My wife and I discovered Silo this week on AppleTV+ when looking for a show we could watch with the kids (teen and pre-teens). We also finished the show this week. If you like dystopian future dramas, this is a good one. My wife and I never had an interest in that as a genre until we stumbled over Jericho in 2006. If that name rings a bell, its because it was the first show where the internet rebelled when CBS cancelled it. The protest involved 40,000 pounds of nuts (a reference to a line from the show) being shipped to CBS’ offices in LA and New York.

Silo is based on a book called Wool which has an interesting backstory itself. The author Hugh Howey is known as one of the first authors to make a living self-publishing on the Amazon Kindle (and later, other eBook platforms). He would later sell the rights to a major publisher, but reportedly took significantly less money in the deal, retaining the worldwide digital rights himself. I stumbled across this interview of Howey with Kobo Writing Life in which he explains the benefits of publishing digitally. Interesting if you like stories behind the scenes with creative professional.

I bought a Kobo eReader last week (which will be the subject of a later post), and checked out Daily Rituals by Mason Currey from the library, it is a pretty amusing coincidence that Kobo’s blog post gave me similar insight into Howey just after I watched his work, and while I’m using their device to learn about the backstories of dozens of other successful creators.