Journal

Thursday, May 08, 2003

Now with a Title, and Even Better!

Today started at 6.00 am. Did a Polish breakfast TV interview, then a radio interview and then the day just went on from there, interview following interview without a break (not even for lunch) until 5:45ish when I started signing. Signed for over 350 people (Piotr, my interpreter, was keeping count but he went off for a smoke at one point) in two and a half hours at the Empik store. Then ate and came back to the hotel and will sleep soon.

My interesting fact for today was learning I'm the third bestelling foreign fantasy author in Poland. (Tolkien is first, and Terry Pratchett second.) This is a perfectly fine place to be.

Hi Neil,

Do you know how many people check in here every day? I'd love to know how many people I share this virtual book with.

Does the number ever seem daunting?
Does in ever pressure you to "write something" or stop you with the feeling that..."well...this isn't really good enough to post", or is it all just a stream-of-consciousness thing...that reminds me, I need to buy some milk....regardless...keep making things up. I rather enjoy them.


Let's see -- according to the statistic server, if I'm reading it right, last month (April) we had 245,001 unique people into Neilgaiman.com (of whom 23.5% are AOL). And the number somehow doesn't seem daunting, because it's moved out of the realms of numbers that mean anything at all into the area of numbers that don't. When I learned, about 8 months in, that there were 19,000 people reading the blog, that was scary. Now, at a hair under quarter of a million people passing through the website, it's completely meaningless, and is just a number. (Interestingly, only 74,924 only read the journal and no other pages, although 158,608 accessed the journal itself.) Then there are the people who are reading this on RSS feeds (or not, because I forgot to give it a title. Let's try again...)

I'm still pleasantly surprised at signings when people say "I read your journal".

No idea why I'm posting this right now. I should be asleep. Krakow tomorrow.