Mel Hopkins

This is where I think a lot of folks get confused. For example, I don't ignore "gender" constructs; I simply refused to submit to it. In fact, when I hear someone discuss gender, I give them the side-eye and keep it moving. Those who embrace constructs and labels as if it's a badge - tell me all I need to know about their level of engagement.

@Delano I find a lot of my books through mainstream and alternative media too! This is yet another strategy, many authors should put into their marketing - media relations activity for books.

@Troy thank you for posting! @zaji you have a new follower on wordpress.

@Troy my parents raised me to think this way. Before cross-cultural awareness was a thing - it was how I viewed the world. First from my immediate cultural perspective then how others' behavior informed their culture. So yes, that's it. I don't see race, per se and I never have. I see culture and subcultures in humans. Here's my backstory: My dad was stationed in Frankfurt, Germany and that's where my public education began. Since the school was affiliated with the U.S. Military - I didn't encounter "race" indoctrination. When we returned to the states, I was a cosmopolite. Yes, 5 going on 6 and I was already a citizen of the world. By then it was hard to talk me off my foundation. When I was confronted with race and the civil rights movement - my mom told me humans were all the same. I remember using the word nigger when I was in the doctor’s office looking at a magazine. It was Jamaica travel ad and I remember saying the little girl in the picture looked like a nigger. My mother said when retelling the story that a "pink" woman in the office smirked. My mother quickly corrected me right there. She said people were fair-skin some were brown-skin and everything in between. What's weird is looking back, the little girl looked just like me. I was under the influence of grown folks’ conversation. I used their” nigger" label and depiction of a girl who looked like me. I made a note to younger self that would be the first and last time I let the national conversation influence my concept of me, my culture or any culture. I kept that promise too. My mom indoctrinated me to her concept of beauty and that's been hard to shake. If I'm not slim-trim, well-dressed and hair perfectly coiffed I'm not fit for polite company. But that too is part of my culture (or sub-culture.) My mother never said whites, negros or coloreds, it was fair-skin, brown-skin. I would later learn that my father wanted to share the harsh realities of "racism" with me, but my mother said "no" because there were more important things I had to learn. She is an education advocate and I still have more books in my library than I can read in this lifetime. But get this, my mother uses the most derogatory terms when it comes to cultures. She didn't when I was young, nor did she use those terms when my daughters were in their formative years. Aside: She didn't tell me about her battle with colorism within the family until I was older. Her skin color was the darkest in the family. The women of my maternal line are light brown to fair-skin with light colored eyes and jet-black hair. My great great-grandmother's father was native American, her mother was from Ethiopia, East Africa. We think she was a free negro since we can't find any enslaved people in my maternal line. We are from the north - most of my maternal family live or are buried in West Virginia. I empathize with those who were enslaved in this country. I hold a harsh opinion of those who did the enslaving. I give a side-eye to those who sold off or let Africans be captured. None of it defines me. Case-in-point, a boy called me "nigger" when I was bussed out of my middle-class to upper-middle class black West Indian and Jewish neighborhood to go to a school in an Italian American poor to working-class neighborhood. Yes, that was NYC bright idea of diversity back in the late 70s lol. By then I already knew who I was in relation to the world. So instead of internalizing it; I beat his Italian-azz. It was no different than him calling me out of my name. My euro-Jewish teacher tried to chastise but I was "eff you too". You already know about our high-school - it was about as diverse as any public school could be - except we were the talented tenth of all cultures in NYC. It wasn't until I got to St. John's University did I have to face the reality of” racism" and clash of the cultures. In college, you realize the clash is more about competition and folks will use anything at their disposable to graduate top dawg to get that head start in the rat race. But it was social media that blew up my cultural reality. I learned that everyone doesn't have the same understanding of the game. I learned there was a difference between blacks - almost the same as what WEB Du Bois revealed in his Social Studies report in 1901 ... There was a difference between southern and northern blacks - there was a difference between free negros and newly freed enslaved blacks. True to that 1901 report my mother. a northerner married my father a southerner. His family were sharecropper but had to escape the south because someone had a hit out on his father. My grandmother with her 9 children made it to Brooklyn but her husband did not. My paternal grandmother had to start all over. It took them just one generation to become lower middle-class and the next generation (me and my first paternal cousins all got accepted to BTHS (wild, right?) one of my first cousins is a millionaire. I think what saved them was cultural assimilation. The sisters and brothers left their southern culture behind and quickly assimilated and all married northerners. So that's a snippet of my back story and how it informed my cultural view of the world.

@CDBurns This ^ is the term I was trying to remember! Thank you! Yes, please share a video in strategies !

@Delano @Troy Ditto " Facts @Cynique Daaayum! This is fabulous! I need to post this on my pc - so that I'm always reminded not to do this! All learning stops at this level.

@Delano Welcome, my psychic brother! Thank you for joining this one! How do you find books to read? Or if they find their way to you - how does it happen? @Delano And this one... how long did it take you to stop being self-conscious?

@Troy Thank you! Sharing thoughts with each other is the only way we are going to get the best into action!

@Troy

@Cynique I recently heard (or I think I read) why some people disagree on everything... and I even pondered it and thought wow that's me. Now I can't remember LOL! As for me, I suspect Pioneer is a composite. I think more than one person writes his responses. Or Maybe there's a Pioneer1 but others chime in on his account. I'm not saying that he's "sybil" with split personalities but I look at the archive conversations at times and when I read his old responses I get the sense we are not always communicating with the same person. In fact, I quoted something he wrote and he didn't seem to remember it. There are phrases that Pioneer uses at times that gives me the feeling he's from a country/island like Guyana. I'm no expert in forensics linguistic but every now and then I'll read text and it feels either foreign or he's from a place that time forgot. But there's a pioneer from Michigan but I don't think he always responds in this forum. So maybe you disagree with him because it's your way of unmasking him. Or maybe this entry can go in my blog "careful, or you'll end up in my novel

says, Jeff Bezos in the CNBC article How Amazon founder Jeff Bezos went from the son of a teen mom to the world's richest person I'd agree. We want someone to make and serve up something to us even before we know we want it. Just the other day, I was wondering how to get a server that's cheap and easy to operate. I don't want to worry about a platform like Myspace deleting all the blog postings. I have a Google alert set for black philosophers. Or how about a catalog of business books written by black authors? Bottom line: I need a personal shopper who will cater to my consumer whims minus unsolicited pitches. Junk mail is annoying because the proprietor sends me what s/he has which may or may not have anything to do with my desires. I want someone to take the time to know what I like and offer a curated selection. Bezos intuited that we have thousands of thoughts like this in a day. He built an online business to offer whatever comes to mind. What I find exciting is we also pay for his research and development. Bezos says, in the article, he's not afraid to be wrong. You can't beat a fearless man. There's a saying: The quote, in this context, doesn't mean work with or for Amazon. Or sell your books on the website. It means to emulate the competition. And from And from Bezos own words, he runs a customer-centric business. Everything Amazon does serve the whims of the customer. Amazon has access to every book in print. If it's not in the warehouse, they will print-on-demand and send it to you and waive the shipping and handling fee. If they can't print it, they'll send a digital version to your Kindle (if you own one) or your PC. It will be lickety-split at a price that's easy on the wallet. So, how can we as independent authors, self-publishers, engineers, etc., become the reader's advocate? How can we become reader-centric booksellers? How can we help them help us help them? Can we make it easy for book lovers to acquire our books? Please post your suggestions, ideas and comments. Update: I wrote an article to discuss this post in detail. Link: melhopkinsdotcom: 5 STEPS TO FINDING A COMMUNITY FOR YOUR BOOK

Love it and the hashtag #readingblack.com - It's really easy to use when you're on social networks and espeically when you are sharing an article written by someone black about a black issues . Although the .com drops off - I still include it for the curious who will actually look for the site.

Please let us know who you are. What you'd like to accomplishment. How we can help you get the most out of this club? Provide your goals, expertise and even your expectations. Share as much or as little - and add when you feel comfortable. Thank you for being part of #readingblack.com movement and we want to make sure the movement serves us all. As for me, I read as much if not more than I write. So far, I've written, published two fiction titles and I’m working on a memoir. The former got me a full-page feature in a major business magazine; the latter is proving to be difficult to format. On the digital front, I've acquired several domain names currently valued at $10K. From those highly-coveted names, I’ve launched a personal website, a news magazine website that is growing in popularity due to the strategic alliances I’ve built with AALBC.com and PRNewswire. com I was half of a two-person start-up team who created and developed a popular lifestyle website and a weekly live 2-hour radio talk-show. With sweat-equity, and free social networks such as Myspace, Facebook, and BlogTalkRadio we built an engaged community for the website. By 2008, the Facebook page had 100K fans. We invited the most loyal fans to write for the site. In 2010, the website had a global ranking with an estimated value of about $35K. If sold, it would have been nearly 100% profit. The co-founder changed the format and pushed me out. The website lost 90% of its value after the community dwindled. Since 2002, I've consulted in Media Relations with a focus on building communities and creating strategic alliances. I've accumulated millions of dollars in earned media for myself and clients in publications with a monthly multimillion readership. Before building a media consulting business, I was responsible for corporate communications of several multimillion-dollar funded high-profile nonprofit organizations. I took those skills to work for a large customer-facing financial institution where I worked closely with marketing to handled internal communications and special projects for the Community Reinvestment Act department. As News Anchor and Managing Editor, at a CBS network affiliate, led a team of editors, photographers, reporters to produce #1 rated weekend newscast that gained 27% of market share. As AM drivetime news anchor/reporter for iHeart (formerly Clear channel) Radio Station 1170 AM WWVA acquired Associated Press credits for contributing breaking news resulting in an AP Radio Partner Award. Several national magazines and newspapers have published my features and opinions. Prior, I worked for trade book publishers, G.P. Putnam's Sons and Penguin USA (before the merger) in Special Sales, and Academic Marketing & Sales from 1987-1992. Oh, did I mention I spent 8-years flying the friendly skies for a major U.S. commercial airline?

@A.J. Williams glad to have you here! Please share your bookselling strategies with us here too...you're an actor which means you have to sell yourself daily. So you'd be surprised how many good marketing ideas you have that will sell your book. If you want traffic to your website - set up a blogger website and link it to your website ... see if flamesofretribution.blogspot.com is available and set up a google group too for black women superheroes that link to your book and website. Also, with your subject matter - you probably wanr to write (blog about) about vigilantism in mainstream media - there's currently a show called black lightening on the CW channel - and last night they had a scene where roland martin appears and says something like "why are black superheroes called vigilante and white superheroes called heroes and saviors.".. You can tap into the superheroine vibe with your character... you can start marketing your book as the black woman superhero - and write about her and otheron your blog - and share on social media too. Just a thought...

@A.J. Williams Keep grinding and diversify.... Your book is intellectual property and you have to treat it that way. What you're giving amazon is the right to copy your book and you pay them for the right. I'm not a fan of that business model. Unlike a traditional publishing company that pays you for the right to copy... you are paying amazon for the right to copy your book and sell it - and give you 10 percent. WHY? When you look at it from that perspective does it seem right?

@A.J. Williams ask those who gave you great reviews to buy at wholesale a minimum of 5 copies to handsell at the retail price. They make money and they also get the word out about your book. Amazon or barnes and noble don't know your book so how can they give it more exposure than those who have read it and believe in it?

Hi @A.J. Williams Welcome! One thing I have learned about Amazon is this : first and foremost it was a book cataloging system in its first incarnation. This means if your title has an ISBN you may not have a say as to whether your book is sold through amazon. But Is your book digital or print?

@David Covin Thank you. Troy gave you an excellent introduction! I didn't think of asking this before attempting to answer @Bill 's question. But it helps to know who are the stakeholders and how the strategies will help. For those of us who are readers only - the strategies might not be helpful unless we construct them with readers in mind. Thank you again for your response.

@Bill Welcome to #readingblack.com Are you a reader, Indie Publisher, author,-independent publisher? Excuse me if you've answered this already.

@Troy Ouch!!!

Also, it's the publisher's unique selling proposition - I know from that one line, their authors are from the motherland.. That's powerful marketing lol

And how about Cal-Exit? Rural California decided to break off from the urban part of California to declare its independence. In doing so, they've formed New California which founders hope will eventually achieve statehood Then a small earthquake hit.

Reason #777 why I rarely write for free - and definitely not on a third-party platform (well except for AALBC.com). Huffington Post's Editor in Chief Lydia Polgreen announced today the contributors platform is now history. You read right. All those Huffpost bloggers, some starting back in 2005, found out today "the HuffPost blogging platform is no more. In its place, Huffpost Opinion and HuffPost personal. Writers will have to pitch ideas to get inches on the platform now. But at least they will be paid for their work. Polgreen also announced they will be hiring staff writers too. Rest of the story can be found on the Huffington Post By Lydia Polgreen If I wanted to hear more of the same programming, I'd watch national network news. But I don't. I want to hear/read diverse thoughts. I want others to challenge and stimulate my thoughts and beliefs . I don't want to get stuck in an echo chamber. So let's hear it for yet another reason, reason #1 we need to maintain our own platforms, share our thoughts and link to each other... RIP HUFF POST CONTRIBUTORS BLOGS.

@Troy aren't those the words from the publisher of The Mantle? If yes, it seems then those words should remain. It makes a strong statement. If those are your words, then :eek: ....

Academic Marketing & Sales Did you know there are many associations that host about 352,300* conferences and meetings that are attended by professionals who can make purchasing decisions, such as making a wholesale purchases of your book? Conference exhibiting is another way to knock on a backdoor market to reach your readers. If you’re only exhibiting your books at book conventions you’re missing out on quite a few opportunities. Source: MARKETING YOUR BOOKS TO THE ACADEMIC COMMUNITY