#63 Hugh Howey: Winning at the Self-publishing Game
01:35:29 Share

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 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.

Hello and welcome. I'm Shane Parrish and this is The Knowledge Project, a podcast exploring the ideas, methods, and mental models that help you learn from the best of what other people have already figured out. You can learn more and stay up to date with the podcast at fs.blog.com.

We're terrible at marketing, but we have a newsletter called Brain Food. It comes out every Sunday. It's short and sweet and full of the best content we've come across all week that's worth reading and thinking about. It contains quotes, book recommendations, articles, and so much more. Most of the guests on this show read it, so make sure to check it out. You can find it at fs.blog.com. That's fs.blog.com.

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

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. ♪

The IKEA Business Network is now open for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Join for free today to get access to interior design services to help you make the most of your workspace, employee well-being benefits to help you and your people grow, and amazing discounts on travel, insurance, and IKEA purchases, deliveries, and more. Take your small business to the next level when you sign up for the IKEA Business Network for free today by searching IKEA Business Network.

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 snowing. How did you... I've been following the summer for a while now, so... How did you fall in love with sailing?

I think I was probably about, I don't know, nine or 10 years old. We used to go to the beach every... I grew up near Charlotte, North Carolina, so a bit inland, but we went to the beach every year for a couple of weeks. And one of the first things I would do is drag this little... They're called sunfishes. They're these little dinghies with tiny little sails.

But for a kid my age, it felt like I was like launching the Titanic. This thing was like really a pain to move around by yourself. It was kind of like a Herculean task when like,

brother and sister were running around choosing which bedroom they were going to have. I was dragging this thing down to the sound and launching it and trying to get the mast in by myself. I would just spend all day sailing around the sound in this little thing. Even then, I 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.

And, uh, and so, yeah, it's been a dream of mine for, um, man, 30 plus years to do this. And it's kind of crazy that I've made it this far, uh, on this trip. Cause it was just a, just a fantasy for so long. And you're sailing around the world. Yeah. The goal was, I figured I'd take about five years. I started in South Africa, um, over three years ago, about three and a half years ago. And, um,

sailed across the Atlantic and Pacific so far. And, you know, of course I'm not doing it direct. I'm really meandering when I went across the Atlantic, I hit the Caribbean, 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 of little loops here.

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...

um i've done some long passages by myself which is pretty fun and but i have friends and family members uh join me here and there like for new year's in australia we had seven of us uh living on the boat and you know anchored out right in front of the sydney opera house and um with the that in the foreground and the uh the uh harbor bridge in the background and all the fireworks it was unbelievable so

Yeah, 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. And 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, yeah.

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

And 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. And I think you called it wayfinding. What is wayfinding?

Wayfinding, specifically, it's the art of navigating across the oceans using natural signs. So not using a GPS or even a compass, but using the stars, the direction of the setting of rising sun, cloud patterns, the temperature of the water, signs of migration from wildlife. And we now know that that's how all the Pacific islands or the general progress of migration across the Pacific works.

was very deliberate and skill-based. We used to, because of the terrible assumptions we have about primitive people, even though they had the same brain power 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. And there's even someone who set off from South America to try to prove this.

I 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 sailed 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 um what 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 probably 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 most of us know if we analyze it very hard 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 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 get out of the airport and maybe you 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 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 flavor of the culture. The crazy thing about traveling like this is that I'm taking my home with me. I have my kitchen everywhere I go, so I'm always buying groceries and learning local recipes. I'm having locals come stay with me on the boat, like in French cuisine.

Let's see, in Fiji, I had a big, large family come on and do 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 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 it. 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 said this is very safe. You can't OD on it. And what's weird about it is if you get drunk on kava, your brain is completely lucid. You do not get 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 moved there basically because of how much they love this kava experience.

And 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 necessary. If you have any kind of food in your stomach, it dilutes it and you get very little of the effect. But if you've done it for a while and you drink it with an empty stomach, it only takes 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, um, uh, you know, very individual based, but, um, 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? You there, you, you, your brain is, you're, you're completely clear the whole time. There's no blacking out. There's just like, um,

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, you lose motor function, but your brain is the same as it is right now. Like you and I would have, it's like forced meditations. Best thing I can say, because you, you can't do anything except be alone with your thoughts. Kind of cool. I don't know.

But 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. That's crazy. People are really getting into this. And now there's kava bars popping up in other countries. I've seen them in the U.S. 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 started asking about what have I learned from different cultures? Right. 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 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. 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... If you go down to the cellular level, the way mitochondria powers us, we have so much DNA in common. And what

what we make really a big deal out of is that two percent of us that's different and i think that's what i found with these cultures is like you know you you know i was raised hearing you know americans are uh overweight we have terrible diets and it turns out that's just what happens when you're wealthy enough um to afford basically unhealthy foods when you have an unlimited um

uh, 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, uh, global poverty. And so some of the biggest, um,

populations, physical size-wise, are these islanders that used to be in great shape until they got access to our kind of diet. 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.

So while there's some sadness to that, like you see the same disdain for the environment and you see pollution in some of the most 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 universal of sadness.

uh, people who are learning from their 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, um, I, 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 alike in sort of like a counterintuitive sense, things that you wouldn't have maybe anticipated or didn't realize or. You know, love of home is something that really has 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 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 U.S. and have like 20 kids, that's legal. But one person coming in is illegal. It's kind of a weird distinction that we make between population growth.

As long as it's not the other, then we celebrate population growth. If it's the other, then 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. 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 be more grounded and more sedentary. Honestly, I don't want other people to be like me. I think that's a weird thing.

human it's part of human nature we all kind of want to be around people similar to us and we want to change people to be more like us for some reason I think maybe because we feel scared and alone with 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, you know, most of what our brain is, is built for is theory of mind. It's like the reason we had, um,

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, you know, 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 run and get enough of the people you do know to help defend against this person you don't know. We can look at chimps and the great apes to really figure out a lot of where we came from and what our natural 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 in 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 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, you know, connection and trust and honesty is, is so rewarding. And I think the reason it is, is because it,

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 in 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, it's 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 fatten us 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, to figure out or discuss. Like we haven't, we haven't even 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 that we're going to have to like figure out how to dial back from. I think you're already seeing that you're seeing people go on technology kind of 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 am. I'm like the biggest geek. And, um,

I am like an early adopter on everything. I love gadgets and upgrading stuff. I love reading manuals. My first career was in computer repair. So I was like building computers in high school out of spare parts and down to like the soldering level and like chip level stuff and haunting Radio Shack and building things out of like 555 timer chips and LEDs and anything I could scrap together.

But 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. He has this podcast called Cool Tools where he's always telling people the best three things for anything you can imagine. 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 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 player 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 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 do they know that

We don't know, and what can we learn from them without having to spend the time that they've spent? That's what's great about expertise and sharing it. It's a shortcut to someone else's wisdom. I've listened to Kevin about this stuff. Technology is fascinating, and as primates who love inventing and exploring, we should

totally geek out about it, but we should also be wary about what habits we're forming 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 socioeconomic? 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 now.

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 flight and 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'd 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, we'll probably see more regulation of social media, especially in Europe. I don't think it'll happen in the U S 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 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 next five years. And maybe in five years, self-driving cars become, they're, they're,

pervasive enough to alter the way that we interact with transportation globally. I think we'll just start to see the first glimmers of that in five years. In 10 years, the world will look completely different. The same way that 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. It's hard to even

that 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. It's going to be incredible. And car ownership is going to become a thing that only a minority of humans even own a car because of the way they'll even, they'll never be parked really because every,

car that can drive itself is 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 seen in retail and other places.

You're going to have every parking space in every city is basically freed up. So you're going to 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. 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. And 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? Like, do you think it'll be individuals owning cars or

Like, 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 Tesla. We've learned enough about disruption 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's 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. Like imagine if in...

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 a Windows 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 have driven billions

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.

um we're gonna have the self-driving equivalent of that kind of trust and that company is gonna take off but um you're asking if people will sell in cars i think there will be um individuals who are always

tinkering and offering 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 going to 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 naive when it comes to data. And I've probably been burned by it 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 them money. There's not going to be

enough people who want to 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. Then 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 this car is shuttling you around. There'll be a compartment that you can get into and a compartment you can't. 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 have been periods of 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 back into...

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. You know, I know that just from spending time in bookstores and talking to owners and watching my own, you know, 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 kids and, you know, hobbies and activities. There's 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. Now most cities have these parks full of trampolines where you 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. 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 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 write a novel? And it turns out, if you take a time-consuming habit and

change it into like a second job. There's a lot of productivity time that we're squandering or 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. Yeah.

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

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 where I was reading a book a day. I was getting flooded. My door stop, my stoop 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 covering them as well. And this is because I'd given up on ever writing a book of my own. I'd tried for 20 years since I was 12 years old and wrote my first Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ripoff book.

um 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 um writers had to be people who were much smarter than me and went to university to learn how to do this or they had to be born um you know with a writing gene in them because their parents were writers i had no idea how any of this worked i just knew that i wasn't good enough and for 20 years i thought that and then uh

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 Carolyn Todd stood up and like slapped the table 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 going to write and you sit down and you write. And she's like,

hand clapping between each word basically as you slap on the table. And I realized like all the excuses that I give myself and all 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 that I had to do. But instead of picking up the next book to review it, 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 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 credit.

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 getting me in the habit of writing every day, but it's also filling my head with like good story and good prose. And so, yeah, 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, it accumulated a lot of words and maybe a little skill. And in about a five or six year period, I wrote 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. It's just doing the thing that 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 failure.

And it gets really hard, right? If you're in your late 20s or 30s or 40s 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 of years after that, was still writing in her nineties. And that really woke me up. You know, there's,

A lot of our calcification, the inability to break our stasis and launch our lives in a different direction is the feeling that we should have done it 10 years ago. And we've lost the opportunity 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. So whoever's listening to this right now, I think you've told me you get over 100,000 listeners. Yeah.

I bet half of them have already turned off because I don't know what your show is 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's 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's 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 uh 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 will 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 can sail that far. And 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. It's nice and clean. It's in your voice, which is how you write emails to your friends. You do that regularly.

one paragraph at a time and you will write a book.

And 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 10 years, you're going to look back at today as the day that you had the free time, the inclination, the talent, the

to change your life. And it's of course not gonna be writing for most people. It's gonna be learning a second language, exercising, getting a better relationship with your mother or brother or sister, 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 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, 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 going to 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 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 and dust shelves and reshelf books and do very like quiet rote 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 it 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. The very thing that used to get me in trouble when I was in school and 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, um,

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, the playground. Like that guy's going to be, or a girl is going to be in a, be an Olympic athlete.

star, a gymnast, and let's embrace that. Like the idea that, and some of that's the bias of teachers, right? Like the people in charge of school are all people who 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 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 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...

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. I didn't think we started talking about the writing process and daydreaming and look at where we are, but this is, there's also how my storytelling process works where I'm,

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 are you doing it as you're daydreaming? Like you're backtracking as you're daydreaming or you've actually written stuff on the page and you'll...

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 is

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 and 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...

um, makes it really easy for us to abandon the project. And so the more, the more of the story, the more of those 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. Um, some people have to outline really heavily. And for me, I,

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, as clearly as possible. And yeah, that's, that's worked for me, but man, I,

Every time I sit down with a blank page to write another book, I'm like, how did I do that last one? It feels daunting. I'm not sure how I did it and how I'm going to do it this time. Am I ever going to be able to do it again? How many books have you published now? I don't know. Probably close to 20, I would think. You still have that, eh?

Oh yeah. Each book, I'm like, "I don't know how I did the last 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. The experience before that was just minor revisions, and the experience before that was a little bit of a rewrite. That rough draft is so far removed.

My rough drafts are much rougher than my finished product. 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 are my mental faculties declining this rapidly? And

It's because 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 editorial help and other kinds of beta reading and my mom giving me advice. So I'm seeing the last thing I saw in my writing was 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 the books that we love also existed as rough drafts and just embrace the...

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 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 you 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 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 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. That's awesome. 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 like too busy for me. And so I don't bug her with almost anything. Like, and she's always telling me, you should bug me more. Like, let me know when you've written something. And 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, I should be like, why didn't you tell me? Like we could, we can go get a film deal with this and we can get like foreign publishers to publish this. But eventually my agent will get a copy. And then usually by then it's already in readers' hands. I've self-published it and people are already devouring it.

What sort of feedback do you seek from beta readers? Are you asking them what works, what doesn't, 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 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 clearer. 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, man. 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 let us 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 from everybody. And I think that's, I learned that from being a part of a writing group, which I highly recommend any aspiring writer, any,

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'll learn that 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. You are one of the, actually, you're the only person that I know of that keeps their electronic rights. Yes.

I want to dive into this publishing world, which is largely 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 with 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. 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 later.

after I'd written a book. I think maybe the first Kindle came out just before I'd published my first book. The first publishing contract I got was with a very small press. 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 e-book edition online, which they could do through the Kindle Direct Publishing system. Anybody can start up a small press. You can just 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 it 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 there's no upfront cost. 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. I 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 U S 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 and it'd be sent to another place where it'd be pulled. And it used to be, they would be burned. Like you, there 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, and it's like, oh my God, 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's 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

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'd 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 going to 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 going to 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 books.

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. I never had those conversations, which was the creative freedom that provided was worth 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 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 had the freedom to write that book.

Even JK Rowling didn't have the freedom to write under her own name when she wanted to change genres. She had to write under this Galbraith pseudonym. So it's like creatively dampening 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 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 has evolved over time. Bookstores are hesitant to order self-published titles unless they see a history of sales or see them on bestseller lists on the e-book 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, this is the title we're most excited about. And the sales rep 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 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 spend...

years writing a novel and you think like this is my one shot and you go to the publisher you're only going to give it a three to six month window um 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 uh an advantage to self-publishing

I've done deals with publishers though. 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. I'm here in Australia, 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 that 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 assigned 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 it's gonna stick with me for a second

Walk me through sort of like you, you sell your books now, but you don't sell your electronic rights. You sell, do you sell audio and physical distribution and foreign translation or do you, how does that work? Yeah, that's, 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 I, when wool took off, I was working in a bookstore and this short story I'd wrote about,

um, went up the charts and I fleshed that into a novel by writing four more parts and combining them into a story is like serialized novel. And the, uh, like the way Dickens used to publish, I guess. And, um,

When the novel hit the New York Times bestseller list as a self-published e-book, I started getting a lot of interest from agents and publishers. I was lucky in a few ways. One, I was living a very simple lifestyle. I was debt-free. I 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 the 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 hearing from someone who's an expert in the industry how great their work is is very enticing. 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 the 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 $15,000 to $25,000 for a book.

$50,000 advance would be a big deal. Six figures is like crazy. And then the seven-figure deals that everyone dreams about are so astronomically rare, it's not even worth thinking about them. And by 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. I would earn that in a month from my ebook sales. I was really lucky that publishers were behind on what the potential was of the digital rights. If anyone had made the offer that they made later, early, I would have buckled. 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.

By the time a publisher finally made a seven-figure offer and offered over a million dollars for the series, I'd already made a million dollars on my own. I'm really fortunate that it happened, that they were slower than readers were to cop onto 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.

What I was able to do from all of that is maintain my e-book rights as I was seeing how powerful they were. And basically, they got too valuable for me to ever sell. And I realized that as soon as a publisher owned that e-book right, they were going to jack up the price to protect their other e-books.

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. Yeah.

Man, that's an eye-opening realization when these people that you sign your lifetime rights over don't have your best interest at heart for the entire length and breadth of your career. It's only during that launch window, really. I just discovered this whole Kindle pricing thing where if your book is priced above $9.99,

your royalty rate changes to 30% instead of 70%. So if it's 999 or under, you get 70% of sort of the, 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, uh,

uh, is a lot like people are losing money on that compared to pricing it at nine 99. 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, uh,

It's a completely different structure. They get like a wholesale price. And so, yeah, it's very complicated, the difference between what publishers get and what self-published authors get. But they have a fixed percentage of

where what Amazon would love is for no publisher to charge more than $9.99 for an e-book. They decided that $9.99 was the max that you should pay for a digital book. And publishers, there was a huge fight over this. This 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 want it 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. Cause we sign a contract with them and we're not going to, we don't have enough power to collude with an Apple and, and, uh, 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%. If you price it below $299, hey, you're welcome to do that, but they're going to pay you 35%, 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 from them for you to price the eBook where they want the customer experience to be. And I

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 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 price pulse, they experiment, they'll do A-B comparisons over time.

Really some brilliant people, especially in 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 pump in my boat going off. Don't worry. I...

I've always devalued my work, which I think has worked to my benefit because I would rather someone take a,

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 people a chance to get hooked on my writing or my characters or my story. And 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 five bucks isn't a big ask for someone to get a novel's worth of reading. So yeah, I have books all over the place, but between $2.99 and $6.99 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 in the last year or something? Yeah.

The first part of Wool, which it's the short story 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 these things. 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 of the other books then in the series?

Yeah, I did when I first started doing this, but then I had, I think it was just one email from a reader who was like, I have to click five times to read this book. 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 book.

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

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 need it 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 how many people are downloading my free book versus individual books because 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,

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 & Schuster, they categorized 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 general books,

science fiction, general, 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, in the general science fiction list, and the dystopia list.

And this is 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 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 & Schuster trying to explain to them. And I had no, this is because I had done a deal with them. Now they have access to the metadata on the backend and they can control how this appears.

I could not 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 at 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 audio books and that was really lucrative. It's amazing the growth curve on audio books. Now I'm happy to do deals with publishers and sell them off. It might be counterintuitive, but now that I don't need the money, I can do more deals with publishers because it might be more lucrative if I put all the extra work and do 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 weird how my...

My success has allowed me to use publishers, even though it's probably 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 do lots of deals with publishers, and it's mostly because I can afford to, which is kind of a weird situation. You would think it'd be the other way around.

Is there anything weird that you like put in your contract that would be nonstandard 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, uh, with wool, uh, 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 uh 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 on 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 an 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 to use as doorstops around the office or just give away to a school or burn to keep a competitor off the market. And

A lot of these reversion clauses are just terrible for the writers. 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 going to be working on someone else's behalf more than yours if you didn't get lucky.

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 and by Simon & Schuster and bookstores. And next year I'm going to 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 Houghton 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 know that this has happened in publishing before, but in a year, I'm going to have the rights to three books that are still selling really well. And how that's going to play out, we don't know because no one's really done it. But the book is going to be on the shelf forever.

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 going to have like first crack at, at getting these proven perennial sellers and do another deal. And maybe we do another five years. Um, but this has been a dream for a lot of writers and agents to get these kinds of like limited time deals. I think, um,

I was another, another author who told me really early on that this is the future of publishing these kinds of deals. And 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 nonstandard 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 ebook pricing can be in the contract. Again,

Assuming the publisher is going to do the best thing for you at all times is just a mistake. You have to be 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 going to own that contract down the road. There's so much merging and acquisition in the publishing space that sometimes

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 do something else. So,

Don't think with your heart when you're making these contracts. Lay out the decisions that you would make if you were a self-published writer. For the price, I don't want my e-books priced so high that people won't take a chance on them. 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. It's not printed. The e-book should cost less. The physical costs are virtually nil for e-books, right? So you would think the difference between the e-book and physical book, the price would be a lot, but it's actually 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 stupid building in Manhattan, which is the dumbest place to set up a publishing empire, but that's where 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 trade it into a bookstore or sell it or give it to a friend...

you know, that should be priced into the value of the ebook. So in contracts, I'll say like, I don't want the book priced over $7.99, which is a low number to publishers, 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 they're in 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 world market is getting more and more lucrative.

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 and New Zealand and basically worldwide English. The book is different. It's localized for Queen's English basically instead of American English.

And they know their market better and putting them in charge of it instead of having someone in America shop that out to subsidiaries. It's not only makes for a better product, it makes for better business sense. So I've done like amazing deals in Brazil, you know, $60,000 advances, which I would have been

gaga for in the, um, in North America with my first books. And here I'm getting it from a country that is exploding with, um, 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, um,

Taiwan, we went with a very small publisher. It's a one-man operation, literally. One guy runs the whole business and does the translation, everything. He's a dynamo. Yeah, he's amazing. He only does two books a year. He was offering the least amount of money, but I had a foreign agent who just works the Asian market who said, we're really lucky to have this person involved. He's considered a poet by the

publishing industry there and buy readers and the 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 flown first class to Taiwan to go to book fairs and sign books. And we're like, why in the world am I going to Taiwan? And we found out Wool was the number one selling book that year in Taiwan. Oh, that's amazing. 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 have never had this level of success comparatively anywhere in the world.

And that never, that experience 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 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 to publish this. If you still self-publish, you're crazy. Like you're,

There's always a reason to go with a publisher, you know, 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. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, maybe if I come back on, we'll talk about the sailing part. Oh, yeah, man. 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 farnamstreetblog.com slash podcast. That's F-A-R-N-A-M-S-T-R-E-E-T-B-L-O-G dot 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 farnhamstreetblog.com slash newsletter. This is all the good stuff I've found on the web that week that I've read and shared with close friends, books I'm reading, and so much more. Thank you for listening.