My Evening With Hugh

Howey, that is. Superstar indie author of Wool. And genuinely, all-around nice guy.

We spent last evening talking about everything and everything on Authors On The Air radio, with Pam Stack.

We covered a lot of ground. Everything from self-evaluation as writers, to our vastly different approaches to generating content, to our philosophies of writing, to what all this Hachette/Amazon fuss is about, to traditional publishing, to writing romance, to the therapeutic value of tequila, to…well, just about everything.

Perhaps what was most interesting to me was how natural the discussion was, how brutally honest at times, and how easy it was to tackle a host of subjects. Callers chimed in, I got disconnected twice due to God’s wrath (okay, a passing hurricane, which sort of qualifies), and as always, I was mixed most of the time so that I sounded like an old woman screaming from the bottom of a well. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

It was interesting to me that he sees a big difference between genres in terms of the nurturing and support offered by established names, or trad pubbed authors to their self-pubbed brethren. My take is that the reason romance is more supportive vs., say, sci fi, is because sci fi is male dominated, and male dominated markets tend to be snake pits because, well, it’s all dudes swinging their dicks around being hyper-competitive and territorial. That’s my theory, anyway. Could be I’m wrong, but I don’t think so. Males tend to engage in a lot of zero sum thinking, which is why men fight and kill each other versus building bridges. A generality, but one I’ve found holds true.

We agreed to disagree on Amazon’s long term business strategy, but were unanimous that everyone should buy my crap.

There we have it. That’s the summary. If you have some extra time, worth a listen.

Oh, and my co-authored tome with Clive Cussler is selling briskly. Thank heavens and Amazon!