Underground stories

Today, Apple TV+'s series Silo comes back for its second season. It's an adaptation of Hugh Howey's Wool series, a post-apocalyptic story where humanity has burrowed underground in deep silos to survive, and where a woman named Juliette has found herself in the unlikely position to recognize just how badly broken her surroundings are and how to set about fixing them.

Overnight success in the publishing industry is rare: authors often toil for years to not only write a book, but find an audience. Howey is one of those exceptions, part of a small cohort of self-published authors who found enormous success outside of the traditional publishing industry, and it's worth looking back to understand how and why this happened.

Indie writer

Howey explained that he'd been interested in writing since he was a child, telling Wired in 2012 that he had trouble finishing what he started: he'd begin a chapter or a story and never complete it. It wasn't until he began writing for a book review blog that he began writing to a deadline, and explained that it was while attending a book conference that he received a jolt that steered him in the right direction: when a panelist was asked about the secret to writing, "she slapped the table and shook her fist and said, 'You just write! You stop dreaming of writing. You stop talking about writing. You stop wishing you were writing. And you write!'"

"Her passion startled me. It woke me up. It was the simplicity and logic behind what she was saying. I'd always wanted to write a novel – just as a personal accomplishment – so I went home after that convention and with the help of my new habit of writing professionally every day, I started a book that I knew I would finish."

As he began writing, he would pass drafts to his friends and family members, recounting to Geek's Guide to the Galaxy in 2013 that "my idea was to polish it up and maybe serialize it on a blog or something," only to have them tell him that "I should explore publishing this because they liked it better than stuff they were reading out of the bookstore."

He opted to begin publishing his stories on his own, noting that he didn't have any plans to become a full-time writer: "Self-publishing, for me, was a way of getting published and the other way took years of querying, trying to land an agent, trying to get a publishing contract, a year from the publishing contract to actual publication."

The timing was perfect: while self-publishing online had been a thing for decades, the infrastructure to help it along was exploding. Amazon had released its first Kindle eBook reader in 2007, and with it, Kindle Direct Publishing, which allowed anyone to upload their own stories and publish them on the platform.

Howey began writing a new story, serializing it on his website chapter by chapter: Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue, a novel about a girl named Molly who had been expelled from Flight Academy and who sets off to find her missing father after his spaceship turned up across the galaxy. "I had a lot of early readers who thought this Molly Fyde story was as good as anything else out there," he told Wired, and soon, a couple of offers came his way from publishers, and he accepted one from Broad Reach Publishing, which released the book in 2009. He went on to write a handful of sequels: Molly Fyde and the Land of Light, Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions, and Molly Fyde and the Fight for Peace.

Along the way, he published a handful of shorter stories and published them through Amazon: "Mouth Breathers,” "Nothing Goes to Waste," "The Automated Ones," "WHILE (u > i) i--;," and others.

Wool

Howey began writing the story that would become his best-known work in 2011: Wool. While writing his other novels, he had the burning idea for another story, about a group of people living underground in a silo, but didn't have the time to expand upon it. "I decided to write it as a shorter piece, and it ended up being about twelve and a half thousand words," he told Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. The story was inspired in part by his changing life experiences: he had gone from captaining a yacht and seeing the world to seeing it through the prism of media:

"Living in one place and relying on TV, the Internet, and newspapers to know what the world was like, and it was terrifying to see how different the picture was painted because of the filters."

He decided to publish the story as a standalone short on Amazon, pricing it at $.99 and quickly began receiving word from readers that they wanted more.

The story quickly topped the science fiction charts on Amazon. "I started selling dozens of copies a day, and it kept building," he told Wired. "Toward the end of the month, it looked like I might get close to a thousand total Wool sales for the month."

"I stayed up until midnight refreshing my KDP dashboard to see if it would happen. I pleaded on Facebook and Twitter for a little push. I think I sold 1,018 copies of a little 99 cent short story that month. I figured it was the apex of my career and that it would all be downhill from there. I can’t remember the last time I stayed up until midnight. I could barely sleep afterward.

Months later, sales were still going strong. Sales, he told Publishers Weekly in April 2012, had "seen a major uptick in the past few months; he made $19,000 from his fiction in January, $50,000 in February, and $70,000 in March."

While that story was designed to stand on its own, readers began commenting that they wanted to see more of the world. As he realized there was demand to see more of this world, Howey began plotting out a larger story beyond that first standalone entry. "I figured they enjoyed it the first time, something you could finish in an hour, and I published the second story and started on the third, and wrapped it up in these five entries, and together they formed like a five hundred and fifty page novel."

The success of Wool began attracting attention from the traditional literary community, and Howey noted that the daunting process that pushed him to self-publishing began coming to him. "The world is truly upside down when a self-published author finds himself fielding calls from literary agents and having to politely turn them down," he wrote on GeekDad in March 2012. "It's not supposed to work this way, but that's old thinking. The world is shifting."

Howey found himself in a rare position in publishing: a huge success in an industry that was slow to change. He signed with agent Kristin Nelson to help him navigate the offers that were coming in, and found that the traditional publishing environment would be a difficult sell: self-publishing offered him better terms and the ability to publish at the rate he was most comfortable with, even if it offered some advantages, like stocking his books in bookstores and expanding to readers beyond the self-publishing ecosystem.

The attention brought more than just the interest of publishing: the success of the books brought Howey to the attention of Hollywood, and in 2012, he sold the film rights to 20th Century Fox, Scott Free (Ridley and Tony Scott's production company), and Film Rites.

According to the Wall Street Journal in 2013, Howey had made more than a million dollars from sales from Wool, and ended up turning down "multiple seven-figure offers from publishers," before ultimately signing with Simon & Schuster for a print-only deal that allowed him to continue self-publishing the eBook editions.

Howey wasn't done with the world of Wool: in 2012, he turned once again to self-publishing with a trio of new stories: "Legacy" arrived in April 2012, he published "Order" in November 2012, and completed the story with "Pact" in January 2013, publishing the trio as Shift. Together, they made up a prequel to Wool, exploring the changes to the world that brought about the post-apocalyptic environment that readers fell in love with.

The novel came at an good moment: Simon & Schuster published its first edition of Wool as a hardcover in April 2013, where it began climbing up the bestseller lists. He capped off the year with another installment: Dust, which built on the storylines of the first two novels and brought them to a close.

Howey also joined forces with anthologist and editor John Joseph Adams in 2014 for a trilogy of post-apocalyptic anthologies, The Apocalypse Triptych (The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come) which included three new stories in the Wool universe: "In the Air," "In the Mountains," and "In the Woods."

Somewhere along the way, Howey jumped publishers with the series: first to John Joseph Adams' imprint at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2020, and then to Harper Collins, under its William Morrow imprint, which earlier this week published a "Collector's Edition" featuring new endpapers, sprayed edges, and a poster featuring a blueprint of the silo, as well as a new essay from Howey about the creation of the series.

Adaptation

In 2012, 20th Century Fox had outbid a handful of its rival studios for the rights to Howey's trilogy, and it entered the adaptation and development pipeline. It was a busy period for science fiction and fantasy films: Ridley Scott (a producer on the project) had just released his long-awaited return to the Alien franchise with Prometheus, while comic book films like Joss Whedon's The Avengers, Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-man, and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises dominated theaters alongside other big adaptations like the first installment of The Hobbit, The Hunger Games, and Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 charted well. The next couple of years would bring other big SF/F films to audiences: Oblivion, Elysium, Gravity, Captain America: Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy, the next two installments of The Hobbit trilogy, and plenty more. Ridley Scott also seems to have found another passion project from an indie-to-blockbuster success adaptation: The Martian, which arrived in theaters in 2015 to solid acclaim and which was based on Andy Weir's self-published 2011 novel by the same name.

It was a good time for high-concept, non-franchise adaptations: audiences were clearly turning out for these types of films. Work on an adaptation of Wool moved along: the studio even had a director lined up for the project: J. Blakeson (The Disappearance of Alice Creed).

Those initial efforts seem to have fallen through. It always seems that Hollywood productions move in one of two ways: everything lines up quickly because of the fervor around a project, or they linger in development hell for years. That seems to be the case here, because by 2015, Blakeson appears to have fallen off the project and the studio tapped Nicole Perlman (coming off of Guardians of the Galaxy the year before) to rewrite the original script for the adaptation.

The project didn't move much beyond that point: in 2017, Disney acquired 20th Century Fox, and ended up axing a number of the films that had been in development at the time.

Its death was temporary: the following year, AMC and LaToya Morgan (Shameless, Turn: Washington's Spies, and Into the Badlands)picked up the rights to adapt the novel as a TV series. Where genre films had exploded over the 2000s and into the 2010s, high-budget genre TV had grown substantially as well, thanks to the critical and commercial success of shows like Battlestar Galactica (2003), LOST (2004), The Walking Dead (2010), Game of Thrones (2011), and plenty of others. Wool could prove to be a solid show for AMC to add to its growing lineup of genre shows, especially those interested in post-apocalyptic narratives.

The show didn't remain at AMC, however: in May 2021, the news broke that Apple had scooped up the rights to Wool, run by Graham Yost (Justified). The tech company had launched its dedicated streaming service in 2019 and already had a solid number of genre titles under its belt, like the post-apocalyptic See and adaptation of Isaac Asimov's famous novel Foundation. (Since then, we've seen Apple pick up a whole bunch of other adaptations of well-known genre titles, like William Gibson's Neuromancer and Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries.) Production moved along quickly as Rebecca Ferguson was cast as Juliette Nichols, the show's lead, and was joined by Common (Robert Sims), Rick Gomez (Patrick Kennedy), Rashida Jones (Allison Becker), Avi Nash (Lukas Kyle), David Oyelowo (Holston Becker), Tim Robbins (Bernard Holland), Chinaza Uche (Paul Billings), and Harriet Walter (Martha Walker.)

Now titled Silo, the series debuted on the streaming service on May 5th, 2023. Writing on his blog, Howey noted that it was hard to believe that the moment had arrived: "For twelve years, I haven’t really let myself believe that a TV show or a film based on one of my novels would ever get made."

After it premiered, he was thrilled at the response:

"Up until two weeks ago, I was still scared. But then early reviews leaked out, and I watched episodes with people who adore the books and people who haven’t read any of it. The consensus has been that this show is great. The reviews from critics are over the moon (95% on RT!). My social feeds are awash with readers and new folks gushing over the show. My heart is so full and happy right now."

In June, Apple announced that it would bring the series back for a second season, which went into production in June 2023, just as Hollywood writers went on strike in July, pushing production back to December. After cameras wrapped in March, the show's second season debuted on Apple TV+ on November 15th, 2024.

While the show hasn't been renewed for a third season as of yet, Ferguson noted in April 2024 that the show's creators were not only planning on an additional season, but that it would wrap up with a fourth, with both being shot at the same time.

"I believe that the show has an ending, and I know when that is. So that's the answer. You will find out when the show is done. To be honest, I don't think it's a secret. The books are the books. It's three books, and the three books are divided into four seasons. So I believe, unless any Apple person is gonna jump on, I think we're absolutely fine with saying Season 1, we've done. Season 2 is shot and coming out, and we're now looking at green-lighting Seasons 3 and 4. And I think we would film them maybe together, and that would be the end."

Despite the lack of a formal announcement, it seems that production has already begun.

Howey's career is remarkable, coming at a moment in time of great upheaval in the publishing and storytelling industry. It's a telling indicator of how small technological changes and advances can shape up and undermine an entire industry, and how creators can take advantage of those advances in unexpected ways.

Looking back over Howey's publishing career, two things stand out to me: first, he's pointed to a personal passion for wanting to tell his stories, regardless of the audience and commercial expectations that seems to guide so many acquisitions these days. He knew he had narratives that appealed to his circles of friends and family members, and followed his instincts to just put them out into the world.

He's not alone here: authors like Andy Weir and John Scalzi have followed similar paths, with Weir publishing The Martian online chapter by chapter, and Scalzi serializing Old Man's War on his website. In each of these cases, these books caught on with audiences: their readability and characters prompted readers to recommend it to others, allowing them to not only reach more people, but to the larger publishers that helped them bring the books out through the traditional bookstore route.

That type of virality is hard to replicate: it's difficult to say exactly what type of story/characters/prose will reach the right combination of readers. Howey was able to recognize and take advantage of an entirely new publishing ecosystem that the more established traditional publishers weren't able to adapt as quickly to. His close contact with readers – replying to reviews, comments, and emails – allowed him to quickly understand what readers were enjoying, and provide insights and updates to his new fans.

A couple of years ago, I spoke with Craig Alanson about his process writing his Expeditionary Force series, and one thing that I came away with from that conversation was the flexibility that self-publishing afforded him: he could write three massive books a year (and did) to keep his audience engage and reading. Other successful authors, like Brandon Sanderson, also seem to understand the value of not just producing stories for readers, but also providing the framework to encourage fandom and community amongst their numbers.

While most of these authors have dipped into the traditional publishing world for many of their books, it's clear that they understand some of the limitations and remain somewhat flexible around them. Howey was able to understand and recognize what his longer-term priorities were, and accordingly, how bringing in traditional publishers and film studios fit into the puzzle, rather than the other way around.

This is a story that likely isn't repeatable in the same way: audiences, platforms, publishers, and technologies have all changed. Howey had the right combination of story, luck, and wits to take his story to extraordinary heights. But Howey's underlying motives–to tell a good story–feels like it remains the most important part of the puzzle, and while it's trite to say that everything fell into place, I do think that having a good product on your hands makes the journey much, much easier.

If you're a fan of the novels, I'd be interested in hearing what attracted you to them, and how you've found the show so far. Let me know in the comments!