Er, speaking as someone who's read, and loved, and enthusiastically blurbed and supported the Susanna Clarke novel (and waited patiently for it for a decade) I think it'll do just fine, because people will read it and many of them will love it and tell other people about it. It's funny, and smart, and intelligent and tone-perfect, in a way that most fantasy readers will enjoy, and so will people who know they don't like fantasy.
It won't be Harry Potter, primarily because it's not a series of children's books that adults also like. It's one book, written for adults who like books.
The Bloomsbury people bought it for the right reason (they loved it) and they're probably the best publishing house it could have. (They're my children's book publisher in the UK, and the impression I get from her editors is that they would be publishing it if they thought it would sell 5,000 copies.)
I could be wrong, and it could stiff -- not badly or embarrassingly (a month ahead of publication it's at #15 on the Amazon list) but I can't imagine that even if it were a famous flop it would be the end of Susanna's writing career. (I don't think she wrote it to have a writing career. Mostly I think she wrote it to find out what happened next.) And she's a good enough writer that even if her next book doesn't have a first printrun of 250,000 she'll do fine; she'll not want for people who would like to publish her work, and I doubt that Bloomsbury would let her go.
Incidentally, the public site -- the one aimed at readers, rather than the trade -- is http://www.jonathanstrange.com, which is all about the story, the book and the author, and not about printruns.
...
Mary Kay -- I'd not worry about the American Gods thing if I were you. Most people who don't like it really don't like it - so you certainly aren't alone.
Oops. Just realised that I've had a gmail invite sitting on my blogger page for weeks.
Well, no-one sent me a g-mail invitation either. Then again, the last time I got an invitation, it was to join Orkut, something I did and still can't work out The Point of...
Dunno -- my website gives information through something called Statistics Server, which tells me where about 50% of the people coming in are from. It's off, of course -- it thinks all the AOL people are coming in from Virginia, for example, and the 50% it doesn't recognise could be coming in from anywhere.
Looking at it right now I'm not sure how it works, because a lot of the ones I'd assume were coming in with a country code (eg nl. fi.) it doesn't recognise as having a location. On the other hand I can see people in from Harvard.edu, which it's correctly tagged as Massachusetts, USA.
I have to admit that I love getting to go backstage every month and look at the website statistics, mostly because they show where people are coming from. I like knowing that as of last month Wyoming has finally overtaken North Dakota at the bottom of the monthly US states tables, or discovering the countries that only one person came in from (last month -Macedonia, Mongolia, Rwanda and Panama). I like knowing that there are people there. I'd not keep a website journal if no-one was reading it (I've never successfully kept a diary for more than four days in the past). So I don't think it's that silly just to want to know you've got readers. On the other hand, if it turns into that thing where haggard authors tell you they check their Amazon sales statistics twice a day, probably just to make sure they exist, it's probably better just to walk away...
In a very real sense, the kind of long-term "science fiction fandom" I've been involved with for decades is a loose international network of people all of whom were devoted to written science fiction at some point in their lives. (Or who knew, were sleeping with, or -- because they were the only ones who had a car -- had at some point in their lives somehow been persuaded to offer a ride to people who were devoted to written SF, and found they just liked conventions.)
I think of SF Fandom as horizontal. An author who buys his round at the bar is generally liked, an author who has something to say is listened to. The boors are tolerated or not. Fans likewise. There's no Them and Us, not so you'd notice.
SF fans are less likely than anyone else to mind, or even not to notice if, due to circumstances beyond anyone's control, no authors or guests show up, and all the art in the art show was sent to the wrong city.
Media fandom tends to be more vertical. (It can actually be more fun as a guest -- you get fussed over more, and you may never get to buy a round at the bar as someone's always making sure that you as a guest, and anyone you're talking to, has a drink, or whatever you want.)
Comics fandom varies, but the emphasis on signing and the enormous number of things that can be signed, and the way a lot of the people there are there to sell as well as to socialise, tends to result in conventions where the fans go home at 6.00pm and the artists and writers and journalists go off to the bar and try and find an editor to buy them all drinks.
And none of those generalisations are true, and at a large convention these days you'll encounter all sorts of cons going on inside the con and all sorts of fandoms with their own agendas and histories and the membership of the fandoms isn't exclusive either. There are media fans who are literary SF fans who are comics fans... And the rules change from country to country and from genre to genre and from medium to medium...
I had a point I was trying to make, but I'm damned if I know what it was. Good night.
interesting interview with an English Catholic Bishop on BBC Radio this morning, when he explained that the Vatican didn't really mean that. It's a translation thing. The word being translated for Evil, for example, he said, can also just mean "lousy", so we're all getting the wrong idea. It sounded like rather desperate spin on something that simply wouldn't play in the UK... It's at http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/realmedia/sunday/s20030803z.ram
Ken is much too kind; and Eric Edelman is, after a spell in the white house, soon, I believe, to become US Ambassador to Turkey.
I was wondering about http://www.coherenceengine.com/blog/2003_06_01_archive.html#105605171646355912 this as possible way of reshaping US politics. Although I'm not sure where it leads...
I've not read Sethra Lavode. but I've read the afterword to it, which is one of the funniest things that the hand of man has committed...
Teresa -- was this the same copyeditor who missed "couchant" as a heraldic term and decided I couldn't write proper French?
The Neilgaiman.com journal's had an RSS feed for a while now -- it's http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/blogger_rss.xml
but I've put it up at Blogmatrix.com anyway
There's a livejournal feed at
http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=officialgaiman
But I do miss the days when I had a fairly good idea how many people were actually reading the journal. Now I know that it's that number plus X, but with no idea what X is. (I can tell that there are 946 (as of right now) people subscribed through Livejournal, but beyond that it's a bit mysterious).
I suppose the numbers are a peculiarly reassuring way of knowing I'm not talking to myself...
Now, that would have made the perfect cover to the original Gollancz edition of GOOD OMENS. I mean, it'd convince anyone who wasn't already convinced that the M25 is really a secret sacred sigil...
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 6 |
| 2003 | 6 |
Total: 12 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Neil Gaiman:
Show all comments by Neil Gaiman.