just a small handful of bits really

The new Burton film, though, was entitled Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Oh yeah. It was, wasn't it? That just makes it weirder.

HOw do I get Guards! Guards! to play?????

You go to the BBC7 help page. http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/help/audiofaqs.shtml#6 . Click on the link that takes you to http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/audiohelp_install.shtml Download your mac/linus/windows/solaris version of Real Audio (apparently without adstuff). Install it. Then go back to thbe BBC 7 page and click on Listen Again for Guards! Guards!

You could also try clicking on http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/networks/bbc7/aod.shtml?bbc7/guards_guards_fri (which I found from http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/networks/bbc7/channel.shtml which is the dedicated radio Radio 7 player, and seems to be using Windows Media Player).

I also recommend Hancock's Half Hour very highly.

As a young journalist I got to interview Galton and Simpson - we talked a bit about Tony Hancock, who I only knew from the TV, and about Steptoe and Son. Now, twenty years on, there are all sorts of technical questions I'd love to ask about Hancock's Half Hour, especially the last 3 seasons, once Hattie Jacques came in and it really started to work. Looking at their website made me realise how nice it must be for work that you did that you assumed was transient -- broadcast, out on the airwaves as radio or TV, and then done and forgotten -- now cleaned up and back and widely available. (Now if only some of those lost Hancock radio episodes would turn up...)

(And congratulations to Patrick Nielsen Hayden on his new Hugo category -- http://www.livejournal.com/users/pnh/14932.html. Now we just need an "Edited by" credit on books, or some kind of central database...)

Hi Neil ^_^I hadn't known of Jonathan Carroll's blog, so upon reading your latest post I immediately went over. thanks for the pointer! but it took me a ridiculously long time to figure the rss feed for it, so in the spirit of helping other slow folks, would you share - should you think helpful - that the lj feed is "jonathancarroll" ? I know, I know, obvious... an example of how google has all the answers but won't tell unless you know what to ask.thanks!Kate

Sure. (That's http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=jonathancarroll and http://www.jonathancarroll.com/index.xml)

Re: the location of blog readers issue...It's circular - if Southerners feel shorted then we are resistant to being interested.So, no visits on tours = snub = loss of interest in following a writer (reading blogs & such) even if his/her books are still being read.So, start showing up in the Southern states more, and more fans will be reading your blog. We get skipped for so many things already...Hope that clarifies it a bit. JaNell

Not really. If people want me to go and sign somewhere, they have to get their bookstores to go and convince Harpers to send me there. Everyone gets a pretty much equal chance. Harpers get to pick the ones that work best logistically and the stores that make the best proposals. It doesn't matter if I say "I'd really like to do some signings in the South, because I haven't really yet," (which I did, before we started the planning for the tour) -- if the stronger proposal comes in from Denver than from Alabama (although I don't actually believe that any bookstores in Alabama made any proposals) then I'm going to be going to Denver. I can sort of imagine that all the people who read my stuff in the south are so irritated that I haven't gone and signed there that they won't visit my website any more (except for Georgia, where they come in in numbers that are rather higher than all the rest of the southern states put together, if you don't count Texas or Florida) but I don't see any indication that this really happens.

Interestingly, the pattern across American States has been pretty constant on where the most people were coming in to the website from and where they weren't coming from: Georgia's always been in the top ten, just as North Dakota's been pretty much always at the bottom (although Wyoming's slowly drifted up from equal bottom to somewhere in the mid-thirties, between Nevada and South Carolina). I don't get the impression at any point there's been a huge surge and drop-off from the southern states. Here's a 2003 post when I'd just got access to the numbers instead of being a sent a six-monthly spreadsheet by Harpers webmistress. And here's the follow up -- interesting to see Singapore so far behind back then -- these days Singapore, the Philippines and Hong Kong are way out in front of anywhere else in Asia, and, for those keeping score, Australia's up from .96% of all traffic to 1.71%.)

Drive In ponders...

Was talked by the girls into taking them to a Drive-In last night. Dozed intermittently through the Dukes of Hazzard, missing, as far as I could tell, nothing important in a film in which everything seemed obvious except its reason for existing in the first place, and was wide awake for W.Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, most of which I really enjoyed.

It seemed like a collision between three films: a remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,a film of Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and a third film, which felt increasingly familiar until the final image, when I remembered where I'd sort-of seen it before -- from the iconic horror actor [Christopher Lee, not Vincent Price] as the father to the snow that isn't snow at the end. I loved all the Dahl, loved most of the Burton-doing-Dahl, but felt all the bits that seemed to have wandered from the third movie (a strange sort of Burton-does-Burton-lite I kept wanting to call Edward Candyhands) were simply out of place in this story. Dahl wrote Charlie's story, and that's the film Burton begins with, but it hiccups in the middle of the film and turns into Wonka's story (he's now the one who learns something and changes, not Charlie, after all), which felt a bit like watching a version of Cinderella in which Cinders winds up skipping the ball in order to sort out the emotional trauma of her Fairy Godmother. (Hmm. That might be fun, actually.)

Jonathan Carroll (one of my favourite living authors, and a man with a website filled with marvels and goodies -- http://www.jonathancarroll.com/indexframes.html) just sent me this -- http://www.rense.com/general67/street.htm -- absolutely fascinating pavement art. And from Jonathan's blog I learned about http://www.hanzismatter.com/ -- a blog that keeps track of the misuse of Chinese characters in, well mostly Tattoos -- sort of the opposite of Engrish.com. There is a certain perverse joy in knowing that the characters in someone's lovely tattoo actually mean hand warmer and air conditioner... http://www.hanzismatter.com/2005/08/hand-warmer-and-air-conditioner.html.

Hey Neil, got a question. A couple of days ago I was in Barnes & Noble and there was a book on the table called "Smoke & Mirrors" but it wasn't your book. How can two books have the same title? Aren't there copyrights and stuff to keep that from happening? If not, I think I will call my book "War & Peace" :)

Connie

I just checked Amazon.com and they have over a dozen books called Smoke and Mirrors. A visit to Bookfinder.com (to include the long-out-of-print stuff) gave about 25 books. And no, you can't copyright a title.

Here's what the copyright office has to say over its FAQs:

Can I copyright the name of my band?
No. Names are not protected by copyright law. Some names may be protected under trademark law. Contact the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, 800-786-9199, for further information.

How do I copyright a name, title, slogan or logo?
Copyright does not protect names, titles, slogans, or short phrases. In some cases, these things may be protected as trademarks. Contact the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, 800-786-9199, for further information. However, copyright protection may be available for logo artwork that contains sufficient authorship. In some circumstances, an artistic logo may also be protected as a trademark.

How do I protect my idea?
Copyright does not protect ideas, concepts, systems, or methods of doing something. You may express your ideas in writing or drawings and claim copyright in your description, but be aware that copyright will not protect the idea itself as revealed in your written or artistic work.

Can you call a book "War and Peace"? Sure. You could even call your book "The Bible" if you wanted to. Can you call a book "Guards! Guards!" (now being dramatised weekly on BBC radio 7, in half hour episodes, go to fridays, each episode's up for a week http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/listenagain/friday/)? Mm, quite probably (but see below). Can you call a book "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire"? Not a hope in hell - at that point you are into a) Trademark Law, and b) you're passing off your work as something it's not and creating confusion in the marketplace -- people would buy your book thinking it was the other.

(By the same logic, if you're doing a photographic history of the Grenadier Guards, and you call it Guards! Guards!, you'll probably be fine. Do a funny fantasy novel and call it Guards! Guards! and Mr Pratchett and all of his lawyers will probably be down on you like a ton of bricks.)

from the mailbag...

hiya Neil,IMDB.com already has some of the cast of Beowulf listed!! so much for confidentiality...ciao,heather

They've got the ones who were mentioned in Variety last month, yes (although they don't know who's playing what). But they don't have Ms J, Mr M or Ms L. Or any of the thanes. They don't even have Crispin Glover down yet...

Neil,

While you may be right in that Moviehole meant to write "king" when they wrote "kind," I can't help but wonder if they were remembering the last lines of the poem (3180-3182):

[Old English thorns, eths, and ashes replaced with "th," "d," and "ae" respectively.]

"cwaedon thaet he waere wyruldcyninga
mannum mildust ond mondwaerust,
leodum lidost ond lofgeornost."

"said that he was of worldly kings
the mildest of men and the most gentle,
kindest to his people and most eager for fame."

Having both studied Beowulf with a number of professors and having taught it multiple times, I know that these last lines tend to get used as a discussion starter -- even sometimes in Ph.D. exams, so it could be that these lines stuck with the writer and that he or she did indeed intend to write "kind."

Either way, I'm looking forward to the release of the Beowulf movie but will have to hold off on reading Anansi Boys until I finish the dissertation. One more thing to squeeze in during the time between when I hand the complete draft over to my committee and when they return it for revision.

John Walter

What a nice person you are, John. A less charitable person would have leapt to the conclusion that it was a misprint. Then again, the fact that the same line shows up in other places as

The film is based on the Old English epic poem about a knight who slays a monster and becomes king.

and

It tells the story of a knight who becomes a legendary king after slaying a fearsome monster.

leads me to suspect slightly less thought went into it than you've given the author credit for, and that somebody intended to hit the g key.


Hi Neil,

I don't know if you've ever been to Nottingham and, if you have, I don't know if you ever visited the comic shop Page 45. It's the most wonderful shop, the staff are friendly and welcoming and are always glad to give recommendations. In fact you don't usually have to ask, the second you are within speaking distance they'll be there to ask you if you've seen this or that latest release. If there's something you're looking for, they'll always try their hardest to order it in for you. If you have strange comic-book items on your Christmas wishlist, they will be wonderfully helpful to your slightly bemused relations when they go in to try to buy your present for you.

Sadly, I had an email from the Page 45 mailing list this week to say that Mark Simpson, co-owner of Page 45, fell ill and died unexpectedly on Sunday 31st July 2005.

If you've ever been to Page 45, perhaps you knew him and this will have some personal meaning for you. If not, I thought it would be nice to sumbit a small tribute to Mark on your journal. There is very little in my collection of your works that I didn't buy from Page 45. In fact, the same goes for all the comics I own.

If you do decide to post this in your journal and there are any other Page 45 regulars out there who hadn't already heard the news, please do send your condolences to Stephen and Tom. You can find their contact details at www.page45.co.uk. Send a card, some flowers or an email. It means an awful lot to them both and the messages are also being sent on to Mark's parents and are giving them great comfort.

Mark will be sorely missed.

~Sarah

I'm so sorry. I've long thought that Page 45 is the best graphic novel shop I've ever been to (I talked about here, among other places), they were the best hosts, and that's sad news indeed.


About the BBC and its revisionist stance on articles:
I know you've already posted one remark about this, but I think what's being overlooked here are the blatant Orwellian implications involved in revising an article to not sound like a jackass. I really can't see how it's different than saying "Of course Eastasia has always been our ally! You must have mis-read last week when we said that we were united with Eurasia against them...go back and look, see?"
If they don't want that article to offend people, they should change the page to say "This article has been removed. A revised version can be found HERE." Ideally, though, I feel like they should stand by their convictions on a piece like this instead of waffling and making themselves look better.

-Shawn McBee,
Sarasota, FL

I think I disagree, but I'm still pondering it. The web is, by its nature, fluid. Sites and information go up and come down. You were sort of convincing me until you started talking about how a news organisation that puts up a story that isn't true should "stand by their convictions" and keep it up. That doesn't really seem like standing by its convictions, more like repeating its mistake each time someone goes to the page.

Stuff on the web changes or goes away. That's not Orwellian. That's part of the transitory nature of the medium -- has been for the last decade that I've been wandering the web, and it's one of the things that makes it different to print journalism. You can change stuff, and fix things (something I applauded when a Guardian journalist did it here), and you can lose them. Whole sites vanish -- sometimes whole news sites vanish. Wikipedia articles change and improve, and mostly for the better. (Which reminds me -- can someone find some decent photos of me that aren't me blinking in the middle of a booksigning for the Wiki entry on me?)

And, of course, on the web things don't properly vanish: a two-second google produced a cached version of the deleted article, which is the original, sillier version of http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4732385.stm, and which rather mitigates the accusations of rewriting history.

Surely it's better to fix something than not to bother, or even to print a tiny correction on page 2 several days later.

(Having said that, personally I'm in favour of what I've done the few times I've removed something from this blog, which is to leave a note saying that something's gone, but, if it was something that someone wanted removed for valid reasons, not repeating what it was that caused the person to want it removed in the first place.)

Kids! Win! Stuff! etc

Two different competitions that I've just been made aware of. Both of them are only open to US residents, I'm afraid.

Both of them are just sweepstakes, and you don't even have to come up with an "I can't stand Neil Gaiman because..." tiebreaker. Just go to the website, enter your details and hope.

Over at http://www.ugo.com/mirrormask/ you can win a visit to Hollywood as a guest of the Jim Henson company, plus Cool MirrorMask Swag. With five runners-up, who just get Cool MirrorMask Swag. -- MirrorMask site: http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/mirrormask/main.html

While over at http://www.harpercollins.com/features/gaiman/enter.asp ten people can win a complete Neil Gaiman Library -- all the books published by Harper Collins, in an assortment of formats.

And good luck...

...

I just got an email from Lucy Anne at The Dreaming letting me know that 1602 is one of the five Quills Finalists as best Graphic Novel of the Year. The finalists are:

American Splendor: Our Movie Year
Harvey Pekar
0345479378
Ballantine

Bone: One Volume Edition
Jeff Smith
188896314X
Cartoon Books

In the Shadow of No Towers
Art Spiegelman
0375423079
Pantheon Books

Marvel 1602 Volume 1
Neil Gaiman, Andy Kubert, Richard Isanove
0785110704
Marvel Comics

Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return
Marjane Satrapi
0375422889
Pantheon Books

-- Details at http://www.quillsliteracy.org/categories.php . It's an honour just to be nominated, but I'd feel slightly weird if 1602 beat any of those others. I'm not sure any of those five things are comparable anyway, other than they all have words and pictures in. Having said that, if bookstores get behind the Quill Awards, and do displays of the nominated books, it'll be a good thing all around. And then there's the rather scary TV event bit of it -- it'll be just like the Oscars, only not.

She also wanted to let me know that,

Tickets for September 19th interview with Susanna Clarke at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater are now on sale from the Symphony Space.Tickets are $20.50 ea with fees, $22.50 with processing fees, and must be picked up from the box office.More info on ordering tickets is here: http://www.symphonyspace.org/tickets/tickets.php
And a ticketing FAQ is here: http://www.symphonyspace.org/tickets/tickets_boxfaq.php

Lucy Anne also wanted to know about RSS feeds and more particularly whether they were being taken into account in the whole where people are coming in from thing, and whether they should be. And no, they aren't. But I still don't think the figures are that off, because there's a consistency, month in, month out that allows one to assume that they're more or less uniformly off -- it's a sampling, not an exact total.

And for that matter, about 60% of the people who come into this site don't come in with whatever information the site needs to decide where they're coming from attached. So it's also basing everything on about 40% of the traffic. So I'm perfectly sure that there are more than 81 people reading this blog in North Dakota, for example, just as I'm sure that there are more than 11,670 New Yorkers. But I doubt that more accurate figures would change the overall rankings of New York (lots of people) and North Dakota (not lots of people). Slice it by day, by month or by year, the rankings stay pretty much the same.

Or to put it another way, in the site's breakdown by continent for July:

North America with 372,021 (33.08 % of traffic)
Europe with 87,711 (7.80 % of traffic)
Asia with 40,407 (3.59 % of traffic)
Australia & Oceana with 20,926 (1.86 % of traffic)
South America with 4,169 (0.37 % of traffic)
Africa with 2,052 (0.18 % of traffic)

...a quick check reveals that 1,976 of the people on the African continent are coming from South Africa, with the remaining 78 people scattered across 18 countries. So it doesn't matter if lots of people in Senegal or Gambia are reading the RSS feed or the Livejournal feed, or if there are several times as many people reading the website there as are showing up, I'm still going to go and sign in South Africa, if ever I go to sign books in Africa.

...

And my favourite typo of the day is from a news report on Crispin Glover and Beowulf at Moviehole, in which we learn that "Beowulf" from Robert Zemeckis, Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman, is an age-old yarn of a knight who slays a dragon and becomes kind.

(Actually, if we're going to get into dragonfighting, it's about a king who fights a dragon and becomes dead...) I spoke to Steve Starkey, the producer, today, and he told me the rest of the lead casting, and I am incredibly happy and cannot say a word until everythng's announced and am mostly just disappointed that I'll be touring through the majority of the filming period and, except for a couple of weeks between the US and the UK, won't be around to watch.

MORE ANANSI BOYS REVIEWS. Grendel. Lost lenses.

More little prerelease bits on ANANSI BOYS are coming in, and I'll put them up as I get them. (When it actually comes out, and the review trickle becomes a flood, I'll just link to them. But right now it's fun to post them.)

This is from the Library Journal.

LIBRARY JOURNAL
August 1, 2005
Gaiman, Neil Anansi Boys
Fat Charlie�s life is about to be spiced up�his estranged father dies in a karaoke bar, and the handsome brother he never knew he had shows up on his doorstep with a gleam in his eye. Next thing he knows, Fat Charlie is being investigated by the police, his fianc�e�s falling in love with the wrong brother, and he finds out that his father was the god Anansi, Trickster and Spider, and that the beast gods of folklore are plotting their own revenge upon his family bloodline. A fun book with a little of everything�horror, mystery, magic, comedy, song, romance, ghosts, scary birds, ancient grudges, and trademark British wit�it shares ideas and characters with American Gods but conveys a more personal look at the dysfunctions unique to a family of dieties (now this would be one reality show definitely to watch!). Another lovely story as only Gaiman can tell it; necessary and recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/05.]

A couple of trickles from the UK -- the Bookseller asked some genre buyers what they were most excited about, and Helen Ward from W. H. Smiths said,

"The book I'm most excited about is Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys (review September), his first mainstream comic fantasy novel for a while. I loved it, I thought it was terrific. I think this will widen him out from his cult readership and Pratchett fans will go out and buy it."

And this made me smile broadly -- author Manda Scott -- http://www.mandascott.co.uk/ -- got an advanced copy of the book, and wrote about it in the Church of England Newspaper (22 July 05) from an article where they asked various authors what they were going to be reading on their summer holidays.

The great advantage of being an author, is that I get the unbound proof copies of up and coming books that other editors think I might like to read. Thus I have the great good fortune to have access to Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys ahead of its publication in September. Neil Gaiman is one of the few genuinely intelligent writers of what is generally described as 'post-modern' fiction -- his work is thoughtful, wise, spiritually challenging and incredibly funny.

Anansi Boys (take off the 'A' and try to pronounce it) begins with Fat Charlie Nancy's discovery that his estranged father has died -- and that his father, who made his childhood a misery, was, in fact, the god Anansi, the spider, teller of stories, weaver of myths and dark shadowy magic. In other hands this would be pulp fantasy fiction. From Gaiman, it's a treasure, every word. I can't imagine a better way to spend a holiday.

...

Other news -- seeing it's in Fangoria (http://www.fangoria.com/news_article.php?id=4496), I can mention here that it looks like Crispin Glover will, if everything works out, be working with Bob Zemeckis for the first time since Back to the Future: he'll be playing Grendel in the version of Beowulf I wrote with Roger Avary, joining Anthony Hopkins, Ray Winstone, Robin Wright Penn and Brendan Gleason. Amongst others.

And I mentioned in the post that got eaten by Blogger the other day that I'd a) got a haircut and b) signed an enormous stack of stuff at DreamHaven Books a few days ago (you can see a lot of what I signed at http://www.neilgaiman.net/just-in.php) including some of the Really Useful Books and an enormous stack of copies of Now We Are Sick, back in print for the first time since 1991.

And to make up for that inept Lev Grossman article in Time, here's a small sane article about Worldcon from the Scotsman -- http://news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=1719612005.

...

The box of stuff from Australia arrived yesterday. It had opened on the way and been resealed by the postal service. Normally this means that the contents have gone, never to be seen again. In this case, as far as I could tell, everything I'd been given was still there (I started listening to the various CDs while working last night) but additionally a box containing an order of contact lenses had been carefully put in by the postal service and sealed up. I suppose I have to work out the best way to get the lady who owns the contact lenses her lenses back...

And Hera's new CD arrived, Don't Play This -- http://www.herasings.com/ -- and she's rapidly becoming my favourite folkie expatriate Icelandic singer-songwriter. The title song is very funny and cruel.

Talking about funny...


Greetings From the South.

I was a bit shocked to see: Louisiana, 354
directed to your site. As I am from this land. However as I thought about it more I realized the truth. Most people in Louisiana don't own a computer. Down here we are a poor down trodded lot. Business take a step into the state, feel that sweltering heat, and run away. We suffer greatly everyday, with only a few of us allowed to use one of the 355 computers a day. But we all read. Your books. The sales just look low because we believe in handing books around. We have our bi Weekly Swamp Book meet.

This event occurs every Monday, and Friday. We all show up at our designated swamp, arriving by fan boats, and poled barges one by one. Each meeting spot consist of atleast 500 people. We then exchange your books amongst ourselves. And have a three hour discussion on what we learned from your writings. This is followed by a rousing song that we have entitled, "Neil, Neil, Neil, He May Not Be From The South But He Can Still Write Good Books." So you see, we are actually huge fans. I just wanted you to know... And I'm certainly not lying... At all.

T Clark

I believe you. Utterly.

Mr. Gaiman, About the 'bookshops who ask' thing, when you're on a tour... I've always wondered about that. Is it as simple as they having just to ask (assuming it fits on the schedule, etc), or is the process a little more complicated than that? I just can't help but wonder if there's a system of benefits or someting (for example bookstore X will make sure that, aside from having your books on display, only books from your publisher will be on the smaller display tables, or something like that...). I mean, I know that you are really interested in making sure that your fans have a good time and don't get exploited, or miss out out on things, but does the 'book tour world' work on the same general principle? Best,/august/

Not as far as I know, no. I'm sure that various special things could be asked for ("While Mr Gaiman is signing nobody working for your bookstore must wear the colour blue or chew anything tasting even remotely nutty") in practice what gets asked of a bookshop is pretty simple. I'll post the current version of "So You're Hosting a Neil Gaiman Signing" that goes to bookstores up here, if people are interested. The main thing I think Harper Collins are interested in is simply making sure that there are enough copies of the book for the people who are there, and that they feel they are getting the most out of their promotional dollars.

...

Edit to add -- I just noticed that Amazon.com have changed their prices, so the MP3 CD version of Anansi Boys is now also discounted and is cheaper than the audio CD version. (I can't find a link to it at other online retailers at this point.)

Too long a post mostly about touring

I thought that in the month and a bit leading up to the release of ANANSI BOYS I would go and dig around the vaults and find things that it might be fun to put up on this website for a while.

So I've put up my third ever published short story -- it's about 23 years old. It's juvenilia, but I hope not entirely without interest, about a murder in NurseryLand, and is one of the very few hardboiled detective stories I've written. Presenting Little Jack Horner, private eye, in The Case of the Four And Twenty Blackbirds. http://www.neilgaiman.com/exclusive/4&20.asp

It was reprinted in ANGELS AND VISITATIONS, and in a handful of anthologies, but wasn't in Smoke and Mirrors, so it will probably be new to many of you.

And one of the bits that vanished into the ether last night was the link to the Endicott Studios site, which now has up four of my poems, each taking its cue from folk stories and fairy tales:

Instructions
Locks
Girls and Boys Together
The White Road

There's a feature page section on Anansi Boys with sundry links over at the Harper Collins web site -- http://www.harpercollins.com/features/gaiman/about.asp

Dear Mr. Gaiman, My friend and I were wondering why you do not plan on visting Philadelphia on your upcoming tour. Philadelphia is the second largest city in the Northeast. It has a significantly larger population than most of the cities that you intend to vist including Boston, Washington D.C., San Fransico, San Diego Austin and others. There are loads of fans here in Philly just waiting for a visit from their favorite author and a chance to get an autograph. We're sure that a stop here would be alot of fun and a great sucess. I understand that you have said that everything is set in stone from here and that you only go where your people tell you to but surely you can try to do something to make to the wishes of your devoted fans here in Philadelphia come true. We won't hold it against you if can't make it but we couldn't help but be a little upset when we found that Philly wasn't on the list.Your hopeful fans,Christine and Noelia

Well, there's not much of an answer that I can give, other than the good people at Harper Collins get to decide where I go on a tour based on a number of factors, including but not limited to whether a store in the area actually asked for me to come and sign there; whether the store is large enough to handle the crowd or is willing to do an off-site event; how near the signing is to other ones; how well the stores have done at selling my stuff over the years; and a host of other reasons, like how long the tour is going to be, whether you can get here from there (there was a planned signing in one midwestern state that we had to scrap because I simply couldn't get there from the previous signing without getting up at 4:30 am, flying to Memphis and then flying on to the relevant city, with no real guarantee I could get there in time for the signing. So I now go to Boston instead) and probably other factors that they don't tell me about, like whether Ernesto the Magic HarperCollins Badger saw his shadow when he came out of his sett that morning. There's publisher politics involved too -- for example, I'm doing one Barnes and Noble signing, one Borders signing and a lot of smaller chains and independents.

I agree with you wholeheartedly about Philadelphia (I have a daughter at Bryn Mawr, after all), but I suspect it's probably fallen victim to its location -- it's near enough by train to New York to the north and to Washington DC to the south that it was probably felt that dedicated Philadelphians could travel, and it was better to get me on to somewhere further away.

Regarding your tour, why does the South always get stiffed? --Nikki in Nashville

See above. A lot of it is bookshops and enthusiasm.

Some of it is also probably where my stuff is sold and where the readers are -- in July 2005, for example, the top five US states sending people to this website (excluding Virginia which is number one but gets skewed by AOL) were

California, 62787
New Jersey, 32341
Massachusetts, 27703
Washington, 21908
Texas, 15387

as opposed to, say,

Louisiana, 354
Arkansas, 271
Alabama, 270

or even

Mississippi, 85

Which may be a good reason for sending me to Mississippi, but I can also see why Harper Collins decided to use its promotional budget to send me to places they know people are waiting.

(Having said that, I'm not doing a signing in Georgia this tour [and I did on the last tour, although the shop in question has alas gone out of business since and even then it was so small I had to do the reading and Q&A in the car park, and I did on the tour before that although that store has long since gone out of business] although Georgia's in the top ten (13753), and Florida's in the top fifteen (3787), and I'm not going there either -- probably because of a lack of good bookstore locations. And your home state of Tennessee, Nikki, ranked more or less in the middle with 1012 people.)

"It's definitely a good thing that online journalism is capable of revising itself to agree with reality"Interesting point, I'm not sure I agree. When a print journalist makes a mistake, if he wants to retract it he has to print a correction. His mistake and the correction remain in the permanent record. For the BBC to correct typos and minor factual errors in their articles is one thing, but I think that to change the editorial tone of an article and leave no record of having done so is worse than puzzling, it's dishonest.Of course, it's possible that the BBC felt that leaving the original article online would amount to continuing to publish it, and that they could not do this if it was incorrect. But they could have left some indication that a change had been made.If you realised you needed to correct or apologise for something you'd said in your blog (for example, if it turned out that Margaret Atwood was right all along. About everything), would you delete the original posts? I think that the ideal would be to leave them in place, but add a prominent link to the retraction. Steve.

Well, up to a point. But if you're a news site and you leave something up that's not true, people will continue to link to it and continue to get upset and confused. Real newspapers print corrections, but then, yesterday's erroneous news is tomorrow's fish and chip paper, except on the web, where it will run and run and not even Snopes.com can kill it.

My journal's not a news site, but when I've got something completely wrong and someone noticed or complained, while I'll normally just fix it in a later entry, I've several times just deleted the offending bit. (Normally with a note to let people know that something has gone away.) And I'd not blame any of the people who make stuff they wish they hadn't posted vanish. It's one of the good bits of the web, I think, not one of the bad ones.


Hi Neil,

I've been looking forward to this tour for some time now, quite happy that you're coming back to Vancouver (I was the one whose back you signed during American Gods, at the Virgin stop).

I'm curious. This time around I found it somewhat odd on the location. Did you know you're going to be in a high school, in a rather out of the way spot in the city? And that we have to buy tickets through TicketMaster? Does this happen often? It seems an unusual setup, and I wonder whose making the profit off this kind of arrangement (besides the corporate coffers of TicketMaster with their 5 different 'fees' added on).

Anyway, looking forward to it, Cheers!

Rhiannon Boyle
Vancouver, BC


No, it doesn't happen often -- this is the only time on the tour. But it's because the signing and talk are being held in association with the Vancouver International Writers Festival (which is "a registered non-profit charitable organization and relies on a combination of public sector funding, ticket sales, advertising revenue, corporate sponsorships and donations") -- the link to the festival site is http://www.writersfest.bc.ca/. John Irving and I both get to do early events before the festival proper.

...

Did you know that for $100 you can get the next 10 McSweeneys books? And that one of them is the Children's Anthology with the long name* that I did a story in, to raise money for Good Causes? And that another of them is a reprint of Harry Stephen Keeler's Riddle of the Travelling Skull, one of the greatest bad books in human history - brought back into print by this man, a fellow member of the Harry Stephen Keeler Society? (You don't have to buy ten books for $100 of course. You can buy them on their own. http://www.mcsweeneys.net/books/future.html lists the upcoming books.)

And I just noticed that there's an interview with me from the HSK Journal up at http://staff.xu.edu/~polt/keeler/pdf/47kn.pdf. Also interviewed is Ken Keeler, who wrote some of my favourite Futurama episodes.






* Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren't as Scary, Maybe, Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones, Creatures from the Sky, Parents Who Disappear in Peru, a Man Named Lars Farf, and One Other Story We Couldn't Quite Finish, So Maybe You Could Help Us Out

A footnote to a teacup

I note that the BBC article formerly entitled PRATCHETT ANGER AT ROWLING'S RISE has now transmuted into a much milder article entitled Pratchett takes swipe at Rowling, which no longer accuses Terry of very much at all, apart from "poking fun". It starts out:
Writer Terry Pratchett has poked fun at Harry Potter author JK Rowling for saying she did not realise she was writing a fantasy novel.
He wrote to the Sunday Times:"I would have thought that the wizards, witches, trolls, unicorns, hidden worlds... would have given her a clue?" and doesn't really get any further than that, really.

(This replaces the previous opening gambit of
Author Terry Pratchett has complained that the status of Harry Potter author JK Rowling is being elevated "at the expense of other writers". Pratchett, one of the UK's most successful novelists with 40 million books sold, said the media ignores the achievements of other fantasy authors.
He also took a sideswipe at Rowling for saying she did not realise Harry Potter was fantasy until it was published. )

It's definitely a good thing that online journalism is capable of revising itself to agree with reality, although it's going to puzzle the hell out of all the people in the future who click on the links to the BBC page and are unable to discover what they're meant to be outraged about.

a shadow of the post it should be

Dear Neil, Any word on a not-so-rough schedule for the ANANSI BOYS tour? I've contacted the bookshop in Denver for more information but they say they are waiting on your camp. If one were to make hotel reservations and get plane tickets would that be too risky? Lots of Love,Erin Pulsipher Santa Fe, NM

I don't have any more information on the Tattered Cover signing than what's already been posted in this blog. But I don't honestly think they can be really be waiting for information from my camp (which I assume is Harper Collins) because the shops decide where the signings are going to be, what time they start, whether they're going to be ticketed, how things are going to work and so on. Harper Collins doesn't and I certainly don't. But no, I can't see it would be risky going to one of the signings -- all of the dates and locations are set in stone at this point. If you're going to be flying and hotelling then I'd suggest you pick one of the ones in a theatre or hall or somewhere, on the basis that you'll probably get a better event than you would in a bookshop, and you'll probably also have somewhere to sit until I scribble on your book (which is easier, although perhaps less social, than standing for hours in a queue that only seems to move just before it gets to you).

I just posted a long updated list of US/Canada ANANSI BOYS September/October Tour event locations and dates and ticket info and suchlike over at WHERE'S NEIL
-- the link to the entry is http://www.neilgaiman.com/where/2005_08_01_archive.asp#112302364738102144. Several locations, including Anderson's in Naperville and the Harvard Bookshop have put up more information, so it's up there now. I'm going to keep updating and revising that entry as additional stuff comes in, so as soon as I learn anything about Denver, or the Michael Chabon talk, or the Mysterious Toronto event (for example) I shall let you all know.

Incidentally, if there's one thing I've learned from the last few ticketed events I've done, it's that it's worth turning up even to "sold-out" events. There are always empty seats -- people have emergencies, or forget, or buy tickets for friends who don't show up.

...and a very long post that answered lots of people's questions and had helpful links to all manner of stuff has just been eaten by Blogger (it loses posts so rarely now it lulled me into a false sense of security), although at least the first couple of paragraphs were findable with "recover post". But I wish it recovered more than it did.

the ghost of empire

hi mr. gaiman!

i just wanted to say that even if it might not seem like it, even if the Philippines has close ties with the US and even if Uncle Sam has a marked influence on Filipinos' way of life, the Philippines is actually a sovereign country.

It's technically an "ally" of the US, as opposed to being a "territory."

Still, I can see where the confusion could be coming from, considering that (1) the US occupied the Philippines after the Spaniards left, (2) there are so many Filipinos in the US, and (3) even if we are Asian, out way of life is more like that of the US than that of our neighbors.

Hard to believe, but small and weak as we are, we are actually represented as a country in the UN. :)



--jennee (manila)

Hi Jenee,

yes, I know that.

But for bookselling purposes, I'm afraid you're still a US territory. For bookselling purposes Australia is normally a UK territory (unless the UK edition doesn't come out within 30 days of the US edition, in which case it becomes an Open Territory), Canada is always a battleground claimed by one side or the other (Good Omens had Canada as UK territory, but all my novels since have had it as US territory)and sometimes it even gets to be Canadian Territory, Singapore regards itself as an open territory and is listed in US contracts as being open territory, but tends to turn up in UK contracts as UK territory (as does most of the Commonwealth and former Commonwealth).Ireland is a UK territory too.

When an author signs a contract for English Language rights, he or she has to agree to a list of what territories are up for sale, which often gets attached in a great big long list at the back of the contract detailing who has the right to sell your book in the English Language in dozens of countries. These are the publisher's territories. If anyone can sell their edition of the book in that country, it's an open territory.

Outside of English Language rights, things normally sort themselves out fairly easily: no-one's going to argue about where you can sell the Finnish edition, because it's sort of assumed that they're mostly going to be sold in Finland. (The only big exception seems to be Spanish, and there are a few times I've signed addenda to contracts allowing, say the Spanish edition from Spain to be sold in Mexico or Argentina).

I did a quick Google to try and find an explanation, and the best comment I came up with was from Teresa Nielsen Hayden (who really does know everything about publishing) where she says, in an exchange about agents


At the same time, I should have also put in that category the new writer's family lawyer, who's not a publishing specialist doesn't see why a publishing contract shouldn't be like any other kind of contract. We truly dread hearing from those. They have all the suspiciousness about being told that something is "standard industry practice" that baby writers ought to have; but alas, where baby writers believe such claims about horrid vanity-press contracts, the lawyers don't believe them about standard industry practices.

My all-time favorite response to a contract (for certain values of "favorite") was a long letter about the assignment of territorial rights clauses, in which a long list of countries are identified as being part of the British Commonwealth. The author explained in painstaking detail that, that, and the other country no longer belonged to the Commonwealth, or had altered their relationship to it, or had changed their name, etc. etc. etc. He was right on every count, but it didn't matter, because for purposes of selling books, all those countries are still part of the British Commonwealth. The ghost of the Empire lives on in bookselling territories.

And Happy Birthday to Winter McCloud. (Who can be seen in all her glory, or some of it, on her sister Sky's livejournal, over at http://www.livejournal.com/~pineappleinc/ -- and it's an excellent livejournal, and very Sky.)

CDs or MP3s

I'm still waiting to hear the ANANSI BOYS audio book (performed by Lenny Henry who, from his blog, is currently in Montreal at the comedy festival).

I've just found out that the two different versions of the two different audio editions are already up at Amazon. The CD version comes on 15 CDs. The MP3 version comes on two CDs. I've been lobbying for an MP3 version of books for years -- Harper Audio hesitated for a long time because they were worried about people buying them and then complaining that they didn't play on their CD players ( a not unreasonable concern).

The MP3 is meant to be priced cheaper than the CD one -- after all, it's two CDs instead of 15, and a lot of the cost of a CD pack is the packaging -- but it looks like most online retailers are discounting the CDs, while no-one is discounting the MP3 CDs yet (and most online retailers aren't even listing them).

This is the CD audio book cover (and this is the pre-order page which links to a number of on-line retailers)...

and this is the cover of the MP3 version (and its pre-order page)...

I hope the MP3 CDs work, and retailers stock and sell them -- as I said, I was the one vigorously lobbying for them, because if you're going to put something on your iPod, you might as well not have to rip it yourself. Ah well, we'll see how it works. It may be that people like to buy their iPod content from Itunes and Audible, and prefer audio CDs.

(Nearly forgot -- there's also an MP3 edition coming out of AMERICAN GODS -- here's the link to the Harper info page.)

Hi, Neil,You wrote about the blank sheets of paper that you're signing for Anansi Boys. Was just wondering. Will the pre-signed copies be available also in other countries aside from the US? Or are those to be distributed solely in the US?

By the way, I learned that Anansi Boys will be available in Fully Booked (the bookstore that brought you to the Philippines) only in October. (Was so sad to find that one out. It's like postponing Christmas really.) Which leads me to think, why, oh why couldn't Anansi Boys have a simultaneous worldwide release, like Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince? Or does it actually have a simultaneous worldwide release and I just don't know about it.Warm regards,Maila

I assume that anywhere that's buying the US Morrow first edition will get the signed books (one to a dumpbin) if they order dumpbins, and the Philippines is a US territory.

And probably the CBLDF will get some as well for sale -- they still have a handful left of the signed American Gods (http://cbldf.safeshopper.com/13/64.htm?143) although they've put the prices up.

And it will have a simultaneous English Language Worldwide release -- but if you're not a Harry Potter (or perhaps Da Vinci's Even Niftier Code) then outside of the US and the UK the books have to get where they're going from the printers by boat, which means that places like Singapore, Australia and the Philippines will be a few weeks behind the US and the UK. It's not fair, but it really is how it works with other books.

...

My son, Mike, is home today for the first time since January. I'm typing this on a sofa, with a son at the other end of it. I cannot tell you how happy this makes me. And Holly gets back from South Africa tomorrow...

And only about 800 more bits of paper to sign and I shall be free.