Hugh Howey
Author & Executive Producer · 1 appearance on the record.
computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →
authorentertainer@hughhowey ↗hughhowey.com ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗
Hugh Howey is an American science fiction author best known for his independently published Silo trilogy, which became a landmark self-publishing success and was adapted into an Apple TV+ series. In addition to writing works such as Beacon 23, he serves as an executive producer and chronicles his voyages sailing around the world.
28statements → 7claims → 3claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 4.04/5average certainty → 2.29/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated →
3 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 3 not checkable as stated how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
3 predictions · 4 assertions · 1 opinion · 18 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Hugh argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Howey: Amazon halves self-publishing royalties outside the $2.99 to $9.99 range
“They think eBooks should be between two 99 and nine 99. And if you price it there, they'll give you a 70%. If you price it below two 99, Hey, you're welcome to do that. But they're going to pay you 35%, which is half. If you price it over nine 99, again, your …”
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Hugh Howey on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Hugh Howey said on the Knowledge Project that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Howey: Traditional Publishing Contracts Are Now the Last Resort for Authors
“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.”
Howey: Technology is to human brains what sugar is to gut biology
“Technology is for our brains, what sugar is for our gut. You know, our bodies have a natural craving for cheap calories and our brains have a natural craving for connection. And what sugar is doing to, you know, fatten us up because we weren't prepared for thi…”
Howey: Tesla will not win the autonomous vehicle race
“It's always someone you don't expect. It's never the first mover. It won't be, you know, Tesla.”
Publishers keep backlist ebook prices high to avoid cannibalizing new releases
“I realized that as soon as a publisher owned that ebook, right, they were going to jack up the price to protect their other ebooks. And this is something a lot of authors don't think about your competition for them. Like the people that own your book competes …”
Howey: Print-on-demand renders standard book rights reversion clauses laughable
“Unless there's a reversion clause and most publishing contracts have them, but they're laughable. 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 mov…”
Howey predicts self-driving robotaxis will reduce car ownership to 10%
“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 though because every car that can drive itself is a robot, basically, that can go earn money by running Ub…”
Howey: Schools naturally bias toward creating classrooms of future teachers
“The people in charge of school or all people ended up teaching
And if you think about what 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 p…”
Howey: Traditional publishers collect ongoing revenue cuts for one-time upfront costs
“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.”
Howey: Freedom of choice in book production beats publishers' economies of scale
“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.”
Howey: Amazon halves self-publishing royalties outside the $2.99 to $9.99 range
“They think eBooks should be between two 99 and nine 99. And if you price it there, they'll give you a 70%. If you price it below two 99, Hey, you're welcome to do that. But they're going to pay you 35%, which is half. If you price it over nine 99, again, your …”
Howey: Free first installments prevent bad reviews and funnel paid readers
“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…”
Howey negotiated a fixed-term rights reversion contract with Simon & Schuster
“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, o…”
Howey: Giving Worldwide Rights to a Single Publisher Is Crazy
“Giving worldwide rights to publishers now is crazy because the world market is getting more and more lucrative.”
Howey: Disrupting automotive hardware is far harder than building apps
“Building cars is very different from building apps. The disruption's much more difficult.”
Howey: Autonomous vehicle winner will be defined by safety reputation
“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, you know, Saab used to have a reputation for building, you know, these tanks that you could, like the other person in th…”
Hugh Howey: Writing One Hour Daily Yields a Novel in a Year
“One hour a day of writing, you'll write a novel in a year, guaranteed.”
Howey: Making structural decisions mid-writing causes authors to abandon books
“Making decisions in the moment while you're writing 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 a…”
Howey: Do not constrain beta readers with rigid feedback instructions
“I kind of want them to share what they're good at spotting, and I don't want people to, 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.”
Howey: Book publishers cannot reliably guarantee or manufacture hits
“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.”
Howey: Traditional publishers give a new novel only a three-to-six-month 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 …”
Howey: Standard publisher book advances typically range from $15,000 to $25,000
“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 to 25,000 dolla…”
Howey earned $1M independently before publishers offered a seven-figure advance for 'Wool'
“By the time we got six figure offers. I was making six figures a month just on the ebook sales. And 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 of my own.”
Howey: Authors should stop obsessively tracking real-time sales dashboards
“The, 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 sale…”
Howey: Overhead and Marketing Drive Book Costs Far More Than Printing
“The, most of the cost is the overhead they have for their, you know, stupid building in, 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 …”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| #63 Hugh Howey: Winning at the Self-publishing Game | Aug 6, 2019 | 1h 18m |