to its inhabitants) is the question of: Why do they clean? Why do those sent outside, banished, given a death sentence, do this final act of kindness before they go?
Isn’t this the mystery, though, of our own lives? In two weeks, I, ZOMBIE will be unleashed upon the world. It also wrestles with this question of free will and why we do things we either swear we won’t or wish we wouldn’t. How many of us sit down to be productive, sit down to write, sort bills, do homework or finish a project, and we find ourselves browsing the web or staring at Facebook, instead? We said we wouldn’t. We promised ourselves. And yet, there we are, doing something we know we’ll feel guilty about later, not truly in charge of ourselves.
I don’t know what world awaits these rising 9th graders, but when I was a freshmen, we could count on being thrown into bushes. Why schools planted bushes with prickly points, I’ll never know. They must be a bunch of sadists. Every year, without fail, freshmen were thrown into bushes. And every year, without fail, freshmen vowed to not be dicks when they were seniors. And every year, without fail, another class of juniors became a class of seniors who forgot the promises they made when they were freshmen.
They were sent out to clean, promised they wouldn’t but something changed along the way. They got distracted. They saw the world in a different light. They crossed a boundary, had new chemicals soar through their veins, and now they can’t *not* clean.
The Stanford Prison Guard experiment of 1971 bore this out, and it’s one of the saddest truths of the human condition that I’ve ever run across. In the experiment, a group of volunteers were divided into “prisoners” and “guards.” The latter were put in charge of the former. What happened next was disturbing. Guards became abusive and prisoners meek. Within days, the verbal and physical violence grew horrific. But what happened next was truly stunning. They switched the two groups around. And soon, the behaviors were reversed. Former prisoners, knowing how horrible it felt to be abused, did it nonetheless. I imagine they would have promised, sitting behind those bars, that they would be different. But they can’t be. They can’t *not* clean.
Have you heard of the “Curse of the Lotto?” There have been countless stories, both popular-media sensational accounts and more formal sociological ones, that study the often horrible outcomes that befall lottery winners. And it isn’t just that family members swarm the luck-stricken; it’s also the changes in behavior and mentality that the winners suffer. All the promises of writing checks for millions of dollars to everyone they know suddenly vanish when the impossible happens. They said they wouldn’t be this person. They would invest and be smart with their money. But they rarely do. They are a different person before winning the lottery than they are afterward. They’ve been sent to clean, have crossed the Rubicon, and what once puzzled them about others now makes perfect sense. They are watching themselves do it, justifying it in their own minds with reasons and excuses, but that’s not truly why. They couldn’t *not* do it.
One of the best books I read last year was WILLPOWER, which looked into our inability to take control of our behavior. The best chapter was on Oprah, who has been very open and public about her battle with obesity. Think about this: Oprah is one of the hardest working and driven people on the planet. Her work ethic is second to none. She busts her butt every day doing a thousand different things. She has all the money in the world to throw at this problem, which has meant hiring personal trainers (the best in the world) private chefs (ditto) nutritionists (again, the top of the heap). What does all her power, wealth, and motivation bring her? The same cycle of diet and binging we all go through. She has the longest lever imaginable, and still she cannot budge that stone.
We like to think we’ll be different when we face certain challenges. We’ll exercise more as we get older. We’ll be better to our parents and our children. We’ll be nicer to those beneath us when we are given power at work, at home, at school. We’ll work harder for those who manage us. We’ll be gracious in defeat and humble in victory. We’ll be good people, better than those who give us pause about the human condition.
Alas, we all think these things. We make promises. But when we are sent to clean, when we have our moment, what do we do? Forget what you think you would do. Stop for a moment. Stop pretending and go look at every study made on the subject. Look at Oprah. Look at every person addicted to drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, or time-wasters like video games and social networks. Look at the self-loathing. We don’t do these things because they make us happy; we do them in spite of the fact that they make us miserable. That’s because the part of our brains, the reptilian part that’s millions of years old where chemical happiness lies, is different from the newer part where more self-aware joys reside. And we are slaves to our chemical happiness, not to our conscious happiness.
If you hook a rat up to a machine that gives its pleasure center a little jolt of electricity when it presses a button (yes, scientists do this sort of thing), guess what the rat does? It presses the button until it dies. It forgoes food, water, and sex, the three stronger drives out there, the ones we would perish and go extinct without, just to taste that chemical joy at the middle of our most primitive brains.
Those rats are cleaning. If you look around, you spend a good part of your own day cleaning. Come late December, we will make promises. We will sit in that tiny cell of time between Christmas and the New Year and we will make promises. We will say that we’ll exercise more, diet more, eat more healthily, be more productive, be better to our friends and family … but we won’t.
And maybe that’s why so many readers reject the conclusions WOOL comes to. Because the fatalistic truth is too painful to bear. So we lie to ourselves rather than bare our teeth and attack this truth head-on. We cower from it rather than be bold against it. You know what? I clean all the damn time. And I hate myself for it. But I’ve found more strength and have won more victories over these urges by studying them, by understanding them, by knowing what takes place and why. It’s how I quit smoking, one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It’s how I get up every morning to write, when there’s no one there forcing me to.
I am a weak person. I know this about myself. I have spent countless hours playing video games and putting off exercise. I smoked a pack a day for fifteen years, and I hated almost every one of those cigarettes. I didn’t try hard enough at most everything I’ve done, from soccer and my studies in high school to almost everything I’ve tackled since. Left to my own devices, I’d probably sleep my life away or waste it on frivolities. And not because I truly *want* to, but because a small part of my brain wants me to.
It wants me to clean. And dammit, maybe I will. But knowing this about myself gives me the best chance that I have to beat the sucker.
My Reading List
BestSFBooks recently got in touch to congratulate me on inclusion in their sacred halls. What an honor and a thrill! Going through their alphabetized author pages is like scanning a who’s who of the genre’s finest. I sincerely believe that I don’t belong there and that the universe will soon correct for this, but I took a screen shot so at least the memory will last. And check it, they already have I, ZOMBIE on my page. The other fine works of literature must be horrified.
One of the things BestSF likes to do is have authors submit their favorite sci-fi works with a few words on why they were chosen. I jumped at the chance. And yeah, there are quite a few classics on here, boring choices I’m sure, but there’s a reason some of these show up on list after list. They are the works that drew many of us into the genre and caused us to dream of contributing one day. If there are any on my list you haven’t read, I urge you to check them out when you get some time. They are each the sort of book that I’ve read often and look forward to reading again.
July 27, 2012
I, Zombie Pre-Orders!
How cool is this? Amazon has a pre-order page for I, Zombie, which means you can have it delivered to your Kindle as soon as it’s released on the 15th. That’s only two weeks away!
The pre-order for the physical book should go live on Monday. And I’ll have a link up for signed copies next week as well, so we can gauge demand for these things. I’m contemplating having one price for books signed with ink and another for books signed in my own blood. The latter will be cheaper, of course. Ink costs money!
Now Anyone* Can Own a Proof Set!
*provided you can outbid everyone else!
The auction for the Wool Proof Set has begun! All proceeds will go to FirstBook.org, a fantastic charity that instills in the less fortunate the incredible thrill of owning a book of their own. A fitting charity, I believe.
Have at it. May the filthiest rich of you win. And if any of you Robin Hoods want to outbid the rest and then give the set to a rabid fan with fewer funds, that’s perfectly okay with me.
July 26, 2012
Arrrhrg! Bleeaahhrg!!
Check the word-count, yo. Spooky how that works out. Aimed for 60,000, got close enough that the counter considers it 100%, anyway.
I, ZOMBIE is in the body bag, all writhing around in there. It’s less shitty than I expected. In fact, I fear a few of you sickos will enjoy it as much as I do.
I’ll say this: I, ZOMBIE has been the most challenging thing I’ve ever written. It was crafted during a period of great change in my life as Amber and I moved to another state and I began dealing with more and more business-type demands. There were two trips to NY, a vacation we’d planned months and months ago, a week at my family reunion, and all the nonsense that comes from a new house that needs lots of work.
More challenging than any of that, perhaps, was the nature of the book itself. There’s very little dialogue in I, ZOMBIE, which I feel is one of my strengths, something that really helps the word count soar. And I’m writing a perspective that hasn’t been done much if at all. Telling a story where characters can’t share and scheme posed unique problems. I don’t want to be premature, but I really feel like I cleared more hurdles in completing this story than anyone will fully know.
As for release date, we’re trying something brand new with this puppy. Unprecedented, really. I can’t divulge what that is just yet, but I can say that the book will be available August 20th and that it won’t be serialized or doled out. On that day, you’ll be able to get your grubby paws on the entire thing and read in a weekend what it took me three brutal months to create.
