Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Year in Review: 2007



Happy New Year, Everyone!

This past year was spectacular for me, I must say. In approximately chronological order:Now, onward to 2008!



The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site


3 Comments:

At January 01, 2008 4:06 AM , Blogger Jim Shannon said...

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.

 
At January 01, 2008 12:08 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

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!

 
At January 01, 2008 11:10 PM , Blogger RobertJSawyer said...

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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