Year in Review: 2007
Happy New Year, Everyone!
This past year was spectacular for me, I must say. In approximately chronological order:
- I won the $2,500 Toronto Public Library Celebrates Reading Award presented at the Book Lovers' Ball (pictured above)
- My 17th novel Rollback was published by Tor to rave reviews
- I had a fabulous 22-city book tour for Rollback, including speaking for the second time at the Library of Congress
- Rollback was a main selection of the Science Fiction Book Club
- My Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint published wonderful novels by Phyllis Gotlieb and Matthew Hughes
- I was the cover boy on Quill & Quire, the Canadian publishing trade journal
- I received an Honorary Doctorate from Laurentian University (pictured below)
- I participated in the conference The Future of Intelligent Life in the Cosmos sponsored by the NASA Ames Research Center and the SETI Institute
- Carolyn and I spent three amazing months at the Berton House Writing Retreat
- Carolyn and I had a fabulous trip to China
- I won China's Galaxy Award -- that country's top science-fiction honour -- for Most Popular Foreign Author
- My "Biding Time" won the Aurora Award for Best English Language Short Story (my tenth Aurora to date!)
- I wrote an editorial for Science, the world's leading scientific journal
- Carolyn and I had a wonderful trip to Los Angeles
- My "Emails from the Future" piece appeared in Report on Business Magazine
- I gave 17 keynote addresses, including talks for the Canadian Public Relations Society, Sanofi Pasteur, Alberta Health and Wellness, and the prestigious Mary Donaldson Memorial Lecture
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Posted by Rob on Tuesday, January 01, 2008
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3 comments
3 Comments:
Sounds lke you have this science fiction writing thing under control. Are you going to branch out into other genres? Maybe a Suspense novel?
I keep saying to my friends your the hardest working writer in SF today.
That sounds like an amazing year. Congratulations and may 2008 be twice that exciting and productive!
Instead of branching out into other genres would be nice to get into movies industry. And yes, Rob is the hardest working writer. All my admiration to you!
Hi, Jim. There are two answers to your question.
First, the artistic one: I've always found that I could do everything I wanted to do creatively within the SF field; I don't find it limiting at all. Courtroom drama? Illegal Alien. High adventure? Far-Seer. Mystery? The Terminal Experiment. Romance? Rollback. Philosophical musings? Calculating God. So, I feel no need to move out of category.
The second answer is economic. I'm making a very comfortable living these days. A good hunk of that money comes directly from royalites and advances worldwide on my books -- and if I changed genres, I'd have to take a cut in pay, back to beginner's money for whatever category I moved into.
But a lot of my money these days also comes from my secondary career as a keynote speaker, and that's specifically tied into my science-fiction writing: clients hire me to give futurism talks because they recognize the applicability of the extrapolative skills that go into my science-fiction books; very few fiction writers are on the lucrative keynote circuit, but I am because I write science fiction -- you'd be hard pressed to find many writers in other areas of fiction getting the number of speaking gigs or the size of fees that I'm getting.
Bottom line is I'm happy doing what I'm doing, and I'm being well rewarded for it financially. So, why would I change?
Now, to Costi's point: film and TV options and development have been a significant income source for me for many years now, and I do think that that's going to expand even more in the not-to-distant future. ;)
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