Neil Gaiman says his next book-signing tour will be his last – when he’ll travel in the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere promoting The Ocean at the End of the Lane, coming in June 2013. Gaiman last did a signing tour in 2005 and explained to readers of his blog the difficulty:
They’re exhausting, on a level that’s hard to believe. I love meeting people, but the sixth hour of signing, for people who have been standing in a line for seven hours, is no fun for anybody. (The last proper US signing I did, it lasted over 7 hours and I signed for over 1000 people. I’d suspect a lot of the signings on this tour will be like that, or bigger.)
In the same post, Gaiman shared details about another project due out this year, Fortunately The Milk:
This is quite possibly the most exciting adventure ever to be written about milk since Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Milk. Also it has aliens, pirates, dinosaurs and wumpires in it (but not the handsome, misunderstood kind), not to mention a Volcano God.
It contains passages like this:
“You are charged with breaking into people’s planets and redecorating them,” said a noble and imposing-looking Tyrannosaurus Rex. “And then with running away and doing it again somewhere else, over and over. You have committed crimes against the inhabitants of eighteen planets, and crimes against good taste.”
“What we did to Rigel Four was art!” argued a globby alien.
“Art? There are people on Rigel Four,” said an Ankylosaurus, “who have to look up, every night, at a moon with three huge plaster ducks flying across it.”
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I’m sympathetic. Our last book tour ended up with both of us coming down with complex pneumonia and me in the VA Hospital for a week on oxygen and antibiotics. We had to cancel part two of it, dropping out of two book fairs and four signings on the East Coast. And we’re still coming back from that. I love meeting and talking to people but it is a strain. I have to agree with Neil; it just isn’t a efficient use of time for an author most fo the time. We’ll still do events, but very selectively — and it has to pay.
When you become the literary version of the Beatles or Elvis, the public gives you no gains and becomes a distraction trying to please everyone. Theodore Surgeon seldom tried to deal with his fan mail, it felt like a painful obligation. I can understand.