Author turns signings into an event: A Short Q&A with Neil Gaiman

Author turns signings into an event: A Short Q&A with Neil Gaiman
By Nancy O. Greene

Along with several other interviewers, I had the chance to meet with Neil Gaiman at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. last September. He answered a couple of questions about his novel, The Graveyard Book, and about his thoughts on fiction in general. Since the interview, he has finished the tour and The Graveyard Book has been honored with the John Newbery Medal and a Hugo award.

Nancy O. Greene: You’re going on tour for The Graveyard Book, and you’ve said before that touring for the Anansi Boys almost killed you. Now that you know more about it, how do you do things differently?

Neil Gaiman: Well, I cheated. This entire tour is a huge experiment. Touring is great when you’re signing for a hundred to three hundred people. That’s really fun. You can just about sign for five hundred people and survive. Once you’re signing for six, seven, eight, nine hundred people a night, it turns into this nightmarish exhaustion, and you get back to your hotel at two o’clock in the morning, and you get out of the hotel at six o’clock in the morning to go to the next place, and it doesn’t work.

So what we’re doing on this is, I said, “Okay, I’m not going to do a signing tour. What I’ll do is a reading tour.” And we’ve got nine stops. Although there are eight chapters in the book, one of those chapters is very, very long, so we’ve divided it into two. And I’m basically planning on doing a chapter a stop. We’re taking theatres, we’re going to webcast the readings, I’ll do a long Q&A. We’re going to try to do essentially an enjoyable two-hour event, at which you can buy pre-signed books. I will get to the event at two o’clock in the afternoon and sit there and sign my way through piles of books. I’ll be signing nine hundred books, as opposed to the three or four things everybody has in line and the twenty-one hundred things a night. What it should mean for people is that they get a more enjoyable experience than standing in a line that shuffles around the store for six hours and forgetting how to spell their name when they get to the front of it.

Nancy O. Greene: There tends to be a gap between what’s considered literary–or quality reading–and what’s not. Since you’ve won the World Fantasy Award for Sandman, how do you think the gap is narrowing between those two schools of thought?

Neil Gaiman: I think I got lucky, and I got lucky because Norman Mailer read Sandman and said something like, “Sandman is a comic book for intellectuals, and I think it’s about time.” That kind of changed all the rules for me. It changed all the rules in that people started to say, “Well if Norman Mailer says it’s okay and it’s intellectual, then maybe it’s not trash literature.”

I … the truth is, it’s not something I really ever give any thought to. I figure I get to have the best of all possible worlds in that I write what I write, it all gets published, and afterwards people can argue about whether it’s high culture or low culture or pop culture, and people can argue about whether I get taken seriously or whether I should be taken seriously if I am. But that has nothing to do with what I do. I sit down and make stuff up, and I write it to the best of my ability, and then I put it out into the world. It only ever dawns on me that I’m technically high culture too when I learn that I’m being taught in universities and colleges. Somebody says, “Well, I did my Ph.D on this.” That’s taking it very seriously, thank you. But it’s not anywhere on my agenda. My agenda is I want to write stories.

http://www.mousecircus.com/videotour.aspx (Video Tour of The Graveyard)
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/
http://www.neilgaiman.com/works/
http://neilgaimanboard.com/eve/forums
Twitter – http://twitter.com/neilhimself

When Nancy O. Greene isn’t writing or reading she’s busy challenging the forces of evil to thumb wrestling contests. She always wins. Read more at www.nancyogreene.wordpress.com.