At a WorldCon conference, a client-hungry agent who sneered about self-publishing set off an outburst from Howey. If “literary” writers haven’t heard of him and can’t find his books in the local library, then he isn’t famous. His accessibility to readers, hisnice guy/humble geek image, his YouTube videos of himself dancing happy jigs (Gangnam style, in one video!) prove he just couldn’t have earned so many 5-star reviews without gaming the system. In an era where fame has less to do with genuine talent and love for one’s craft, more to do with “going viral” via social media and YouTube, skeptics say there’s more to Howey’s success than consumer demand. Your demand created this as much as I did.” My thanks go out to those reviewers who clamored for more. Due to reviewer demand, the rest of the story was released over the next six months. The first Wool story was released as a standalone short in July of 2011. Readers who begin with the newly released Omnibus, an ominous sounding word for a book containing reprints of a number of works, are notoriously “late to the party.” As Howey writes in the cover blurb, “This Omnibus Edition collects the five Wool books into a single volume. This is not a novel in the traditional sense of the word, but a series of five novellas that came out one at a time. Literary success depends on a mysterious combination of talent, luck, preparation and opportunity, and it’s fascinating, a kind of a puzzle, to figure out why a 37-year-old yacht captain’s book is doing so well while other well-written novels go nowhere. “You just sit down and do it.”īut not just anyone can sell their writing. “Anyone can be a writer,” Howey tells his 3,000-plus Facebook fans and 7,000-plus Twitter followers. Thanks to a World Wide Web that pioneers of science fiction never dreamed of, Hugh Howey’s “Wool” may be more famous for how it was sold than how well it was told. NEW TECHNOLOGY, A HALLMARK of the science fiction genre, has launched a common man into the coveted stratosphere of literary success.

First published at Perihelion Science Fiction (ezine) in April 2013, here again is my praise of Hugh Howey’s blockbuster novel.

Wool omnibus edition