Up close and personal with Neil Gaiman
By: Tatiana Craine, Arts Editor
Issue date: 10/24/08 Section: The Arts
NG: Oh, "American Gods" came from about four or five different places. It came from sort of a lot things coming together. I had bits of it. I had the idea of these two people meeting on a plane, and I didn't know who they were or what they were doing there. I had all these - a load of stuff - and then one day I was in Iceland, and I was very jet-lagged and very tired. And I hadn't slept in a long time and I went to a sort of tourist exhibition they had of the Vikings coming to America and I looked at it, and I thought, "I wonder if they brought their gods with them. And suddenly I had a book. And suddenly I thought, "Okay that thing with those two people, that goes there. And that thing with the cars parked on the ice, going through everyone, that's in there as well. [Talking to Cabal, who has started to wander off with his leash.] Cabal, come on, just sit. Everyone's okay. Nobody's going anywhere. Look, I'm sitting down.
TC: Lately you've been dabbling in a new approach to getting your work out there by having "American Gods" or "Neverwhere" free to download online. There's also this tour where you read a chapter of the book out loud in each city, which is a lot like what Radiohead did with their last album, in terms of marketing. How do you feel about this new method of letting readers see what you've done?
NG: I love it! It took me a while to get there because the-originally I'd see people putting up poems or stories of mine up on their websites and I'd say, "Okay, you come down. This is my copyright. It's wrong. I don't want this up there." I never thought, "You're somehow taking away my audience," but I did think, this is wrong. And then I started to think about this, and I started to ponder it more and more. And one of the things I realized was somehow, almost without looking, I became huge in Eastern Europe. I became huge in Russia. And I became huge in Poland. I'd never been to Russia and I'd never done any promotion in Russia. And really, the big thing in Russia is that people had put out pirated editions of all of my stuff. I thought that's really interesting. And I started to realize that I would find music, and what would tend to happen is I'd go "I like this song" and "I like this song" and I'd download a few more and I'd go and find a couple more and then I'd go I like this, but then I'd go and buy an album. And then I'd start buying the albums when they came out. So much of this is just a matter of how do you find your favorite authors. You know, people don't find their favorite authors by walking into a bookstore and saying "I will have that. Here's my money. Oh good! I've found my favorite author." They find their favorite author when somebody says, "I just read this thing you'd like, here, tell me what you think," and then they'd pass it over. Or you're sitting in a dorm and you notice a book on the floor and the cover looks interesting and you pick it up and start reading the first few pages and then you keep reading it. I don't think I found any of my favorite authors ever by buying them. I found them in libraries. It's that process of choosing and picking and being able to try something out. So I started pushing HarperCollins to let me do some of that. And they would go, look, we sell these rights, how can we give them away as well? But the birthday of the blog, the seventh birthday of the blog, was coming up. And I said, "Well, can we give away 'American Gods'?" and they said, "Yes! Well, no. But you can read it online." And I said, "Okay." And they did. And sales of all my books went up 300%, and I was just like, look, that didn't hurt. So when it came to "Neverwhere," I said, "Can we do a downloadable 'Neverwhere'?" And they said, "We can't do a downloadable 'Neverwhere' because people could keep it." And I said, "What if we had a download that just expires after a month? Which is kind of like taking a book out of a library. You've got it for a month. And technically you could download it at the beginning of September or download it at the end of September and you could have it for like 59 days if you wanted." And they said, "Yeah, okay." So we did that. I have no idea whether it's worked or not. On the other hand. I got a call about 25 minutes ago saying that the book ["The Graveyard Book"]had gone in on the children's list on The New York Times, so I don't think giving away all the chapters, except tonight's, has actually hurt [the book] at all. It's a way for people to find it and find that they like it.
TC: Lately you've been dabbling in a new approach to getting your work out there by having "American Gods" or "Neverwhere" free to download online. There's also this tour where you read a chapter of the book out loud in each city, which is a lot like what Radiohead did with their last album, in terms of marketing. How do you feel about this new method of letting readers see what you've done?
NG: I love it! It took me a while to get there because the-originally I'd see people putting up poems or stories of mine up on their websites and I'd say, "Okay, you come down. This is my copyright. It's wrong. I don't want this up there." I never thought, "You're somehow taking away my audience," but I did think, this is wrong. And then I started to think about this, and I started to ponder it more and more. And one of the things I realized was somehow, almost without looking, I became huge in Eastern Europe. I became huge in Russia. And I became huge in Poland. I'd never been to Russia and I'd never done any promotion in Russia. And really, the big thing in Russia is that people had put out pirated editions of all of my stuff. I thought that's really interesting. And I started to realize that I would find music, and what would tend to happen is I'd go "I like this song" and "I like this song" and I'd download a few more and I'd go and find a couple more and then I'd go I like this, but then I'd go and buy an album. And then I'd start buying the albums when they came out. So much of this is just a matter of how do you find your favorite authors. You know, people don't find their favorite authors by walking into a bookstore and saying "I will have that. Here's my money. Oh good! I've found my favorite author." They find their favorite author when somebody says, "I just read this thing you'd like, here, tell me what you think," and then they'd pass it over. Or you're sitting in a dorm and you notice a book on the floor and the cover looks interesting and you pick it up and start reading the first few pages and then you keep reading it. I don't think I found any of my favorite authors ever by buying them. I found them in libraries. It's that process of choosing and picking and being able to try something out. So I started pushing HarperCollins to let me do some of that. And they would go, look, we sell these rights, how can we give them away as well? But the birthday of the blog, the seventh birthday of the blog, was coming up. And I said, "Well, can we give away 'American Gods'?" and they said, "Yes! Well, no. But you can read it online." And I said, "Okay." And they did. And sales of all my books went up 300%, and I was just like, look, that didn't hurt. So when it came to "Neverwhere," I said, "Can we do a downloadable 'Neverwhere'?" And they said, "We can't do a downloadable 'Neverwhere' because people could keep it." And I said, "What if we had a download that just expires after a month? Which is kind of like taking a book out of a library. You've got it for a month. And technically you could download it at the beginning of September or download it at the end of September and you could have it for like 59 days if you wanted." And they said, "Yeah, okay." So we did that. I have no idea whether it's worked or not. On the other hand. I got a call about 25 minutes ago saying that the book ["The Graveyard Book"]had gone in on the children's list on The New York Times, so I don't think giving away all the chapters, except tonight's, has actually hurt [the book] at all. It's a way for people to find it and find that they like it.
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