This is the best line in almost any TV series ever but you really only understand the enormity and profundity of it if you are familiar with the whole show’s mythology and it’s just so beautiful and I was in the bath and I cried.
I do not know which title I would like.
But whatever the book in question would be, I would like it very much to be tattooed on Amanda Palmer’s back.
Perfect answer, good lord.
…honestly? It’s been pretty lonely. Amanda and I had a dinner date over Skype. It was midday tomorrow in Australia and it was 8 pm here. I read her what I’ve written so far on one of the things I’m working on, and we talked, and ate sushi. It was good, but it was still hard. We haven’t seen each other in the flesh for six weeks, won’t see each other for another seven weeks.
And I would have traded an awful lot of Being Neil Gaiman today for someone there who would have made me a cup of tea and given me a hug.
Right now B&N’s NOOK and Amazon’s KINDLE are both discounting Neverwhere. It’s at $2.99 — these discounts do not last for very long (normally 24-48 hours) so if you want it, grab it quickly.
http://www.amazon.com/Neverwhere-ebook/dp/B000FC130E/?tag=arcadata-20
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/neverwhere-neil-gaiman/1100109136?ean=9780061793059&cm_mmc=AFFILIATES-_-Linkshare-_-TnL5HPStwNw-_-10:1
It only applies to the US site.
When this happened with American Gods, iBook also dropped the price. I haven’t checked…
(Edit to add, I checked. They did. http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/neverwhere/id363686338?mt=11)
Go and check out http://blog.shelfari.com/my_weblog/2009/09/neil.html
It’s disturbing because the photos - if you click on them, are clear enough that you can read the spines of the paperbacks in the second row…
I keep showing this cover to people and making choked noises of amusement.
I’m sure it’ll be a really good book, but the cover makes me laugh with cruel delight at my own expense.
I think I will write a story about very dangerous and respectable Warrior Philosophers, and be glad I do not look like that in real life.
When the web started, I used to get really grumpy with people because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn’t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true.
And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was… places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia, it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was fascinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took “American Gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent
I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.”
What you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.
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Seeing that Barnes and Noble dropped the price of AMERICAN GODS 10th Anniversary Edition to $1.99, Amazon has just matched it for the Kindle. I don’t know how long it’ll be that price for, probably another 6 hours.
Here’s the link to the $1.99 (93% off) Amazon Kindle edition.
