Hi! At http://www.wikipedia.org you'll find Wikipedia, a great project to create an entirely free and open encyclopaedia. Athttp://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Gaiman you'll find the entry for Neil, which has links to other entries for specific books and so forth, and at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman you'll find the Sandman entry, which has links to each of the Sandman collections and to a page on characters. I noticed all of these were a bit sketchy,occasionally inaccurate and sometimes non-existent, and have spent sometime lately fleshing the sketchy bits out, correcting the inaccurate bits and creating the ones that didn't exist. I was hoping that a) you'd find it interesting to read and b) you'd post these links on the blog, in the hopes that people both more knowledgeable and more concise than
myself will improve my stuff, this after all being the point of Wikipedia. Thanks a lot!
Adam W.
Not a problem.
1. When you decided on becoming a Writer, did you have trouble on deciding what type of novels you were going to write, for example you thought that maybe you were a science fiction writer, or a modern fiction writer. Or have all of your stories always been dark and macabre?
2. How many copies of American Gods have been sold worldwide. It's my favourite book of all time, and I know Sandman has sold 12 million (according to the British covers, but you never can trust them.) But I was just curious to see how my favourite book had fared across the world.
3. Are you planning on writing a huge mammoth book like American Gods again, aimed only for adults, as that would be cool.
Thanks for your time, don't let me disrupt your work.
1 -- Good question. I think I thought I might be a science fiction writer. I don't think all of my stories have been dark and macabre -- Stardust isn't dark, for example, and it's only faintly macabre. Much of Sandman is quite sunny and only macabre around the edges. The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish was practically not macabre at all.
2 -- well, it's not done selling yet. I actually don't have any figures in for France, Italy, Brazil, Israel, etc.
But in the UK it had sold around eighty thousand copies between hardback, trade paperback and the recently released paperback, the last time I heard. The US has sold around a hundred thousand hardbacks and so far about three hundred thousand paperbacks, and it is still doing very well (it's not been off the Northern California Independent Bookseller bestseller lists since it came out, normally at # 1 or #2). The publisher would say that US and UK paperbacks continue to sell 'briskly" and have both gone back to press again recently.
3 -- Yes. But not yet. I want to do another book that will be done in a year or less before I dive into something huge. (There are two huge books in my head, at present -- Time in the Smoke and Night. But both of them will wait for me.) I don't have to decide until I pick up my pen toward the end of the year, but I think Anansi Boys will probably be next.