American Gods

I finished it, eventually, and I handed it in, taking a certain amount of comfort in the old saying that a novel can best be defined as a long piece of prose with something wrong with it, and I was fairly sure that I’d written one of those.

My editor was concerned that the book I had given to her was slightly too big and too meandering (she didn’t mind it being too odd), and she wanted me to trim it, and I did. I suspect her instincts may have been right, for the book was certainly successful—it sold many copies, and it was fortunate enough to receive a number of awards, including the Nebula and the Hugo (for, primarily, SF), the Bram Stoker (for horror), and the Locus (for fantasy), demonstrating that it may have been a fairly odd novel and that even if it was popular nobody was quite certain which box it belonged in.

But that would be in the future: first the book needed to be published. The publishing process fascinated me and I chronicled it on the web, on a blog I started for that reason (but which has continued to this day). When it was published I went on a book-signing tour, across the U.S., then to the U.K., then to Canada, and finally home. The first book signing I did was in June 2001, at the Borders Books in the World Trade Center. A couple of days after I returned home, on September 11, 2001, neither that bookstore nor the World Trade Center existed.

The reception the book was given surprised me.

I was used to telling stories that people liked, or that they didn’t read. I’d never written anything divisive before. But with this book, people either loved it, or they hated it. The ones who hated it, even if they liked my other books, really hated it. Some people complained that the book was not American enough; others that it was too American; that Shadow was unsympathetic; that I had failed to understand that the true religion of America was sports; and so on. All, undoubtedly, valid criticisms. But in the end, mostly, it found its people. I think it’s fair to say that more people loved it, and continue to love it.

One day, I hope, I will go back to that story. Shadow is ten years older now, after all. So is America. And the Gods are waiting.

NEIL GAIMAN

September 2010

A Note on the Text

The book you’re holding is slightly different from the version of the book that was previously published.

Shortly after it was published, Pete Atkins and Peter Schneider, the partners in Hill House Publishers, a (now, alas, defunct) small-press book publisher, arranged with the book’s U.S. publishers to do a special edition of American Gods. As they told me about the wonderful treats they had planned for the limited edition—something they planned to be a miracle of the bookmaker’s art—I began feeling more and more uncomfortable with the text that they would be using.

Would they, I inquired rather diffidently, be willing to use my original, untrimmed text?

As it turned out, they would.

And then it became more complicated, as I realized that, of course, after I had trimmed American Gods, I had made other editorial corrections and changes, many of which were for the better. So the only way someone could create a definitive American Gods text would be by comparing my final, unedited version with my final edited version, and then with the final printed version (because I had cheerfully scrawled changes on the galley proofs, and just as cheerfully not actually bothered to keep track of them), and then making a number of judgment calls.

It was going to be an enormous amount of work. So I did the only sane thing under the circumstances that I could do: I sent several enormous computer files and two copies of the book (the English and the American editions) to Pete Atkins, along with my list of errors and typos I’d noticed since the book was published, and I asked him to sort it out. He did, excellently. Then I took the manuscript that Pete had prepared and went through it myself, fixing things and tidying and sometimes restoring cuts I’d made for a reason that wasn’t just making the book shorter, to come up with a final version of the text that I was perfectly happy with (given that a novel is always, as I might have mentioned, a long piece of prose with something wrong with it).

Hill House published it in a limited edition of about 750 copies (described as “a miracle of the bookmaker’s art” and not by them this time). It was very expensive. I’m grateful that my publishers were willing to publish the expanded version of the book on the tenth anniversary of its publication, and in a much larger edition than 750 copies, and for a lot less money. The version of American Gods that you are holding is about twelve thousand words longer than the one that won all the awards, and it’s the version of which I’m the most proud.