Blame Hugh Howey

I’ve got two parts of my novel How It Ends up and published on Amazon, here and here. Part three will be coming out in the early part of January.

You might be wondering why I’m serializing it rather than just releasing it in a single volume.

Well, even if you’re not wondering, I’m gonna tell you why. (This is your opportunity to click out of this page.)

The reason is Hugh Howey. It’s his fault.

If you’re a writer, and you’re self-publishing your material, and you haven’t heard of Hugh Howey, then you’ve been living (and writing) under a rock.

Hugh Howey is the author of Wool, a science fiction, post-apocalyptic dystopia, that was has taken the publishing world by storm. If you want the full history of Wool, you can check out the Wall Street Journal article on it. The short version is that Mr. Howey published the first part of Wool as a short story in Amazon for $0.99. In the few months, it had sold 1,000 copies and readers were asking for a sequel.

He’s now making seven figures and has a movie deal.

Okay, so, I have no expectations about making seven figures. It took me a decade, but I finally broke out of the idea that I would write for money. If you’re writing for money rather than to tell a good story, you’re writing for the wrong reason.

However, Hugh Howey’s story represents the holy grail of self-publishing. The idea that a lone writer, crafting fiction and self-publishing it, without agents, houses, or editors, suddenly having such huge success–well, that’s a pretty enticing dream.

And it might just be a dream. Then again, it might not.

So I’ve decided to take a page out of the Hugh Howey handbook. I’m serializing my novel in four parts, keeping the price point down for each piece, with a final omnibus version to be published when the whole thing is complete.

How’s it going so far?

I’m up to 5 copies sold. 995 copies to go.