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In a time when an increasing number of authors are resorting to Facebook, or Amazon, as their primary web platform, it is refreshing to see an author establish their own web presence. @Cerece Rennie Murphy is one prime example. Cerece recently took advantage of our Fall Book Special. I'm not just the type to place an ad and forget about it. I actually check out the author's work and even provide unsolicited suggestions from time to time. From my perspective it is a long term relationship not merely an anonymous financial transaction... but I digress. After checking out Cerece's website, watching a couple of videos in her "For Authors" section, I came across her book store. Which included logos and links to IndieBound*, Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and Booksamillion. I followed each of the links and realized that I give Cerece a much better treatment of of her work than all of those websites. So I asked her to add AALBC.com logo to the page--which she did in a matter of hours (screenshot below). I know for authors like @CDBurns, and @Mel Hopkins, this type of activity is a no-brainer. But in practice, it really isn't. This is why I'm taking the time to point out what Cerece did in the hope other authors will follow her lead and do the same thing, not just for AALBC.com, but for the independent booksellers of their choice. Cerece is not the first author I asked to do this, but she is the first I asked in quite some time. One of the reasons I stopped asking is that most authors don't manage their own websites so the requests often went no where. But a more alarming reaction I would get is that the author did not want to risk alienating other indie booksellers by recognizing any individual bookseller single "over" another. I always found that last response exasperating because those very same authors would prominently display Amazon's logo while excluding all other Black indie booksellers. It is absolutely not preferable to ignore all the other platforms who have committed their very livelihoods to selling the author's work. But if you visit any author's site most will link to Amazon and most will not link to (support) an indie bookseller. Now if you ask any author if indie booksellers, online and brick and mortar, are important they will, universally, say "yes." It is important that authors appreciate that indie booksellers, particularly the Black owned ones, can benefit a great deal more than Amazon by a simple link on an author's. Of course increased support will benefit the authors themselves as the number of platforms available to promote, critically reviews, and sell their books grow in numbers and strength. *Indiebound represents independent book sellers, but Black owned stores are not represented well. Just a quick query of Manhattan shows a bunch of stores that have closed and does not include the last remaining Black owned bookstore in Manhattan Sisters Uptown.

Afrocentric Books is a publisher of fiction featuring characters of African descent. We are a small press that is bent on changing the racial status quo in literature, particularly in Speculative Fiction. Surely white people aren't the only ones living on alien planets or facing down dragons with a sword in one hand and a flaming ball of magic in the other? We require at least one main character (not a secondary character, not a loveable sidekick, not an important supporting character; a MAIN character--hero or heroine) to be of African descent. We live in a diverse world and we would like to see today's literature reflect some of that diversity. If you're an author with a great, polished story, immerse us in the colors of the African diaspora.

Once you buy a book, CD or DVD, it’s indisputably yours and can’t be taken back by the seller. You can lend it, give it away, leave it to your heirs or sell it to a secondhand store. But the truth is that in most cases, “buying” digital content doesn’t confer any of those other rights. Rights to digital content or items have been revoked abruptly by Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble for a variety of reasons. Amazon stealthily removed versions of George Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm” from customers’ Kindle e-readers after copyright issues arose with those versions; iTunes has removed albums from users’ accounts after the albums were withdrawn or changed by the artists or their labels; Barnes & Noble shut down a customer’s access to an e-book after the user’s credit card expired, even though the book already had been paid for. The above article is from today's LA Times, "Consumer deception? That 'Buy Now' button on Amazon or iTunes may not mean you own what you paid for" I know this to be true and it is extremely frustrating. I migrated all of my music, taking CDs I purchased and converted them to digital files that I managed using the Itunes application. After a few years I gave away all those antiquated old the CDs. Any other music I acquired I purchased at the Itunes store. I have an Ipod that I listen to my music on, but most of the time I used my Iphone to play music. My desktop crashed (they all do eventually), and I migrated from an I phone to a Samsung phone. It was a royal pain in butt to the get my music onto my new computer. I won't even go into the details, but it involved hacks, 3rd party apps, unhiding hidden files, all just to migrate music I "owned" to a new computer. I felt ripped off... because I have been. Now both of these companies want you to migrate everything to the freaking "cloud" so that they can stay in your pocket for ever. F Itunes! I'm going to be like everyone else and steal my music from youtube.

LOL!!!!!! I guess because I worked for Apple and was a certified tech, I never bought into the hype. I still have all of my CDs and I go out of my way to get CDs even now. I buy so much music that I've literally run out of space to house them, but I'm going to keep buying because I know what happens with the "cloud" and digital music. The digital domain is still being scrutinized and changed. The laws haven't been written and it's a very dangerous space for creators. Imagine being the artist and knowing that your work can literally be stolen from YouTube. The amount YT pays for streams is horrible. Amazon Cloud is even worse. I tell you, no one is winning right now except the platforms.