American Gods Blog, Post 105

The problem with trying to keep some kind of record of a tour like this, is you need to have the time to write entries about the tour...

Today was DreamHaven Books in Minneapolis. I've known Greg Ketter, the owner of DreamHaven, since 1984 (we met on a train to Brighton), I've been signing in his store as long as I've been doing American signings, from a tiny store to a medium sized store to the giant purple building he currently occupies.

The staff of DreamHaven are good people. The customers are triffic. The DreamHaven web site at dreamhavenbooks.com is without doubt the best place on the web for going and finding stuff by me you might not find elswhere. Some of it, like the book Angels And Visitations, or the CD Warning Contains language, Greg has even published.

I try and do too many signings there -- one a year or thereabouts -- just to make sure that the numbers don't get too huge. Even so, today's signing started at 2:00pm and I left the store, hand hurting, everything signed, a couple of minutes before 9.00 pm.

Barnes and Noble tomorrow marks the last of the US signings. I wish I'd got to write more about the various US stops as they went by -- I never talked about Keplers (700 people, but only about 300 of them braved the signing line) and Vromans (they gave me two bottles of ink. Burgundy -- although it's pretty much purple -- and brown) and Book Soup (my favourite bookstore for browsing and buying whenever I'm in LA, although much too small a space for the signing -- I wish the Library they were meant to be holding it in hadn't fallen through) and many of the rest of them I only touched on, or may not even have mentioned at all.

The UK tour will kick off with a Forbidden Planet signing next Saturday at 1.00pm, although there will be a lot of other stuff to do with launching the book that I'll try and report back on here, much of which is very different to the way it was done in the US.

For a start, there will be a launch party.

Launch parties are fun, on the whole, for everyone except the author (who has been out of the country for several years) and the publicist organising the party. This is because the invitations are split squarely between the author's friends (who all have several years of catching up to do) and People The Author Should Meet -- who can be buyers from book chains, people from publishing, journalists, or just people who somehow got to the party. And the trick is for the publicist to get the author around the room in order to talk to everyone there without the author's friends ever feeling slighted as he gets yanked away from them after a measly three minutes.

I have very understanding friends, but I still worry about getting all the way around the room.

(Normally, an hour into the launch party, everyone's downed as much of the publisher's wine as they can and the publicist is having a fit as two journalists are found trying to make love under an antique table, and an ancient feud about a long-ago book review surfaces and there's a screaming match between five old friends and someone else starts crying in a corner and the last thing anybody cares about is the author anyway, nor will they remember much in the morning. But still, as long as publishers persist in holding the launch parties, and as long as the wine keps flowing, people will keep coming.)

I'm looking forward to the UK tour. I have no idea how long the lines at the signings will be over there, or how the book will do. I know that Hodder are behind it all the way -- they're doing the hardback at a discount with a money back guarantee, which I learned when I saw it a couple of weeks ago -- as good as Stephen King or your money back. I'm not sure that's what I'd have said about it, and I keep getting the urge to write to Steve and explain that it really wasn't my idea. But if it gets people to pick up the book, I'm happy. I just hope they aren't looking for chills and real horror because, while there's a lot of stuff in American Gods, that's not really the territory it covers.

How long have I been typing this? I should go to bed. Good night.

American Gods Blog, Post 104

Someone at one of the stops put a piece of paper down on the desk in front of me. Secret advice for blogger users it said. When I opened it up, it said, write your blogger entry in notepad first. But unless I'm writing from the road, I never do. I just head over to blogger.com, enter the blogger and start typing.

I just typed an entry, hit ... some key... and everything I'd typed to that point vanished completely. So I'm doing it again.

Let's see.... first of all, ignore previous comment on the NY Times bestseller list not being out till next Sunday. That was written because I'd lost a day and thought it was sunday -- this was caused by (a) a two week long marathon tour across America (except for the south) without much sleep at a city a day and (b) buying the Sunday papers on the way home. Mock me if you wish -- you try doing a tour like that, and be happy if all you lose is a saturday.

And the list is up at:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/07/08/bsp/besthardfiction.html -- and thanks to Jade Walker for letting me know, over in the Well. Jade does a really good online e-zine for writers called Inscriptions -- if you write, want to write, or you just like writers, you should go and look at it...

Talking about Except for the South, there were some people who came a really long way to get their books signed on this tour. Most of them were from Texas, and many of them drove... I felt guilty and was pleased at the same time. My assistant tells me I'll be a guest at Aggiecon next year, so people won't have so far to drive...

(Which reminds me: we probably need a page of my future appearances, conventions etc somewhere at neilgaiman.com...)

Okay. Now to shave and then -- onward to DreamHaven!

American Gods Blog, Post 87

So Neilgaiman.com went live and ate most of americangods.com. I miss the old-style front page -- I was rather hoping to see what happened to the AMERICAN GODS WILL BE PUBLISHED IN ... counter as soon as we got past midnight on monday the 18th.

So, right now, if you're reading this, you probably have this page bookmarked, because you can't get to the working bloggerjournalthing from the main site.

As the cover note says on the home page, neilgaiman.com is, right now, very much a work in progress. Given another week, everything should actually work. Over the following few weeks it'll become much prettier and better organised, I'll try to get a few more things written for it, find fun archived stuff, we'll have more links to things, all that -- but for right now what you see is more or less what you get.

The message boards look like they may be fun. Feel very free to chip in -- and to use the AMERICAN GODS TOUR section for everything from seeing if you can get a ride to a signing, to, um, meeting up at signings.

webmaster@authorsontheweb.com is the webmaster, and julia.onder@harpercollins.com is the publisher's webperson. If something seems to be broken... tell them. They will want to know. They've moved mountains to get everything up before the 19th of June...

Let's see, what else...? Oh yes. My assistant, the Fabulous Lorraine, has a new CD out. She and writer Emma Bull are a band called The Flash Girls, and they've made their first new album in about five years. (They were geographically challenged.) It's called Play Each Morning, Wild Queen, and it's very cool. (Their last album, Maurice and I, was also very cool, is still available, and has Alan Moore's song "Me and Dorothy Parker" on it.) It has a cover by Michael Zulli, and three songs by me on. Please buy it and make her independently wealthy. You can order it from DreamHaven books in Minneapolis.

American Gods Blog, Post 48

Got my hair cut by the wonderful Wendy from Hair Police (particularly wonderful as she didn't grumble that I was almost half an hour late), then stopped in to say hello to Greg Ketter at Dreamhaven Books, to discuss the new series of spoken word CDs. (Regular readers of this journal will have noticed me recording the material for the first two CDs last week.) We were trying to figureout how long it would be before they could be released, and it's going to be a little while -- probably not till the end of the year. Greg mentioned how frustrating it is that Warning: Contains Language now goes for $100 on e-bay, and I said "Well, could we just print up a few to tide us over until we can get the new ones out...?"

Greg made a phone call. "We can have some in two weeks," he said, mildly astonished. So we're doing a small print run -- about a thousand copies -- of Warning. It's a double CD, and I hope it will be for sale at the various stops on the signing tour, and through DreamHaven. I don't know if Greg's doing enough that he'll be offering it through Amazon.com, or into the comic stores through Diamond. We'll see.

But you will be able to get copies, for a little while. And then after that the CDs on there will become part of the new Audio CD series.

So that's news.

And yesterday I got an e-mail from my agent saying that Harper have just bought the electronic book rights to American Gods (no advance. The e-retailer takes half, and Harper and I split the remaining half). And then they asked if they could do the rest of the books in the same way, and we said yes.

(That's not really news. But it's interesting.)

And I got home to find an e-mail telling me that it's been announced that David Goyer is adapting and directing a movie based on my short story Murder Mysteries for Dimension films -- something that's been in the works for several years, and has just come to fruition.

I wish David much luck.... (Thinks: I hope they do Private Eye Angel toys.)

And that's all the news for this afternoon.