My very first novel was published with a small press, and I enjoyed the experience but decided that I would be happier publishing on my own. HH: My expectation was that someone, somewhere, might accidentally purchase the story and live not to regret it.

At the heart of this book is a cast of characters who dare to hope, who have the courage to see for themselves.ĬRH : What made you decide to self-publish Wool in the first place? Self-publishers the world over are now motivated by your amazing success with it, but what were your expectations back on that very first day, when you pressed the ‘Publish’ button? Anyone who does is sent outside and never heard from again. What does it do to our perception that these outlets are mostly (and understandably) full of bad and dire news? In Wool, a group of people live underground and can only see the world through a single screen. Today, we glean most of what we know about the world from TV news, the internet, and newspapers. Plato suggested that we can’t see the true forms of things but are doomed to sit in a cave and guess at what’s going on behind us by studying the shadows projected on the walls. Hugh Howey: It all started with a version of Plato’s Cave analogy. I was lucky enough to catch up with Howey for writing.ie, to mark the release of the third installment, Dust, and to find out more about his self-propelled journey to global bestsellerdom.Ĭatherine Ryan Howard : First of all, congratulations on the massive success of the Wool series, both in terms of praise and sales. This mystery has helped drive Wool-originally self-published by Howey as a short story-into a phenomenon on both sides of the publishing divide, and director Ridley Scott has bought the film rights. As a reader, you have endless questions (why do these people live in the silo? Who built it? What happened to the outside?) and you can forget about getting anything else done until the pages reveal the answers. The premise of Hugh Howey’s global bestseller Wool makes it the ultimate page-turner. Each ‘cleaner’ has spent precious last moments on wiping the grit and grime off the lenses. No one sent outside has ever walked past the cameras.

And yet even though they know they have mere minutes to live in the toxic atmosphere, no one has ever refused to clean. Most of the time the screen shows nothing but a lifeless, desolate landscape with the crumbled ruins of a city in the distance-except for when someone is sent outside for ‘cleaning’, banished from the silo forever for voicing a wish to leave and tasked with wiping the camera lenses clean. Their only view of what remains of the outside world is a television screen that transmits images captured by video-cameras mounted above ground. National Emerging Writer Programme OverviewĪn entire society dwells in an enormous, underground silo.

Dust hugh howey