No, I don’t know what ‘mouse circus’ means . . . not yet, anyway.
The book will be released on audio in June, read by the author. Then the hardback will be released a month or so afterwards.
Strange tactic to release them staggered in that way. I wonder how much of the decision was fueled by Gaiman’s enjoyment of reading his own work aloud . . . and how much of it was some 28 -year-old marketing assistant saying “Hey, we’ll sell twice as many audiobooks if we hold back the release of the novel. The die hard fans will be forced to buy both.”
I’d like to think that Neil pushed to do it to put the emphasis on the storytelling aspect of his work. And yet I suspect that it wasn’t his decision at all.
It reminds me a bit of that period of five years or so when CD’s and tape casettes overlapped in popularity and all sorts of albums were released with slight variants in tracks between one medium and the other. If you wanted, say, every single “Staring at the Sea” track, you had to buy both CD and tape. Or the maddening brilliance of Elvis Costello’s Girls+£/Girls=$+Girls which had three variants: CD, LP, and casette.
Strange. I can’t think offhand of any mainstream, popular artists where content is held hostage in this way . . . it seems like a stunt done with bands or writers who have a comparatively small and devoted fan base, usually occupying some sort of niche market. It can double the sales of what would be a moderately-marginally-successful release of a vertical genre artist.
I would have bought both the CD and the novel regardless of their release dates (I love Gaiman’s writing, but I also like his reading of his own work).But I still feel manipulated by the evil 28 year old marketing assistant at Harper Collins.
Damn those 28 year olds, damn them all. I get what I want, and I still feel cheated somehow.