Some of you may know I'm a big fan of Neil Gaiman's, and a big fan of the American Deep South. One of my "pet issues" is how the South is misperceived and sometimes maligned. I feel that people outside the South don't really compare apples to apples, and confirm some of their own wishful thinking or project their own problems onto the South.
So I was quite delighted to read Neil's remarks about his first trip to Alabama. I'm from South Carolina, but Alabama is a sister state in many ways -- pure Deep South and without one of the major media markets (mainly Atlanta).
Here's the link to his blog entry, with some of the most interesting excerpts (including response from the letters portion at the bottom):
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/02/o ... a-but.htmlQuote:
The strange thing is that, as an author, there are places publishers never send you, and the American South (if you don't count Atlanta) is one of those places. When I'd ask, I'd be told it was because people didn't really buy books there, or there wasn't a demand, or something.
And all I know is, the first batch of tickets for my reading in Alabama were gone in 120 seconds. (Literally. We thought the website had crashed.) The few leftovers, released later in the week, went at the same speed. A 1078 seat theatre sold out in minutes, and they could have filled it twice or three times over. People had driven 4 hours to get there and more. Everybody there seemed hungry for words and stories and literature.
***
And I'm going on about this at greater length than I normally would because I don't get it. On the one hand you have a terrific university and a population that really seems to read and is hungry to interact with authors and to come to events like this. On the other hand, you have authors, who really like to go places where people like us. So why has it taken me 22 years of signing my way across America to get to Alabama? And why don't publishers send authors there?
It makes me suspect some kind of self-fulfilling deeply wrong idea here. Bookshops and such that wouldn't ask for signings because they know they'll be turned down? Publishers in New York who'd never send authors to places like that because they know nobody would go, and nobody asks?
You can probably see why I enjoyed his comments.
