Troy

What made it interesting to you? Did you discover something not previously discussed here?

Hey @Char Backey would you mind if I added your book club's information to AALBC? I have another club on the site that has been together over 25 years years and I have all of their books on the site. I compile Book club information and reading lists to help readers find good books. Here is the Go On Girl! club reading list going back to 1991. They are also committed to buying their books from AALBC. I have collected information on over 700 Black book clubs and virtually all of them have female members. Most Black people in Great Britain read books. Over 80% of Brits will read a book this year. I gave a presentation in Austin this past Saturday, the Austin Black Book Festival. The founder is a sister. The volunteers were from a book club (all sistas), Folktales’ Black Women’s Literary Society Delta Sigma Theta and the Links organizations provided sponsorship and volunteers too. If it were not for the men who presented or sold books. Attendees would have been mostly female Maybe, most Black Men Don't Read. Everyone, we have an online book club here, and are trying to get more folks to participate. The club has started in 1998 the next book we are reading is Sag Harbor.

Hey if ya'll could provide links to the book you recommend that would be helpful -- especially if it is an AALBC page Nelson George's To Funk and Die in LA Blissfull by Heather Neff

Please share links to some of your reviews! I see you are from LA. I was in Shreveport this past Sunday and Monday. My father's people are from there :-)

Yes, all of these things made a school bad. I'm also an educator with over 10 years of experience, most of it at the college level. But I've also taught at-risk youth and adult learners. The data you shared does show that there is a large gap in scores based upon income. This gap has remained unchanged over 20 years, so it is a strong indicator. Unfortunately, was no breakdown by income and race. If there was, I'm sure you'd see little or no disparity once you account for income. I'm familiar with the data on Black literacy and reading rates, and have written about this quite a bit on the subject over the years. The Atlantic reported a few years ago that the person MOST likely to read a book is a educated Black woman. As a bookseller, with over 2 decades of experience, this comes as no surprise. I also know that you can't look at Black literacy with an American lense. A third of Americans will end the year without reading a single book -- most of these people will be white. Interestingly, the fact that so many white people don't is never discussed. However, we are quick to highlight the poor, underprivileged, Black people who do not read. Neither of my grandfathers could read or write. My father did not go to college. I went to college and now I sell books :-) My trajectory is not unique. Many Black people are ahead of my curve and many perhaps more are behind. Given our experience in this country our reading rates are quite good, if not remarkable. Do we need to do better -- of course we do and we will, but it will take time. @Word Lovers I completely agree with your statement: "Not enough Black people read." But is also true not enough Americans read. Given the reading rates of Black women to who weren't given the right to vote until the 20th century, were subjected to the worse hundreds of years of slavery could dish out only to be followed by a century of Jim crow. the achievement of this group of people is absolutely remarkable. For these reasons and so much more I don't buy into the notion that "Black people Don't Read." Indeed, it is amazing we read as much as we do.

@Mel Hopkins Google does a lot of hard things really well, but they fail at some relatively easy things. Failure at something simple only comes with consequences if a great of money is lost. The impact on people, the culture, society, or the web are not considered. Google's public behavior illustrates this quite well -- they focus doggedly on where the money is. The benefit of indie sites like AALBC is that you can query the site without having to include the conditions of "African American," "Good," or maybe even "Book" in your query, because the site's focus eliminates the need for this. For example, here on this website, you can run a search on the term "series," and get almost 3,900 results. Now some of these results may not meet your requirements, but I'd be be willing to bet that most of the first 100 results would, as it yields results like Kimberla Lawson Roby, Vanessa Miller, Walter Mosley, and L.A. Banks on the first page. A better way of handling this, on AALBC, would be to add a field to my book table and include series information (name of series, sequence in series, etc). The data is available it is just a matter of updating my database and building a page to highlight these types of books. This is not likely something I'll immediately do because I see no indication that the search volume on "African American Authors with Book Series" is just not high enough to warrant the effort in light of other priorities. All of these pages have been indexed by Google and could show up in Google's search results, but they don't because Google simply is not that good at parsing search results for many categories of web pages and queries. They often return that Mental Floss page listing the "25 Amazing Books by African-American Writers You Need to Read." as a go to page for anything relating to Black books, much like they use Wikipedia for everything else. I have more and better lists of books lists than Mental Floss, but Google has chosen to default to that one Mental Floss page. No amount of SEO will change this as Google puts very little effort into returning quality search results on this subject. The query on "African American authors with book series" is better as they only return one result per domain, so even if the page does not have what you are looking for, you are more likely to find a website that has what you are looking for -- something Google stopped doing a decade ago.

No just equal.

We @richardmurray you are familiar with your story so the images have context. Without that context, at least for me, they were random, uninteresting, images.

Hey Del why did you post a link to this article. I read it. Was there something in it that you wanted to highlight?

Morrison documentary is in theaters now and available in upcoming weeks in theatres all over the country: http://www.magpictures.com/tonimorrison/get-tickets/

Yes. combating Google (and Amazon) will require not just creativity but some short term sacrifice. The later is the challenge in the book world. That NY Times article about Amazon is quite telling. A couple of authors I spoke with in Austin on Saturday were shocked that I could buy their books on Amazon for less money than they can afford to sell their books themselves. They thought they were the only ones who had the books so they believed it was not possible for anyone else to sell their book at a profit. One could not wrap her head around it. Now I don't know if their books were being pirated (which is not a new problem on Amazon) or if the 3rd party sellers were selling stolen or used copies. Incidentally, Google favors Amazon in their search results as well. Speaking of Amazon. I mentioned during my talk how using Amazon publishing services and giving Amazon the exclusive right to sell own's book (something that would normally be considered crazy) cuts one off from all other booksellers. I showed one authors how her book in not available in distribution (so I can't sell it). Plus some booksellers flat out refuse to sell book published by Amazon -- even when it is not sold exclusively by Amazon.

This is true. If you don't jump through Google's hoops, they punish you in your site's search engine ranking. You don't need to have an adsense account (sell Google's advertising) to be effected. Google "claims" they are merely trying to give the websurfer the best possible experience, but like any dictator Goolge makes this decision for us -- and they do this to maximize their revenue. There is no other long term alternatives. However you can't make it on your own. AALBC has survived only because of our community (which includes you and the others who post and read these forums). I know you know how to build community @Mel Hopkins that last statement was for others reading this. #EFFGOOGLE

@Mel Hopkins you might find this interesting. This is from another publisher of Kam's content who Google buried without consequence. I had not seriously considered than Kam's business was killed as well. He never ever complained even as I too had to stop publishing his content. I suggested that he should modify his model by either monetizing his own website or selling articles exclusively, at a premium. Neither worked for Kam as he was not a webmaster and the nature of his articles limited how much he could sell them for. “Kam syndicated his stories to more than 100 publications around the world, which used to be a good thing until google changed all of the rules in 2011. That one google change destroyed Kam’s syndication business and ours, and eventually caused the shutdown of many of our competitors, who were Kam’s customers. Kam and NewsBlaze were too stubborn to give in to the search engine bully. He would send his Top Ten lists, and I would enhance them to make them unique. I added text from his reviews and embedded the video trailer clips. We continued to work together, trying to figure out a way to stop google destroying both our businesses, until mid-2016 when it became impossible to continue our collaboration.” It was excerpted from an article written by another one of Kam’s publishers, NewsBlaze. The article's author, Alan Gray is skilled in SEO. He and I compared notes several years ago. Again, Google's greed driven, ham-fisted, domination of the WWW, and their adverse impact on Kam's publishers is clear.

The collage makes more sense after you read the book's excerpts.

Equity and Justice

Ok I'll work on a query (a web page) that displays self-published literary fiction, by genre, from the past three years. I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, I see you've taken advantage of the information shared by authors here. AALBC can not possibly review all the book review requests we receive, so I'm happy to see more platforms emerge.

Hello @Word Lovers interesting publication. Ill have to print i t and read offline. Is this also published on your web site?

@Word Lovers your voice is welcomed and needed here. Judging by your entire comment I presume the following statement was an exaggeration to make a point: Also, given the same preparation and environmental factors minority children perform as well as anyone in reading and math. The following may be true if you are comparing poor minority kids from bad school with rich white ones from great schools: These hyperbolic and unqualifed statements are the one racists make to justify their beliefs of Black inferiority. However, your literary club and avocation increased reading are extremely important and needed.

You wrote "racial." What did you mean by "racial violence?"

@Delano I don't think I know any Black people affected by racial violence. Sure I'm aware of the sensationalized stories that make the news, but I don't know anyone personally.

Nah I'll leave it. @Delano does that a lot. Why don't you ask him?

When i visit Portland again ill check out North Portland -- assuming I don't need a pass to visit.

I'm gonna read Bell's story as soon as im back home.

@Delano because the behavior is exhibited here in America does not make it "normal." A lot? Relative to what? Sure there are some negroes living in Portland, but that is really stretching it man -- about the same number of people attend a cowboys game on any given Sunday as there are Black people living in Portland. It is an amazingly white city. As far as I'm concerned they can have it. Though I would like to visit Powell's Book Store one day.

Hey @Dak I see you already discovered The State of Black Science Fiction club here on AALBC all is needs is some participation. Sometimes you have to help create the thing you want. Here are some sci-fi authors to check out @Valjeanne Jeffers is on the list. You can chose related categories to find even more. Here is a list of Black book sites, some maintain blogs that may be wirth checking out: https://aalbc.com/booksites/ Here is a list of Black blogs: https://aalbc.com/blogs/ Admittedly it is a neglected portion of the site, but you might find something there.