Marketing American Gods – Publisher’s Weekly

Daisy Maryles; Dick Donahue, “Gods’ Odds…”, Publisher’s Weekly, 9 July 2001, 248(28), p.17

…are looking especially rosy at this point, as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods has been garnering excellent reviews and is being supported by publisher Morrow’s aggressive and innovative marketing campaign. Thanks to the carefully conceived February launch of a dedicated Web site (www.americangods.com), suspense built rapidly for the book and, according to assistant publicity director Dee Dee De Bartlo, it “was one of Amazon’s Top 100 weeks before it was available.” (On-sale date was June 19; copies in print total 83,000 after three trips back to press.) “It’s flying out of the stores at record speed,” De Bartlo adds–a pace that will certainly pick up, given Gaiman’s just-concluded a 10-city coast-to-coast tour. (No rest after that, however, as his 10-city U.K. tour started last Saturday, and will be followed by a three-city Canadian tour.) The author is perhaps best known as the creator/writer of the monthly cult DC Comics horror-weird series Sandman, which won him the Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for be st writer every year from 1991 through 1994. Harlan Ellison, who knows a thing or two about dark fantasy novels, calls Gaiman’s latest “alarming, charming, even winsome,” and its author “serially inventive, surprising, purely remarkable.”