We met at the National Conference of African American Librarians. I’m Troy Johnson founder of AALBC.com (African American Literature Book Club). AALBC.com was started in 1997 and has grown to become the largest, oldest, and most frequently visited website dedicated to books written by or about people of African descent.
Even if you are already familiar with the website, you many not be familiar with the many different ways our website can help you connect with new readers. Given the size and age of our website we are able to attract most of our visitors through search. In fact, more than 73% of our traffic comes from search. You may review our websites analytics to see how the last 3 million visitors discovered AALBC.com.
Most of our visitors are interested in African American Literature, in fact you’ll discover AALBC on the first page of 1,000’s of search results* for terms like “African American Literature”, “Black bookstores” (Huria.org is our website), or over 1,000 popular authors like “Toni Morrison”. This makes AALBC.com uniquely positioned to get your book in front of readers of African American Literature.
We also publish a monthly eNewsletter, full of book recommendations and related information. If you are interested in receiving our eNewsletter; click here to be added to our mailing list.
The most common question we get is, "How do I get my book on your website?" The answer to this question is in our FAQ (question #7). I’ve pasted the answer to that question below. I trust that you’ll advantage of some of these tactics.
Answer: There are 9 ways (6 are ?Free or very close to it!):
1. ? Talk about your book on our discussion forum 2. ? Sell enough copies to make our bestsellers list 3. Commission an AALBC.com Book Review 4. Purchase an AALBC.com Author’s Profile 5. ? Contribute an article or other form of content to the web site. If we publish it we will definitely mention your book. If we really like it, or you contribute regularly, we’ll create an author profile for you for free. 6. Launch an AALBC.com ad campaign. Campaigns start for as little as $39 per month and can include placing your book, ad banner or video on virtually every single AALBC.com web page. We can even customize a campaign specifically for your needs. 7. ? Tell us something that you have done which is noteworthy and we may mention you in our monthly eNewsletter. 8. ? Do something to support AALBC.com. It is so much easier to support someone who is mutually supportive. AALBC.com is also open to barter. Drop us an email and tell us about any ideas you might have. 9. ? Buy an AALBC.com Mug and send us the photo.
A few of you have already reached out to me and I will get back to your shortly.
