American Gods

12) No, I probably won’t do a drawing for you, because there are 300 people behind you, and if I had to draw for everyone we’d be finishing at 4.00am – on the other hand, if you’re prepared to wait patiently until the end, I may do it then, if my hand still works.

13) If it means a lot to you, yes, I’ll sign your lunchbox/skin/guitar/leather jacket/wings – but if it’s something strange you may want to make sure you have a pen that writes on strange surfaces legibly. I’ll have lots of pens, but they may not write on feathers.

14) At the start of the tour the answer to “Doesn’t your hand hurt?” Is “No.”

By the end of the tour, it’s probably going to be “Yes.”

15) Yes, you can take my picture, and yes, of course you can be in the photo, that’s the point isn’t it? There’s always someone near the front of the line who will take your photo.

16) I do my best to read all the letters I’m given and not lose all the presents I’m given. Sometimes I’ll read letters on the plane to the next place. But given the sheer volume of letters and gifts, you probably won’t get a reply, unless you do. (On one previous tour I tried to write postcards to everyone who gave me something at the last stop on postcards at the next hotel. Never again.) If you’re after a reply or to have me read something, you’re much better off not giving it to me on a tour. Post it to me care of DreamHaven books in Minneapolis.

(And although things people give me get posted back, on the last tour FedEx lost one box of notes and gifts, and on the tour before that hotel staff lost or stole another box. So smaller things I can put into a suitcase are going to be more popular than four-foot high paintings done on slabs of beechwood.)

17) No, I probably won’t have dinner/a beer/sushi with you after the signing. If it’s a daytime signing I’ll be on my way to the next signing; and if it’s an evening signing I’ll be heading back to my hotel room because I’ll be getting up at six A.M. to fly to the next city. If there actually is any spare time on the tour it’ll’ve been given to journalists, and if there’s any time on top of that old friends will have started e-mailing me two or three months before the tour started to say “You’ll be in the Paphlagonian Barnes and Noble on the 23rd. That’s just a short yak-hop from my yurt. We must get together,” and would have got themselves put on the schedule. (Still, it never hurts to ask.)

18) If you can’t read what I wrote, just ask me. After a couple of hours of signing my handwriting can get pretty weird.

19) If I sign it in silver or gold, give it a minute or so to dry before putting it back in its bag or closing the cover, otherwise you’ll soon have a gold or silver smudge and nothing more.

posted by Neil Gaiman 7:03 PM

Monday, April 16, 2001

The whole process of getting and giving blurbs is an odd one.

(Minor side note. If memory serves, BLURB as a word was created by American humorist Gelett Burgess (who also wrote the ‘Purple Cow’ poem). It means, basically, the puff stuff on the back of a book that tells you you ought to read it. The other word Gelett Burgess tried to introduce was “huzzlecoo” meaning, I think, to schmooze. It failed to catch on.)

I’ve met people who assumed that the whole blurb-giving process was one that authors were paid to do. Not so.

Generally blurbs mean one of two things; either the person giving the blurb really liked the book, or that complex networks of favour and obligation have been called into play.

It’s seldom simple logrolling — normally the reason why two authors say nice things about each other’s stuff is that they like each other’s stuff. But the process of getting something read, and of getting a quote can mean anything. It could mean that you have the same editor or agent or film producer as the book author, and they pressed you to read it. It could mean that the author is someone who did you a good turn once. And normally the favour is in getting the book read — anything after that depends mostly on whether or not the reader liked the book.

A very few blurbs make a difference. Clive Barker’s career was given a huge leg up by Stephen King’s “I have seen the future of horror and it is Clive Barker”, and I think Sandman was given a huger boost than I ever realised from the Norman Mailer quote (although, oddly enough, DC has never run that on anything except SEASON OF MISTS). I doubt that they actually changed anything for either of us; they might have sped up processes that would have happened anyway, though.

Most of them probably don’t do a thing. But in book publishing (as with movies) nobody knows anything. So they put them on the book jackets anyway and they hope.

Most successful authors could make a life’s profession simply reading books and giving blurbs — in any given week I get two or three books arriving with nice pleas from editors to read their book and say nice things about it. Also I get a couple of things from authors.