Scott Sigler
Scott Sigler is a contemporary American author of science fiction and horror as well as an avid podcaster. Scott is the New York Times #1 bestselling author of sixteen novels, six novellas, and dozens of short stories. He is the cofounder of Empty Set Entertainment, which publishes his young adult Galactic Football League series. Originally from Michigan, he now resides in San Diego, California.
Raised in Cheboygan, Michigan, Scott’s father passed his love of classic monster films along to his son. His mother, a school teacher, encouraged his reading offering him any book he wanted. He wrote his first monster story, Tentacles, Tentacles & More Tentacles, at the age of eight. Scott didn’t travel far for college having attended Olivet College (Olivet, Michigan) and Cleary College (Ann Arbor, Michigan) where he earned his Bachelor’s of Arts in Journalism and Bachelors of Science in Marketing.
Scott has had a varied career path having worked fast food, picking fruit, shoveling horse manure, a sports reporter, director of marketing for a software company, software startup founder, marketing consultant, guitar salesman, and bum in a rock band.
He has been covered in Time Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Publisher’s Weekly, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, io9, Wired, The Huffington Post, Business Week, and Fangoria. He now resides in San Diego, California with his dog, Reesie.
In 2005, Scott built a large online following by releasing his audiobooks as serialized podcasts. More than a decade later, he still gives his stories away for free, every Sunday at scottsigler.com. His loyal fans, who named themselves “Junkies”, have downloaded over thirty-five million individual episodes. Described as “Stephen King meets Michael Crichton meets Chuck Palahniuk,” Scott’s thrillers will have you trembling with anticipation for each week’s episode.
EarthCore was originally published in 2001 by iPublish, an AOL/Time Warner imprint. With the novel doing well as a promotional ebook, Time Warner was planning on publishing the novel. With the economic slump following September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Time Warner did away with the imprint in 2004. Scott then decided to start podcasting his novel in March 2005 as the world’s first podcast-only novel to build hype and garner an audience for his work.
Scott considered it a “no brainer” to offer the book as a free audio download. Having searched for podcast novels and finding none, he decided to be the first. Scott was able to get EarthCore offered as a paid download on iTunes in 2006. After EarthCore’s success (It had over 10,000 subscribers), Scott released Ancestor, Infected, The Rookie, Nocturnal, and Contagious via podcast.
Scott released a PDF version of Ancestor in March 2007 through Scott’s own podcast as well as others. Ancestor was released on April 1, 2007 to much internet hype and, despite having been released two weeks earlier as a free ebook, reached #7 on Amazon.com’s best-seller list and #1 on Sci-Fi, Horror, and Genre-Fiction on the day of release. Scott is leveraging new media to keep in touch with his fans, regularly talking with them using social networking sites, via email, and IM.
Scott was featured in a New York Times article on March 1, 2007 by Andrew Adam Newman, which was covering authors using podcasting innovations to garner a broader audience.
In March 2014, Executive Editor Mark Tavani at Ballantine Bantam Dell bought World Rights to a science fiction trilogy by Scott. In the first book, Alive, a young woman awakes trapped in a confined space with no idea who she is or how she got there. She soon frees other young adults in the room and together they find that they are surrounded by the horrifying remains of a war long past … and matched against an enemy too horrible to imagine. Further adventures follow in two more books, Alight and Alone. On Wednesday, July 15, 2016, it was announced that Alive made #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list in the Young Adult E-Book category.
Scott calls Stephen King a “’master craftsman’, who writes from the ‘regular guy’ strata from which he hails. His older stuff had no pretense, no ‘higher message,’ no ‘I’m extremely important’ attitude, just rock-solid storytelling and character development. He also would whack any character at any time, and that’s what hooked you in — when characters got into trouble, you didn’t know if they’d live, unlike 99% of the books out there that are trying to develop franchise characters.”
According to Scott, Jack London’s “The Sea Wolf totally changed my views on life”. Scott saw King Kong (1976 version) when he was a little kid. He said, “It scared the crap out of me. I hid behind my dad’s shoulder and begged to leave the theatre. As soon as we were out, I asked when we could see it again — that was the moment I knew I wanted to tell monster stories. I wanted to have that same impact on other people.”
Scott has been a runner-up in both the 2006 and 2007 Parsec Awards. In 2006 he was a runner-up for his short story Hero in the Best Fiction (Short) category and for Infected in the Best Fiction (Long) category. In the 2007 Parsec Awards, Scott was a runner up for The Rookie in the Best Speculative Fiction Story (Novel Form) category. In the 2008 Parsec Awards Scott’s Contagious, the sequel to Infected was listed at 33 on the New York Times best sellers list.
In the 2008 Parsec Award Scott broke through and won for Red Man in the Best Speculative Fiction Story (Short Form) category. He followed up with another win in the 2009 Parsec Awards for Eusocial Networking in the Best Speculative Fiction Story (Novella Form) category. 2010 saw him continue to win in the Best Speculative Fiction Story (Short Form) category with his podcast, The Tank, and in the 2011 Parsek Awards he again took out the Best Speculative Fiction Story (Novella Form) category with Kissyman & the Gentleman.
On July 31, 2015, Scott was inducted into the inaugural class of the Academy of Podcasters Hall of Fame at a ceremony in Fort Worth, Texas.
Scott is a Master Knitter, Bassist for Evan Diamond and he says “My goal is to conquer the world and make all of humanity my servants.”
Scott has several of his alter-egos. Soupbone the Wonder Pimp, Francis Dominic Olivieri, Pope Siglericus XXX, and General Siglerisimo.
Read his Bibliography at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
View his LinkedIn profile. Follow him on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and MySpace. Visit his homepage or chat with him on messenger.
