Scary eyes

I went to the British Library today and recorded a podcasted interview about the Ramayana. In case you were worrying. And I had lunch with my editor at Bloomsbury. Oddly enough, Dave and Claire McKean were at the next table (in town to hang an exhibition of art at Foyles). It was lucky that my editor really liked the new The Graveyard Book cover, and so did I, or bread rolls might have been flung.

...


It's worth drawing people's attention to the fact that the free online reading copy of American Gods is now in its last six days online (it ends 31 March 08). I learned this from an email from Harper Collins, which also told me the latest batch of statistics.

For American Gods:

68,000 unique visitors to the book pages of American Gods

3,000,000 book pages viewed in aggregate

And that the weekly book sales of American Gods have apparently gone up by 300%, rather than tumbling into the abyss. (Which is -- the rise, not the tumble -- what I thought would happen. Or at least, what I devoutly hoped would happen.)

The book is up at This URL, if you're interested, or want to pass it along to a friend.

I was wondering if you'd consider giving a shout out for Don Rosa, the prolific writer/artist behind many great Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck comics. He is spending the next six months recuperating from surgery for a detached retina, and I thought people might like to keep him in their thoughts and prayers.

Of course. We used to sit together a lot at foreign conventions, Don and I. People would look at us puzzled, and obviously wonder why the Uncle Scrooge guy was talking to the Sandman guy and what we could possibly have to talk about. Mostly I would be learning all about hummingbird feeders and bluebirds, and how to look after woodlands and suchlike, and sometimes I would be explaining to Don how comics business was conducted outside of Disney, and he would take that information and use it to better his lot across Europe. He's a really good guy, and I hope he recovers quickly.

Dear Neil,

This isn't a question, but rather, an apology for something I've felt badly about for quite a while now. I attended your reading and signing, in Toronto, for Anansi Boys. It was a fabulous evening, and I was lucky enough to be one of the first people in line to have my book signed. You drew me a very nice Mr. Punch, unasked, much to my delight. Thank you for that.

The reason I need to apologize is because, of the many photos I took that evening, one fills me with such terrible guilt I can't even look at it. The reason? My camera's auto flash setting. Which turned back on every time my camera went into standby, and which I'd not thought about until I perpetrated the following upon you . . .

There's one photo I snapped of you during your reading where you have extremely intense red-eye happening, and I can only imagine the blinding that must have caused. I am so, so sorry. I fully intended to respect the no-flash policy, and should have remembered to switch off the default setting. Every time I walk by that church, I feel terrible guilt. Moreso than I normally feel when walking past any church.

It's a small thing, and it's ridiculously late in coming, but I thought I'd at least get it said. Now my church-related guilt levels can return to their normal, questionably healthy levels.

Thanks, and sorry,

-Eden

Not to worry. I have world class photographic red-eye pretty much all the time. As a general rule, if it's taken with a flash, I look like I am possessed by the blazing forces of darkness, at least in the eye department.

...

It's sold a lot of copies, but Odd and the Frost Giants hasn't got many reviews -- http://www.greenmanreview.com/book/book_gaiman_oddandthefrostgiants.html is one of the few.

Very small footnote to Free

Today my assistant Lorraine is in the kitchen doing mysterious things to obtain beeswax from slumgum, and I am mostly on the phone copy-editing The Graveyard Book.

Anyway. Free books. I started thinking about times we've used this principle in paper books -- using the free thing to spread the author or the idea, and, if you ignore the five fingered discount (remember, in the UK you can add Terry Pratchett to the "four authors who are flying off the shelves and don't forget the graphic novels" list) then you still have things like Free Comic Book Day. And before there was ever Free Comic Book Day, there was Sandman 8.

It was 1989. I wrote Sandman #8, Mike Dringenberg drew it, and the editorial and marketing departments at DC Comics got enthusiastic about it. I went out and got three pages of quotes from fantasy and horror authors about Sandman, wrote a "The Story So Far". DC Comics overprinted Sandman #8 and sent each retailer an extra 25% above what they'd ordered, for free, and told them that they could do whatever they wanted with them.

Some stores simply sold them.

The smart stores gave them away. Some of the smart stores even went back to DC and asked for more. The stores that gave them away were the stores who, a year or so later, found it very easy to sell Sandman trade paperbacks to their customers. And then to sell Sandman hardcovers. And some of them are now selling the Absolute Sandmans.

(And a few people have written to let me know that ABSOLUTE SANDMAN Volume 3 is now up at Amazon, with the extra 5% discount for pre-ordering it bringing it to 42% off.)

Anyway. There weren't any grumbles that we were somehow devaluing other comics, or that this was Marxism in action, or that this was going to put comics retailers out of business or anything like that. It was about expanding the readership, about convincing people that it was safe to try something new.

(I just called Brian Hibbs at Comix Experience who put labels with his store's name and address on his free comics and then left them at barbers' shops and on buses and anywhere else he could, bookcrossing style -- he said he passed out about 400 copies of Sandman 8 and got 100 readers back, who bought every copy of Sandman, and the collected editions, and some of those people are buying Absolute Sandmans from him now -- and then he pointed out that it wasn't just Sandman that those people bought, but lots of them discovered comics and bought everything...)

...

Rachel McAdams says she would like to be Black Orchid on the screen -- I'd like to see that too. I didn't know what I was doing when I wrote Black Orchid, and it shows, but there's some dialogue I'm still really happy with, and a wilful attempt to avoid cliche that I'm still proud of. And Dave McKean created an entire school of realistic superhero art (one he's still apologising for). It was our first full-colour baby.

I wish her luck.

...

How does he come up with the cover images? Dave I mean. Does he just make it up out of his head like writing? Or is there a HarperCollins committee that says, "We would like a blue cover with a knife. And perhaps a black one with some mist...no no, more swirly please."


Can you ask him? And if he answers, can you post it?


Thanks Neil!

-Miriam

I can answer this -- I was there and watching it. The first cover Dave did was done to a Harpers request (they sent him a sketch of the kind of thing they wanted, and he painted that). With the more recent ones I posted, Dave had simply read the book (which I was still writing when he did the first one) and then sketched a bunch of potential covers and handed them in.

Hi Neil,

Can I ask what happened to the much more finished graveyard book cover that you posted a few weeks back? I have a feeling that Dave might be someone that hands in finished pieces on a whim sometimes, but had he just done that for promotion etc, or was it just an early version? I know what it is like to do covers several times, not just as roughs but also finished pieces, and I think the rough sketches you posted might be stronger than that one, but I just wondered...

-Joel Stewart

Well, it exists, and it might be used in promotion, or turn up in the back of the Subterranean Press Edition or as a colour Frontispiece to the Bloomsbury limited edition, but it probably won't be a book cover (unless there's a foreign publisher who wants it, I suppose).

It was done to order, but it really didn't reflect the book I wrote, which was why we went back to Dave and said, "you don't have to worry any longer about doing a book cover that looks like it's for young readers. Just do a book cover."

And yes, I think most of the ones he came back with are stronger than that was.

And yes, it's not at all unknown for Dave simply to do finished art and hand it in. On Sandman he did it after he was removed from the book, as we started The Doll's House. He was told that he was off Sandman so that he could concentrate on finishing Arkham Asylum -- he simply went home and did the next three Sandman covers and sent them off to DC...

...

Which reminds me -- it's been a very long time since I posted a link to http://gaimanmckeanbooks.co.uk/ -- there are some very wonderful Dave McKean screensavers and ecards and suchlike there...

the one with the Dave McKean Graveyard Book cover sketches in

Lots of people wrote to tell me that X-Rays were needed for TB tests, and some people suggested that they were in hand-baggage as they might be fogged by X-Rays in checked baggage, but no-one explained why there seemed no mechanism for anyone ever to look at the (quite expensive, and carried over in hand-baggage), x-rays until this arrived from Mr Petit...

Having been a commanding officer in the UK -- meaning I had to supervise
airmen and NCOs under my command when they wanted to bring their UK brides
back to the US -- I had to chuckle when I saw the note about the x-ray.

It's not required by the immigration folks (either Division 6, or anyone
else). Since it's a different federal agency, I'm not surprised that an INS
employee wouldn't know about it. It's required by the US Public Health
Service, for everyone, regardless of nationality, who is trying to immigrate.

And they do, on occasion, get checked, but only if there's advance reason to
believe there's "a substantial risk of exposure." For example, you can bet
that flights on foreign-flag carriers originating in, say, Nairobi get more
scrutiny than would a BA or AA flight from Heathrow.

The relevant statute was passed in 1938 (there may have been a predecessor,
but I doubt it) and hasn't been updated yet. What a surprise.

And this came in from my editor Jennifer Brehl at Harper Collins about the free American Gods -- I'm putting it up because she says it better than I could paraphrase it:

First of all, the online edition has been optimized and the embedded pages are moving much faster. I’ve asked that the widget confusion be fixed – i.e., open up widget to full book rather than older partial version.

We’re wondering if you might have some time tomorrow that we could call you and we could have a conference call to discuss things? We want your fans to know that we are responsive to their concerns and, although it’s painful getting the criticism, it’s also a good learning opportunity.

So there will be a conference call, and I'll report back on it.

...

Neil,

Huge fan, metaphorically speaking, regular sized person.

Did you see this? You're creating favorites that stand the test of time: http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20181426_13,00.html.

-Mike


Oh good.

(And I should mention, I loved this Michael Chabon New Yorker article about Superhero costumes.)

Hello Neil,
I am going to the Easter Con in Heathrow because I'd like to hear you. Could you recommend which day would have the most Neil-time or most Neil-events? I know I'm not made of the right stuff since I might have to be selective about the days at the con, and even though I'd love to build my own battle-ready space ship, I still would like to get two flies with one swat....being battle-ready an'all (Ahem!).

Thank you,

Henriette

From the schedule, it looks like it's definitely Sunday.
http://www.orbital2008.org/sunday.pdf
-- and you get a Mitch Benn concert into the bargain.

...


Dave McKean says he doesn't mind me putting up his sketches for The Graveyard Book cover...

So to bring you up to speed...

Dave did a cover while I was writing the book. As the book continued, it became sort of obvious that the cover was younger than the book was, and we needed a cover that told adults that this was a book for them too.

So I finished the book and Dave read the book and did a bunch of sketches, all of which made me happy, and all of which felt a lot more like the book I'd written...

All of these are sketches, it's worth pointing out -- roughs for me and the various editors and art departments to look at and choose from. It's not finished art, nor is it meant to be.

(The actual typeface is something Dave plans to scan in and create from photos of old gravestones.)

And in the next post I'll tell you what the response was, and which one we wound up going with and why.

Born Free

Lots of lovely letters from people about where and how they found authors for free whose work they then went on to buy, although I was vaguely hoping someone would write a letter saying, "If you're so fond of Free, then why don't you write a book for free, that you don't get any royalties on, that could be given away or sold incredibly cheaply, just to encourage people to read? Yeah, what about that then, smartarse?" But nobody has.

Which is actually a pity, because if they did I could point out that I did just that -- the writing the book bit anyway -- last year. It's a short book called Odd and the Frost Giants, and it's published by Bloomsbury Books in the UK and Ireland for the 2008 World Book Day, which is this coming Thursday, the 6th of March.

And I wasn't the only one.

Basically, every kid in the UK and Eire gets a book token, and gets to decide where to spend it (they have nine books to choose from, most of them specially written for the occasion). No-one -- authors, illustrators, publishers, book-sellers, Book Tokens or schools -- makes any profit anywhere. (Except possibly for Amazon.co.uk making a healthy profit on international postage.)

"13 million school children in the UK will receive a World Book Day £1 Book
Token which can be exchanged for a World Book Day £1 Book, throughout March,
from over 3,000 participating bookshops and book retailers across the UK and
Republic of Ireland. The £1 Token can also be put towards any book or
audio book costing £2.99 or more. The World Book Day £1 Book Token is sponsored
by National Book Tokens and redemptions are funded by bookshops across the
country."

Again, it's books as dandelion seeds, and not all of them are going to find soil. Some of those 13 million kids will destroy their books, some leave them behind, some not even care enough to participate. But some of the kids will go and choose a book of their own, find something they wouldn't have discovered otherwise, maybe find out that reading and owning books of your own is something you can do for pleasure, and... maybe... it'll help ensure that there are still readers of books -- and bookshops -- a hundred years from now.

(I just googled to see if there were any reviews of Odd yet. None from newspapers that I could see, but

http://thingsmeanalot.blogspot.com/2008/03/odd-and-frost-giants-by-neil-gaiman.html

http://stuffasdreamsaremadeon.com/2008/03/01/odd-and-the-frost-giants-by-neil-gaiman-and-ttfn/

Kurt Busiek reviews it at http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.arts.sf.written/2008-03/msg00371.html)

...

Lots of people wrote to tell me that the chest X-Ray was needed for the Tuberculosis test. Nobody explained why the chest X-Ray has to be carried to the US in hand-baggage (it's one of the rules, or it was in 1992). I asked at immigration when I arrived in the US if anyone was going to look at it, and was told that no, nobody ever ever looked at the chest X-rays in hand-baggage. Ever? Ever, said the man.

...

If your dog suddenly discovers and goes for a cat (no longer in a tree) when you're standing on a sheet of what was ice-melt that has just refrozen into sheet ice, and you make a sudden and ill-advised move in an attempt to stop the cat being chased (and to stop the dog losing an eye -- Princess takes her fights seriously) and go down rather heavily on your ankle, you wind up oddly happy if an hour or so later you're just limping and icing it. It could have been a hundred times worse, as my doctor (who happened to be nearby) pointed out.

Princess is back inside the house, Cabal has a scratch under his eye.

And Dave McKean sent over nine sketches for nine different covers to The Graveyard Book -- all of them really impressive. I'll find out from him if he minds me putting them up here (once the final one has been decided upon, anyway). It would be interesting to show people how a book cover gets decided on. (I was also thrilled that Dave wrote after finishing it and said he thought it was a much stronger book than Coraline.)

More on free and suchlike

This just came in, and I thought it deserved a long reply...

Hello Mr. Gaiman:
As a bookseller, I am a bit surprised by your recent comment about free books and the HarperCollins download. When you say, "the problem isn't that books are given away or that people read books they haven't paid for. The problem is that the majority of people don't read for pleasure," you seem to miss the point that all of us booksellers are hoping to sell your book to READERS as well as non-readers. Our situation improves as more non-readers become readers, but we can't survive when the readers go elsewhere. I am not at all against free literature--I firmly believe that the more people read the more people read--but somehow, if we independents are to survive, we need to be included somewhere in the formula. I also believe that we independents have no RIGHT to exist, that our time may have passed or be passing, but it would be nice if we could survive; I believe we can--and do--serve a very important purpose.Thanks. I don't sense that you have anything against booksellers--I do want to let you know how your comment might be interpreted by some.
Don Muller
Old Harbor Books
201 Lincoln Street
Sitka, Alaska 99835

Hi Don,

I don't see this as either they get it for free or they come and buy it from you. I see it as Where do you get the people who come in and buy the books that keep you in business from?

The books you sell have "pass-along" rates. They get bought by one person. Then they get passed along to other people. The other people find an author they like, or they don't.

When they do, some of them may come in to your book store and buy some paperback backlist titles, or buy the book they read and liked so that they can read it again. You want this to happen.

Just as a bookseller who regards a library as the enemy, because people can go there and read -- for free! -- what he sells, is missing that the library is creating a pool of people who like and take pleasure in books, will be his customer base, and are out there spreading the word about authors and books they like to other people, some of whom will simply go out and buy it.

If readers find (for free -- in a library, or on-line, or by borrowing from a friend, or on a window-sill) an author they really like, and that author has a nice spanking new hardback coming out, they are quite likely to come in to your shop and buy the nice spanking new hardback. You want that to happen. You really want that to happen a lot, because you'll make more in profit on each of the nice spanking new hardbacks than you will on the paperbacks (or, probably, on anything else in the shop).

I don't believe that anybody out there who can afford a copy of American Gods is going to not buy it (or another of my books) because it's available out there on line for nothing. (Not at this point, anyway.) I think it's a lot more likely that some of the people who read it will find an author they like, and buy more books. Which is good news for people who run bookshops.

(Remember: one in four adults read no books last year. Among those who said they had read books, the median figure — with half reading more, half fewer — was nine books for women and five for men. The figures also indicated that those with college degrees read the most, and people aged 50 and up read more than those who are younger. Which means you need to find ways to get young readers to read books. And means that if someone likes American Gods and goes out and buys my entire backlist from you, that's more books than most Americans read in a year.)

I think it's very likely that someone who reads American Gods online and likes it may decide, come the 30th of September, to go out to your shop or somewhere else like it and plonk down their $17.99 for The Graveyard Book in hardcover.

I don't see it as taking money from the pockets of booksellers.

(To steal a metaphor from Cory Doctorow, it's dandelion seeds rather than mammals. A mammal produces a few offspring that take a lot of resources. A dandelion produces an awful lot of seeds because the cost in resources to the dandelion is small, but those that sprout, sprout.)

Then again, I do not always understand the ways of booksellers.

Old Harbor Books looks marvellous -- http://litsite.alaska.edu/akbooksellers/oldharbor.html -- and looks like somewhere that's involved in creating readers and a reading community. My local bookshop (now deceased) was physically arranged so that finding a book and then buying it was harder than walking around around the shop and going back out again; the bookseller mostly sat at the cash register in the middle of the shop playing online chess, and he tended to be unhelpful, vaguely grumpy and to treat people who wanted to buy things as nuisances (he was nice to me, because I was me, but still); he didn't stock paperback bestsellers because "people could always go to Wal-Mart for those" and when the she shop closed its doors the final time they put up a note on the door saying that it was Amazon.com that had driven them out of business, when it manifestly wasn't -- it seemed to me that they didn't work to entice people into the bookshop (which is what those paperback bestsellers were for), and didn't give them a pleasant experience when they were there...

But I digress...

Anyway (it probably bears reiterating) this is an experiment. Harper Collins are going to be looking at the figures over the next month and longer. If sales of American Gods crash in bookshops -- or if sales of all my other books crash -- they won't be doing it again. If American Gods sells more, if my other titles sell more, on actual Bookscan sales, then I think we'll all agree that you and your fellow booksellers will be selling more books, and will thus have nothing to worry about.

Remember, publishers aren't making their money from free downloads or from free online books. Like you (and like me), they make their money from books sold.

What we all want to do is sell more books. To readers, to non-readers, to people who thought they didn't like that sort of thing.

Also, there are also a lot of posts coming in like this:

No question - just wanted to let you know, after getting your "American Gods" online for free and reading about 200 pages, I had to go out and buy the book. Great read!

which may make you feel a little better....

...


Dear Neil
You should be able to listen again on the BBC website. all the radio programmes have a seven day period of grace and you can hear them again. If I remember rightly, I thnk I caught the Lovecraft show this way. The Beeb are also doing their shows throught the iplayer (not yet Mac compatbale). I watched the Worlds of Fantasy series about child heroes, only two days to go. Two more in the series and I think worth watching.
Kind regards
Philip

Not Desert Island Discs or Pick of the Week though.

Mr. Gaiman - Congratulations on finishing "The Graveyard Book." Can't wait to add it to my collection. I have two questions, that are both tied together.

1) You grew up in England, but have moved to the US. How difficult / time consuming was the process (paperwork, etc.) at the time, and what prompted your decision to move here?

2) If someone wanted to reverse that, and move from the US to England, any suggestions on what websites would be good to start researching?I know you are a busy man, but I thank you for any advice you could provide.

1) Fairly time consuming, not that difficult. I think the fact that we had two kids made it fairly obvious that I hadn't married my wife to get to America, and the fact that I earned the majority of my income from DC Comics (at the time) meant that it wasn't like I was about to become a drain on the US economy. I still wonder why I had to get the X-Ray of my lungs and bring it to the US in my handbaggage, and still remember fondly the lady at the US embassy who called me back and told me, quietly, that I'd left originals with her when I should have given her the copies, and when I thanked her told me to shut up because if it was known that she'd been helpful she could be fired.

2) It's nice to think that I could do more than you with a quick Google, but I don't think I can. http://www.uk-yankee.com/ looks like it might be a fine place to start looking though.

...

Mr. Gaiman,

Since your love of libraries has been well documented on your blog I'm sure I'm not the first to alert you to the marvelous www.deweydonationsystem.org (tagline: helping books find libraries since 2003). Their efforts this year are aimed at the Children's Institute in Los Angeles which helps out abused children in a myriad of ways both large and small and the Rockhouse Foundation in Jamaica which serves impoverished children in Negril. The Dewey Donation System (which I'm not affiliated with except as a donor)is a grassroots campaign run simply for the love of books and with the sure knowlege that books change lives. As a librarian and veritable eater of books (yours and many, many, many others), I know that much is true.Thanks for your time and thanks for your much-loved books,
Stephanie Betts

Oddly enough, you were the first -- but thanks...

And this made me smile: http://cjsd.blogspot.com/2008/02/ten-simple-rules-for-graduate-students.html

This fascinated me: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080214114517.htm

This (via Cabinet of Wonders) is a Google Map of the American Gods-style holy places of America.

And for those of you currently reading American Gods, it's worth pointing you to http://www.frowl.org/gods/gods.html, and on Neilgaiman.com to http://www.neilgaiman.com/works/Books/American+Gods/in/183/ (the astonishingly incomplete bibliography).

The nature of free

I'm currently talking to Harpers about ways we can make the American Gods online reading experience a more pleasant one. And about ways to give American Gods away that would make Harper Collins happy while also making, say, Cory Doctorow happy too.

I was surprised by a few emails coming in from people accusing me of doing bad things for other authors by giving anything away -- the idea being, I think, that by handing out a bestselling book for nothing I'm devaluing what a book is and so forth, which I think is silly.

I like giving stuff away. I think it's sensible. I like that you can read Sandman #1 on the DC Comics site, for example. (It's at http://www.dccomics.com/media/excerpts/1696_1.pdf. (Although for reasons known only to DC, they have put the last two pages of the story in the wrong order.) We've got five short stories up at http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Cool%20Stuff/Short%20Stories, and I just realised on poking around that I've put more essays and things up over the years on this blog than have ever made it into the essays section, and a lot more audio than ever made it to the rather threadbare audio section (although there's lots of free audio now up at http://www.last.fm/music/Neil+Gaiman)


During one of the interviews recently, a reporter said something like, "Of course, a real publisher wouldn't give away paper books," and I pointed out that 3,000 copies of The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy were given away by Douglas Adams' publisher, with a 'write in and get your free book' ad in Rolling Stone. They wanted copies of HHGTTG on campuses in the US, and they wanted people to read it and tell other people. Word of mouth is still the best tool for selling books.

This is how people found new authors for more than a century. Someone says, "I've read this. It's good. I think you'd like it. Here, you can borrow it." Someone takes the book away, reads it, and goes, Ah, I have a new author.

Libraries are good things: you shouldn't have to pay for every book you read.

I'm one of those authors who is fortunate enough to make my living from the things I've written. If I thought that giving books away would make it so that I could no longer make my living from writing and be forced to go out and get a real job -- or that other authors would be less likely to be able to make a living -- I wouldn't do it.

As I tried to explain in the Guardian interview, the problem isn't that books are given away or that people read books they haven't paid for. The problem is that the majority of people don't read for pleasure.

...

If a kid picks up a candy bar and runs, you give him a warning before you cuff him. Same with those mindless teenyboppers who go to the Hickory Farms store, and then take double samples of fruitcake and cheeselog, you warn them that they will be charged with a felony(grand theft), and that if they attempt to fight and run, they will be, unfortunately, first tazered, and if they continue to resist violently with intent to maim, then wounded. Fortunately, wounding fire to suppress teenage kleptomaniacs is relatively easy, they all run in straight lines, and a hit in the knee will be relatively simple from the second floor. But they all get a warning first, we do not simply shoot shoplifters unless they resist violently.

Ah, the joys of the Mall-Ninjas. Click on the link for context and much, much more of the same. Really wonderfully, dreadfully, unintentionally, funny...

Kids! Free! Book!

The good news is the link to the free online American Gods is up on the front page of the neilgaiman.com website. The bad news is that the link is wrong.

[Not any longer.]

For the next month, your free copy of American Gods is waiting for you at
http://tiny.cc/WRiXE

Feel free to spread the link as widely as possible around the web. If it works, and people read it, then a) we may be able to put up another book and b) sooner or later they'll simply let us give away the book in electronic form....

[edit: The artist formerly known as the Web Elf came out of retirement and fixed it. Hurrah. Visit her at the Fabulist and give her toast.]

The Birthday Thing

As you may have deduced, it's the blog's 7th birthday today. On February the 9th 2001, I started writing this thing. And now, 1,071,213 words later, it is still going. (Until the wind changes, as Mary Poppins said.)

One thing we've decided to do, as a small celebratory birthday thing is, initially for a month, make a book of mine available online, free, gratis and for nothing.

Which book, though...? Ah, that's up to you.

What I want you to do is think -- not about which of the books below is your favourite, but if you were giving one away to a friend who had never read anything of mine, what would it be? Where would you want them to start?

Click below on the cover of the book you'd like to see out there, online, for free. We'll keep the voting up for a week, and then announce (and Harper Collins will post, to be read) the winning book.

American Gods	Anansi Boys	Coraline	Fragile Things
M is for Magic	Neverwhere	Smoke & Mirrors	Stardust
[Display current results]