Tell us about Wool. It has been a remarkable success story.
It’s not your usual success story, that’s for sure! Wool started as a novelette, just a 50 page story not quite long enough to be considered a novella. I uploaded it to Amazon last July, and the thing just took off. So I started writing more stories to follow up, which I later collected into a single novel. And it’s been going strong ever since.

What genre is it?
I just think of it as fiction. It takes place in the future, but the technology isn’t a key part of the story. It’s just about people. All that’s left of humanity lives underground, and they don’t even know why. There are only legends of people having lived aboveground. I liken it to Cormac McCarty’s THE ROAD, except with punctuation.

There’s a strong – and growing – tradition of post-apocalyptic fiction in literature and Hollywood; why do you think we are so intrigued by the break down of civilisation?
I don’t think it’s anything new, actually. We’ve had people predicting the end-times for as long as people have been writing. Part of it is just our fear of our own mortality and maybe our hope that we won’t go alone. Reading too much into it, as in our culture is in decline and all that, ignores the fact that the hair-pulling and sky-falling has been going steady for thousands of years. We’re just sad and paranoid people. Maybe that’s why we’ve done so well as a species! We don’t get comfortable.

Fair enough. So what kind of readers will Wool appeal to?
People who like suspenseful stories. I get a lot of complaints from readers about lack of sleep, that need to read just one more chapter. I love feedback like that.

Complete this sentence for us: If you like __________, you’ll love Wool.
puppies and ice cream

You are probably asked this question in every interview, but we’ve got to ask it too: how would you fare in a post-apocalyptic world?
I like to think I’d make a fantastic zombie. But really, everyone thinks they’d do okay, and I have a strong self-preservation drive. I’m a crack shot, an omnivore, and a devious bastard. I’d probably last at least a week.

You have threatened to end the Wool series soon. Surely you were joking?
No joke. There are two more books. THIRD SHIFT will wrap up the prequel trilogy, and then I’ll write DUST, which will wrap things up for good. I’m not sure if I’ll release DUST in parts or not. Still debating that.

The thing is, I have so many stories I want to write. Not all will please readers like WOOL has, but there are other worlds I want to explore. And I don’t want to be one of those writers who keeps releasing books until the reader loses interest.

There doesn’t seem to be any danger of that happening soon.  You’ve just sold the movie rights for Wool to the great Ridley Scott, director of Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiator. How did that come about?
Well, the devil came and asked for my soul—

But not really. Maybe. But no. It came about because Kassie Evashevski at United Talent rocks. She read WOOL at the behest of my literary agent, Kristin Nelson, and she loved it. She had high ambitions for the work. This is the same agent who placed the Twilight films and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo works. So WOOL went to the best and the brightest. Steve Zaillian, one of Hollywood’s top screenwriters (Schindler’s List,  Gangs of New York), fell for the story, and he roped in Ridley Scott for a read (the two of them have worked on a couple of films together). Ridley loved the characters, especially Jules, and so two of the top names in Hollywood ended up with the option on the film rights. It felt like an absolute dream.

Wool is going to be published by Random House in the UK and has been translated into a number of other languages, however you have chosen to stay indie in the US.  Why is that?
Well . . . we may have an announcement on that front very soon. I haven’t wanted to give up the digital rights, which is how I’m currently able to make a living as a fulltime writer. When you’re having success like this, any kind of deal is an exchange of the known with the unknown. The known is pretty damn good. I haven’t had the kind of promises and assurance I’d need to do a domestic deal. But that may have changed recently.

Wool, you have said, was a word-of-mouth hit. It isn’t that simple, is it? Surely a book needs intense marketing in today’s crowded market?
I don’t know about today, but when WOOL came out a year ago I didn’t market it at all. Not one bit. I think it helped that I had a half dozen other stories available. Some of those readers may have given it a kickstart, but I never even linked the story on my website. It just spread like a virus. Which is both humbling and frustrating. It means our efforts to create a success are wholly locked up in the writing process, not what comes after. It can make you feel a bit helpless.

We hadn’t thought of it that way. In what ways is the life of a very successful writer different from that of someone just starting out? What new skills did you have to learn quickly?
Time management. You have to balance the business aspects with the writing. I can see how it would be easy to slack up on the output and enjoy the success, but then it doesn’t build. My focus has been to keep writing at the same pace and with the same dedication to quality.

You also have to learn to say “no” to some things. I’m still trying to learn that. I’m not very good at it.

Tell us a bit about yourself.
I think of myself as a reader, first and foremost. I don’t really think of myself as a writer or an author. It’s how I spend my days, but it still feels strange to conceptualize myself as something other than what I’ve always been. One of the more interesting things about my life, perhaps, is that I spent a decade as a yacht captain. I drove multi-million dollar yachts all over the Caribbean and up and down the East Coast. It was a great career.

Have you got a blog where readers can keep up with your work?
Absolutely. It’s: www.hughhowey.com.

Where can we buy Wool?
At all the online retailers. The physical book does very well on Amazon and is now popping up in bookstores. You can also get signed copies via my website, but perhaps not for much longer. So if you want a collectible, and an edition that won’t be around forever, you might want to act soon.

What’s next?
THIRD SHIFT. And then the finale. After that, I’ve got a half dozen works I could concentrate on. The world will feel wide open with DUST and the WOOL series behind me. And I’m sure I’ll have emails to look forward to, begging me for more.