kimmycup asked:
With all the thrilling saga of google being unhelpful about your career, I gotta ask - don't you maybe have like a place where you store your publications? That'd probably help with "at least 34" counting. I mean, I know I do that but I guess at some level of success that becomes less significant?
I do. It’s about 7,000 miles away from where I am right now. But I’m pretty vague still. Take the 75 issues of Sandman, divided over 10 trade paperbacks, two omnibus editions, or four Absolute editions. Is that ten books, two books, four books or sixteen books?
Listen, I was on your side until you said you also don’t know the answer to this question.
Excellent. So you have the definitive answer, then?
(It occurs to me that that other answers, in addition to 10, 2, 4 or 16, could be 76 – as it’s actually 76 monthly issues of Sandman, because I’d forgotten the Song of Orpheus special – or, including every form those 76 issues came out in, 92.)
@neil-gaiman you speficially said books so since its only possible to own 16 different sandman books thats 16 books
Got it. So you are definitely in the “different editions of the same material count as different books” camp. (Would that make the version of The Doll’s House which included Sandman 8 a different book to the later one which began with Sandman 9? So that would be 17 books?)
I’m not in that camp. Barnes and Noble did an edition of “American Gods & Anansi Boys” as a one volume book. I’d count American Gods as a published book, and Anansi Boys as a published book. But I’d regard the Barnes and Noble edition as an edition of those books, rather than a third, different book, in an answer of how many books I’ve written or had published.
But I don’t think there’s actually a right or wrong answer to any of this. We decide how we want to count things, and then count within those parameters, and then find things that don’t quite fit into any boxes, and then fudge it.
