William Hertling – A Self-Published Success
By S.E. SEVER
The singularity is that point in time when computerthan humans, and then continues to accelerate its
intelligence, whether due to self-optimization or just
the continuing increase in computational power.
Avogadro Corp, won Forewords
Review Science Fiction Book of the Year and the
second, A.I. Apocalypse, was nominated for the
These two books caused me to think deeply about the
singularity, and in particular, to examine that moment
of emergence. What would it be
book of this trilogy, The Last Firewall, was endorsed
by Harper Reed, the CTO for the Obama Campaign.
they were confronted with a selfdriven AI, and how would they
react?
adventure is a highly inspiring one. And
he’s also written a
S.E.: Did you have writing a
trilogy in mind from the
beginning, or did the story
unravel itself more and
more as you wrote it?
share his publishing
experiences. It’s called
Indie & Small Press
Book Marketing. In this
book, he successfully
covers many aspects of
publishing from design
to media relations.
William: I only expected to
During this Q&A, we’re going to discuss two skills that
publishers demand from their authors: coming up
with ground-breaking stories, and self-promotion.
Then, we’ll dive into evaluating the pros and cons
of self-publishing vs. traditional publishing. And as
experience goes, William Hertling is the person to
whom to address these issues; he has his hands in
both self-publishing and traditional publishing.
After I had written the
chance conversation with
another author convinced
me to keep writing.
it to agents and publishers, I
happened to attend Ignite, a
Portland conference where the
Hugo-award-winning
author
David D. Levine was speaking.
Afterwards I went up to him and
asked him if he had any advice for a new writer. He
said “keep the pipeline full”, meaning that I should
continue to write while I was submitting. This was an
astonishing message because it was the last thing
I’d imagined. I thought Avogadro Corp was going to
be my only book. I had no intention of writing more.
But the idea stuck with me, and even as I was putting
Avogadro Corp during
revisions, I started daydreaming about the plot for
A.I. Apocalypse.
S.E.: Hi, William. Let’s start from the beginning.
How did you come up with the idea to write
Avogadro Corp?
William: I read two books back to back: Ray
Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near
about the technological singularity, and Charles
what it would be like to live through the singularity.
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