American Gods Blog, Post 88

The Message board on neilgaiman.com should be working on Monday Morning.

Today's Mail brought a Dutch contract for American Gods (I'm always faintly pleased when the Dutch buy the rights to a book, as they all speak terrific English and import UK or US editions anyway).

Therese Littleton's review of American Gods is now up at Amazon.com ... someone else who understood it.

I'm on tour from tomorrow morning, for six weeks....

... wish me luck.

American Gods Blog, Post 78

Spent a good part of yesterday trying to compile a bibliography of Books Consulted for American Gods for the not-yet-online neilgaiman.com -- a sort of astonishingly incomplete bibliography, because otherwise I would have had to try and catalogue half a library, so I'm trying just to list the books in the boxes I'd put in the boot of the car (that's the trunk, for americans) when I drove down to Florida to work on the novel, and the ones I tried to make sure were on the shelves in the cabin as I wrote the rest of the book... and the ones I filled my suitcase with when I went to spend two weeks writing in Las Vegas (an anecdote, it occurs to me, that I've not mentioned yet on this blogger. Oh well. Feel free to ask me about it if you are at one of the Q & A sessions between the reading and the signing.) I got down a lot of the myth and folklore books. Lots of mini-capsule reviews.Cannot for the life of me find the box of books on confidence tricks or coin magic.

.....

http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/jun01/fansf.htm has a review of American Gods up... (the version up earlier was an early draft of the review posted in error).

....

Spent a couple of hours today in the basement, pulling out foreign editions of books for neilgaiman.com. I'm not sure whether I was more amazed by the stuff I didn't know I had -- "Chivalry" and "Snow, Glass, Apples" in Japanese. A box of first editions of Angels and Visitations. A Large Print edition of Stardust. A folder of short stories and poems I wrote in my teens (didn't have the heart to burn them, but the idea of anyone ever actually reading them... ow!) -- or the stuff I knew I had but couldn't find -- The German Hardback of Good Omens, for example -- or the stuff I should have had but had never been sent -- like the swedish editions of Neverwhere, or the Spanish Smoke and Mirrors and Stardust.

American Gods Blog, Post 32

And the question comes in from places as far away and as far apart (except of course alphabetically) as France and Finland, “What is happening with foreign editions of American Gods? When will it come out in my country?” And the answer is...

It’ll be a while. (Except in Australia, where they’ll be importing the Headline edition from the UK.)

My literary agents, Writers House, are waiting for the bound galleys to come in from Harper Collins – they should be around any moment now. Then they will send out copies of those galleys to their sub-agents in various countries all around the world, who will show them to the publishers who will offer them money for the rights to publish the book.

(It’s probably worth mentioning here that at last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, the foreign publishers were all told that American Gods was coming. Really it was. So they are all prepared to read it. And, with luck, to like it and offer lots of yen, francs, marks, zloties and crumbulae.)

And then the foreign publishers will get translators in, who will try and figure out how to translate some things and still keep the spirit of the book, something that I do not envy them on. (A French example from Patrick Marcel, who translated Neverwhere and Smoke and Mirrors into French: Thursday in English translates as Thor’s Day, in French it’s Mardi – Mars’s Day. This apparently trivial fact can be quite important in a book with gods in it.)

And then, probably sometime in the following 12 - 24 months, the book will come out. Sometimes I get sent copies. Often I find out about them only when I sign one for someone, or hear about them from people who grumble about the Serbian translations of my books, and I say “I didn’t know I’d written any Serbian books”.

Sometimes the publishers bring me in to do signings for them, and sometimes they don’t (mostly they don’t, but it’s fun when they do). Sometimes the translations are good, and sometimes they aren’t (I normally find out from people telling me how much better it is to read the book in English). (I’m still waiting for someone to come up and tell me how much improved the book was by being translated into Japanese or Greek; it’s only a matter of time.)