‘Wool: Omnibus’ Debuts on USA Today’s Top 150 Books
Hugh Howey’s Wool Omnibus
debuted on USA Today’s Top 150 Books this week, coming in at #98!
Let’s keep the worth of mouth advertising going and push the book to greater heights. I’ll try to track the progress as the weeks go by.
Hugh Howey in Entertainment Weekly’s Summer Must List Issue
This week’s June 1/8 Entertainment Weekly is a double issue highlighting this summer’s best movies, tv, music, and books and on page 122, there’s a half page spread on Hugh Howey!
In it, Hugh Howey jokes about being compared to Fifty Shades of Grey, “I’m just waiting for the really bad reviews to come in from disappointed soccer moms who pick up Wool and find absolutely nothing titillating about it.”
The comparison between the two books continues to drive me insane. It’s like when you recommend A Game of Thrones to your friend and she asks if it’s as good as Twilight; you just want to claw your eyes out and fall to the floor screaming at such a question.
The cover features The Amazing Spider-Man and hit stands May 25, 2012. The issue will sell until May 31, 2012 or June 1, 2012, depending on when your local magazine stand or bookshop switches out the issues.
‘Wool’ Picked up by Random House UK
Last week, self-published author Hugh Howey announced via his blog at HughHowey.com that ‘Wool’ has been picked up by Random House UK.
While I’m an author myself, I won’t pretend that I have the faintest clue what that means other than people in the UK can buy hard copies of his book. Luckily, he explains a lot of it himself.
Do you know what this means? Oh, man, so much. I’m absolutely giddy over here thinking about this. First of all, it means books will be available to fans in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. I’ve shipped dozens of books to these regions, and it ain’t cheap. Soon, readers will be able to go to the store and pick up a copy, tell their friends, spread the good news. It means WOOL will be read by more people in places where it’s less accessible right now!
Even better, this means I’ll get the best of both worlds. I now have a native-language (mostly) publisher while remaining indie here at home. With feet firmly planted on both sides of the fence, I’ll get a taste of the traditional route without signing over my life. I can still write what I want over here. I won’t lose the sales that allow me to write full-time. And foreign book contracts, let me tell you, are much more progressive and author-friendly than domestic ones. This is like eating Marie Antoinette’s cake and having it, too!
If you’re stateside, you’re probably wondering how you’ll get a copy, but it sounds like maybe Hugh will bring a bunch home and possibly put them up for sale for his fans? He’s been tweeting about a special added scene he’s writing for the UK book, so it’s definitely something you’ll want to get your hands on.
The tentative plan right now is for them to do a hardcover release in January 2013, so there’s a while to wait. Still, amazing news! Big congrats to Mr. Howey!
The Down Deep: A Fan Uprising
About a month ago, I finished a couple of young adult books and found myself just fed up with the genre and the lack of quality in the writing so many of them have now.
Sick of teen characters and their slow fictional awakenings, I went in search of something based on adults. I browsed the Science Fiction & Fantasy list on Amazon and naturally, all of the Game of Thrones books were in the top ten. Then there was this cheap e-book called Wool
by Hugh Howey.
It didn’t sound like sci-fi. What kind of title is ‘Wool’ anyway? But it had an astonishing 400+ 5-star ratings with the first displayed review hailing it as a sure-fire sci fi classic in the making. At such a bargain price, I figured I didn’t have much to lose.
Right from the first page, it didn’t sound all that interesting, but the quality of writing was immediately apparent and it kept me going along with the desire to figure out what was going on. You see, the Amazon synopsis really wasn’t much to go on. I went in basically blind.
Originally published as a single short story, self-published author Hugh Howey then went on to write four more after he got rave reviews from his fans. All five shorts now comprise one book called Wool Omnibus (which means “a volume containing several novels or other items previously published separately.”). I finished Wool 1 very quickly and was so hooked. I was so refreshed. This was exactly the cure I’d been looking for.
I told my husband, who is a sci-fi fan and the harshest critic I know, that he had to read it. Curious about my enthusiasm and bored to boot, he read it in about an hour. He gave it 5 out of 5 stars and agreed that it would go on to become a science fiction classic. We then went on reading the book, butting heads over who had dibs on my Kindle.
Wool 1 still remains the strongest of the five stories to both of us, but overall the book was just fantastic. Hugh Howey weaves characters so real that you can’t help but feel like you know them intimately. You love them. You feel for them. You want them to survive.
Last week, the news came out that Wool had been optioned for a movie, purchased by Fox and holding the interest of Ridley Scott himself. I took this as a sign that it was time for a Wool fansite.
I run quite a few fansites already and it’s something I really, truly enjoy so I figured why not. I knew that Wool would eventually make it big because something that good can’t stay a secret for long, which is why I bought an autographed copy of Wool 6, thinking that it’d be harder to get something like that later down the road. The book now has almost 700 5-star ratings on Amazon.
The fact that Hugh Howey has a very active blog, seems like such an ordinary guy, and is truly a self-made man makes a fansite seem even more justified. He’s truly talented and deserves a large fanbase, which I hope to help build with this site. Taking from what the residents of the silo call the lower third of the silo, The Down Deep is where I’ll put my attempts to build an uprising for this truly phenomenal book and its talented author.
