If more of us writers are getting out there with more books, those of us who survive in this business and profit, says Neil Gaiman, are those who hustle. And few writers are more effective hustlers than Gaiman with his sci-fi novels, graphic novels, children’s books, a British television series, and, yes, movies. Gaiman’s written a flock of television and film scripts that have seen production, and two of his long works – Stardust and Coraline – have been turned into top-rated films. The Graveyard Book is the next slated for filming.

As a promoter of his own work, Gaiman maintains an interactive blog, a Twitter feed, a website, pages on Facebook and elsewhere – all right, he’s got help. And he’s out touring.

Smart authors, he told NPR’s On the Media host Brooke Gladstone, may wind up reverting to the world of Charles Dickens.

Printers here cranked out pirated editions of Dickens’ books and sold them. There wasn’t any profit in that for Dickens, so, when he couldn’t stop the pirates, he decided to go after the Yankee dollar another way. Dickens came here, and he hit the lecture circuit. He gave readings from his books for a price.

Says Gaiman, Dickens gave people the one thing the pirates couldn’t give them – Charles Dickens. And we Americans in that day came out for that. We bought tickets to get into the theaters and auditoriums, so we could see and hear the man who wrote The Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, and so many other books.

Gaiman believes we may be heading for a world, in the next 10 to 15 years, in which Stephen King won’t make any money from his new book, but he instead will pack our country’s arenas and read the book – well, portions of it – to his audiences.

That, Gaiman told Gladstone, will be fun.

Tomorrow: Borders now selling e-books