Neil Gaiman Interview (page 5)

MF: And yet, you do manage to keep up on your blog.

Neil Gaiman: Yes, but that's partly guilt and partly the incredible immediacy of the blog that keeps me going. I started that in February, 2001 and the plan was it just was going to go until September. And when I looked around in September, I had 23,000 readers. And I thought, "Fuck! I have 23,000 readers! That's so cool! I'm going to keep this thing up!"

And also I loved the fact that for the first time in my life I was no longer dependent upon the whims of publishers on whether or not the publisher or the shop could get the word out on each individual event effectively. The great thing about the blog is now we're in a world in which if I'm doing a signing, most of the people who could know about it will know about it or at least will have the potential to know about it.

So like I said, when it was 20,000 people I thought, "I can't just stop now." Now, we're around 1.2 million, which makes it probably one of the most successful completely non-ad-driven sites around. But I'm also painfully aware that the only reason that I can do my site and that it can bear the traffic, is because HarperCollins are paying for it. And the reason they're paying for it is because it has become a sort of flagship for them in what you can do with websites.

MF: So, you'll keep on then?

Neil Gaiman: I will, until one day I stop. The nice thing about the blog for me is that it has this kind of Mary Poppinsy quality of "I will stay until the wind changes." The day that blog stops being fun to do, I'm out of there. The day I get up and go, "Oh my god, I've got to do my fucking blog," I will stop. Right now, I love the immediacy.

MF: Well, you certainly are an author, more than most, who is tapped into the Internet culture and savvy in that regard.

Neil Gaiman: Well mostly because I've been part of it for as long as I can remember. I was on CompuServe in 1989, I think. I remember it was just after Terry Pratchett and I finished Good Omens. And then when I came out to the U.S. in '92, I was on GEnie, and I did some stuff on The Well for a while.

But the nice thing about www.neilgaiman.com was that suddenly I have my own place here. The scary bit is that I must have written a million words by now, and there's part of me that goes "if only those million words had been a novel, two novels, four novels..." but they probably wouldn't have been. What they tend to be, honestly is I no longer write long chatty emails to friends and loved ones. I figure they can find out what I'm doing from my blog.

MF: Can you tell us a bit about your next book?

Neil Gaiman: The next novel, which I've actually started but haven't done much with yet, is going to be called The Graveyard Book. It's about a boy, a little baby, who flees seeking safety and is brought up by dead people. And it's far and away the scariest thing I've written so far, at least from the first five pages.