Troy

HUmm, maybe it is just my access then. I would have loved to been able to demonstrate a broken Facebook page

Really? I thought all they cared about was working in the coal mines, kicking Mexicans out of the country, beer, and reading fake news on Twitter.

NOt sure what the draw back of being omniscient would be, since you can do anything you want... besides if I was omniscient I'd just make myself know all.

I've been trying to open my Facebook Fan page, after not using it for about four month, and it appears Facebook has put me into the corner for misbehaving I actually can't open my page. It just Just as a sanity check, before I start talking even more trash about them, can any of you open the page: https://www.facebook.com/aalbcfanpage ? Lemme know.

But do you really care about to the number of white boys in the NBA? Oh yeah @Cynique, even tennis has been dominated for years by non Americans. When was the last time you heard of a White Male American winning a major? Can you name 3 American professional tennis players who are currently playing?

I assumed omnipotence included omniscience too, but OK I'll take that too. I'll use my last power to give a power to someone else.

Look at what I just found on the web: What is happening to black stores everywhere The fact that black-owned bookstores are closing everywhere is not necessarily a negative reflection on the owners. One of the biggest problems in America right now is that people are not reading as much anymore. The National Endowment for the Arts stated as far back as 2004 that “…literary reading in America is not only declining among all groups, but the rate of decline has accelerated, especially among the young.” If reading is on the decline, bookstores are no longer a viable business. Other factors There are, of course, other causes for the close of black bookstores, such as a weak economy, rise in rent costs for bookstore owners, and bad business management. But the largest, most contributing factor appears to be also the most disturbing factor, and that is the lack of interest in reading books. Even web sites that feature books by African Americans and about the African American culture are suffering. With other sources of information available now through technology, black and white bookstore owners are facing a tough business environment. Some have suggested that, instead of just books, bookstore owners need to be creative to get people in the door by selling other products they would be interested in. Others have speculated that black bookstores have added to their demise by focusing just on the black community and need to expand their products to include books of interest to a wider community. Now I actually know the Brother that said this I visited his stores in Brooklyn, NY and Longwood, FL. They actually linked back to the AALBC.com! Amazing! I always like that Brother Desmond Reid! The original article may be found here: http://blog.blackbusiness.org/2015/05/why-50-black-owned-bookstores-left-country.html#.WVO292jyuHs

No wealthy Black people don't care about this either; if asked they will say they care because they know the "right" answer but fundamentally they don't they care. Honestly, do you even really care?

I only need one omnipotence.

The dysfunction of Black male/female relationships gets a lot of attention in Atlanta. I'm beginning to believe too many people believe the hype. Perhaps it is time time give some shine to the positive thing going on with this subject. Imagine attention given to talking about successful relationships. Instead of Real House Wives of Atlanta, how about a show about normal folks who work together to raise their families and get along and and do fun things with each other. I guess that show would be too boring, huh? But no I never heard of the guy, until I approved this post and looked him up. The subject is not my cup of tea, but I understand why he would be quite popular--especially in Atlanta.

I just researched for a couple of hours the newpapers I was missing from the NMPA members (my list includes papers that are not memeber so my list a actually larger despite the reporting by CJR I also only track newspapers that are still in print. several of the NMPA member are actually magazines or only have websites. These are not tracked on my list. There was anomalous data on the NMPA website, bad links and missing website, etc. I'll also take this time to review my links once I validate the rest of the NMPA member listing before adding them to my website. There is anomalous data on both sites, but My data is better if you are interested in find Black owned newspaper still printing. It will be better still after I add the missing papers and I have all the newspaper checked out so that the information displays the way my book site displays with website screen shots and additional information. Here is a summary of the things I found so far Mobile Beacon-Citizen was added they have a Facebook page but no website (I don't add links to Facebook from AALBC.com. Can a newspaper be taken seriously if they do not have a website?) The CA based, Black Voice News, an NNPA member, is web based only www.blackvoicenews.com (I track only print newspapers, I've added the site to Huria Search) The Bakersfield News Observer has a facebook page, but it's websites are down www.bakersfieldnewsobserver.com and www.observercorp.com (I'll add it anyway added it anyway) The California Advocate they have mapped their domain, www.caladvocate.com to a Facebook page (just a terrible move for a newspaper!) I added the newspaper. California Voice's website was for sale www.sunreporter.com and I can't find anything about the current state of the newspaper or what happened to I did not add it L.A. Focus Newspaper nice site and newspaper added African News Digest web site only only not added African-American News (list on NNPA three times but they have one site and the paper appears to be the same in all three cities it was already in my database but counted once) The Afro Times Brooklyn based Facebook page, no website (will be added) Alexandria News Weekly stopped publishing in 1999 no website, no facebook page not added. Atlanta Tribune now a magazine transferred from newspaper to the magazine page Sparing you additional boring details you kinda get the picture. Basically what I saw was a bit depressing. I'll have more once I review all of the information. I should have been working on my newsletter instead of missing around this this newspaper stuff, but I my interest was peaked after reading the article. Man if I don't get my newsletter out by tomorrow....

Hickson, don't tell me you gave up your website? What about folks who don't have Facebook accounts? There are still 5 billion of us left ;-)

Yes, of course I can show you. As I build out the facility to order books I'll create a video to demonstrate the tag manager. The problem with Tag Manager, is that it is too technical for the average person to use. The geniuses at Google think it is simple, but the average person can't make heads or tails out of it. It is worth mentioning but it should probably be a standalone session. I'll work through this as I build out my ordering system. But anyone can do it as long as they have a google account.

Thanks Mel. How did you discover this article? So while they mention this site by name, the Columbia Journalism Review choose not to link to the page they sited: https://aalbc.com/newspapers/ (and it was a choice). The question is why did they chose not to link to the site? It is reflective of an over trend on the internet that depreciates all of our websites. I just did a search on Black Owned Newspapers and AALBC.com came up first. Here too you see Google front running the search results with links to their content (see screenshot below). Amazingly, I beat Wikipedia on this search. Google seems to be backing off ranking Wikipedia number one on every search. Still ranking first here means little, because less than 100 queries, a month are run on this term. For the search term African American Newspaper, Wikipedia comes in first and AALBC.com comes in 5th, but here too this search term has low competition less than 1,000 searchs a month are run this term. Again after Google's own content and a 5th place position, which would normally be pretty valuable, is not likely to generate as much traffic as it should. Image if the site was on the 2nd or 3rd SERP... now you can begin to understand why optimizing for Google (which is really what SEO is all about) is so very critical. I'll update my site to include any newspaper I may be missing however the discrepancy between the NNPA numbers and what I report currently less than 20, no where near 100 as the article seems to imply (I just dumped the information to spreadsheet and simply counted...). The state of reporting today

Also here is a bit more detail as my take as an online Bookseller; “Black Book Websites Need Love More Than Ever.” The crazy thing, in this environment just to stay alive I have to spend more time dealing with things that have nothing to do with books sales including; website development, maintenance, and upgrades; SEO; marketing; research; ad sales, content creation, including video, articles, editing; even managing this discussion forum is non-trivial. If Google focused on returning the best search results rather than front running those results with their products and if Amazon did not exist, we would all be wealthier and more enriched. I know, I said we'd be better off without Amazon. That sounds almost sacrilegious, right? A last Friday Amazon announced they were buying Whole Foods. The government does not seem to care that Amazon will not stop until they are the only ones selling everything. In the short term, as long as we can get stuff, we don't really, need a few pennies cheaper and a few minutes faster; we don't mind the longer term adverse impact of a monopoly, less choice, higher prices, lower wages, and overall f'ed up situation.

With all of these websites there is very little transparency. If you sell a book through me, you can use Google tag manager to traffic and click and fulfilled order, because it would be physically impossible for anyone else to sell your book through this site. The drop shipping option works best for me. I send you the order and money you handle the shipping. Alternatively, I could drop ship through Ingram. This would be the strategy I would use, in general, to fulfill book orders directly to readers, by passing Amazon. You'll make more money per book if I drop ship to you, but again their is the lack of willingness for reader to by from their won versus Amazon. I'm actually going to set up my website to fulfill orders orders directly. I will consider removing Amazon as an option if the direct sales justify it. If I practiced what I preached I would be like you Mel and boot them altogether, but the problem is too many of our author's books are only available through Amazon.

@Mel Hopkins to be clearer, I'm not saying Amazon is reproducing books and reselling them. I'm saying that their platform is used by others who do. For example, it is trivial and apparently legal for anyone to take a book in the public domain and sell it on Amazon. The problem is books, like music are easy to copy, so any book, including new ones, are bootlegged and sold on Amazon. Keep in mind you don't have to make you book available in digital format for it to be copied. You can just scan the book and published scanned copies. More sophisticated folks will run the scans through OCR software and republished a newly formatted version. Amazon makes the money off the transaction and the bootlegger incurres all the risk. In the old days, a company that did this sort of thing was put of of business. Remember Napster? A company like Amazon (with Kodi over Fire), and Google (download any song from Youtube), is Napster on steroids and covered in teflon. Because of Amazon and Google dominance, it is virtually impossible to run a book website as a business. I commend you for refusing to publish your books on Amazon Mel. If every author/publisher chose to do this, I can't image all the wealth that would be hared more evenly among the people that create the value. It floors me that any writer would post a thing on Facebook, for free, when Mark Z is making billions off your content. Bezos is on track to become the first person to be worth $100B-100 Billion dollars! Mel I recently added a book I saw on your website to your AALBC.com site: https://aalbc.com/books/bookinfo.php?isbn13=9light_attend I changed the way the site is designed to highlight went book are available for purchase directly from the author.

Check out the update for 2017. Unfortunately the outlook is pretty grim...

Back in March of 2011 I wrote a article attempting to raise awareness about the struggles Black Book Websites. This was in direct reaction to the unexpected and total beat down Google just gave us. as I described in this forum. I did not mention the abrupt and dramatic drop in AALBC.com's traffic from Google search because I did not yet understand that it was not my fault, and I was ashamed of my perceived failure. Again, I'd brought into the assumption that if you fail at SEO (search engine optimization) or SMM (social media Marketing) that the problem was with you. I understand today that this is not true and that excellent businesses are penalized by Google simply because they are Google's competition (this is essence of the $2.7B fine the EU levied against Google). The article, Black Book Websites Need Love Too argues about the importance of Black book websites. For over 15 years, I've maintained and shared list of other Black book websites I was a very labor intensive to publish the information because I had to look up the new information, resort the information on the webpage; it took a few hours. As a result, months would go by between updates. I was shocked when I noticed during the update I performed in March 2011 that 20% of the websites had gone away! I wrote; "... I feel it is time to emphasize why websites dedicated to Black books are just as important as physical stores. If these websites are taken for granted they too will disappear, and we will have lost another important platform for celebrating and showcasing books by and about people of African descent." The websites pictured in the graphic above were some of the most prominent Black book websites. Unfortunately my words did not seem to have much of impact. By October of 2015 I was prompted to post an article on this discussion forum, Black Book Websites Going, Going.... (Note: By 2015 I know Google subordinated my discussion forum posts to Blog posts in search engine ranking, but I wanted to leverage the power of my community. I was really very interested in working on removing our collective dependency on Google. Today, sadly, I know that goal was unrealistic, but I still have not given up--hence articles like this one to raise awareness). I updated the graphic from 4 years earlier and greyed out the all of the sites that had shut down. Fully 25% of the websites I'd been tracking had shut down including the majority of the most prominent ones I identifies 4 years earlier. Exasperated I wrote, "...I feel like I'm the only nut running around complaining. Turning into an old curmudgeon, bitching about the way things used to be... Of course I appreciate that I run one of these websites so I'm far more sensitive to this issue than most. But there are still readers out there right? Don't they miss these websites? I know I do." Today, because of the AALBC.com's upgrade, my list list of Black book websites is stored in a database and updates can actually be performed automatically, saving me hours of effort, and publishing the information in virtually realtime. I execute the process manually to check the output and look for bugs. When I ran the update yesterday (6/27/2017) I noticed that the list of sites was starting to grow thin because too many were failing to meet my minimal criteria for inclusion, which was to have an Alexa rank. Alexa (owned by Amazon), is an imperfect way to rank website. I say imperfect because unless you volunteer to give them your traffic data they can only estimate your site's traffic (I do not give them my traffic stats). I used Alexa long before Amazon purchased them to essentially capture the site that were essentially working hard enough to get the minimal amount of traffic to earn an Alexa ranking. I did not want to indiscriminately share every website the Alexa ranking also gave me an easy way to rank the websites. Previously (before 6/27/17) sites without an Alexa rank were excluded from my list. Because the list was starting to get short and because the additional exposure and link from AALBC.com might might these sites. I decided to remove the Alexa ranking restriction which resulting in the additional of more than 20 new sites to the webpage. SItes without an Alexa rank are assigned a rank of 30,000,000 (I think Alexa ranks on the top 30 million websites). I quickly discovered more than half of these newly added sites were no longer active! As far as I'm concerned we are in a crisis situation as far as our representation on the web. Now I know some people, new to the web, might say this can't be true look at the impact of "Black Twitter." If you know how to work social media you can bring attention to yourself. People who believe this have no clue what we've lost. If they believe Facebook pages are a better alternative to what had we've ve lost more culturally than I can explain... One day I hope to be able to write about how Black book websites and physical stores are thriving not just through the support from our community by through the support of those outside the community interested in learning and even supporting our culture. Check out the websites on my list, and consider placing an order from them. Sure you may need to pay a bit more, or wait a little longer to get the product than you would if you purchased it via Amazon, but you'll be making an investment in a businesses that support you, your culture and community. AALBC.com currently sells books through affiliate relationships; selling books whose orders are fulfilled by of all the major retailers, independents, and even directly through publishers and authors. AALBC.com generates commissions through most of these sales. So if you've discovered a book you think you like here please purchase it through our site. Authors, you must buy your books from indie booksellers (read this article). The more you support us the more we can (and would want) to support you. That's a no brainer right? In 2017 Black book website need lover more than ever.

Dude, Google can squash me at any moment and AALBC.com, I'm sorry to say, will just die. There will be no publicity or coverage, no bakes sales or crowd sourcing to raise money, it will just be over. You see people believe their failure to secure traffic has to do with them not creating valuable content. The biggest factor I'd argue Google. Webmasters have to jump through every hoop Google holds up. Miss one and you're done..done! I shared this graph with you before right? I share it because it is publically available, and while the data is not 100% accurate, it is very reflective of my relative traffic over time. It is pretty clever really how they were able to plot this chart without access to my traffic. Basically this company gathers search engine results (big data stuff), and are able to derive good estimates of traffic. In my case in January 1991 my traffic dropped >75% overnight! My google revenue dropped from more than $2,000 per month to less than $200. This was the result of a google algorithm update. Companies across a wide variety of industries were simply clobbered, including many bookstores who did not know what hit them. This was before Google started placing their books in front of search engine results for queries about books. This effectively made it impossible for a book site to obtain traffic. I've seen excellent book sites come and go, sites no one remembers. My site has recovered and this year will probably be a record year for page views, but Imagine if the site was able to growth without Google slap down. I'll be the first to admit however that the site is probably much better than it would have been were it not for me jumping through Google hoops. But just today I was updating my Black Book Site database and the results were sobering--Black book sites are dropping like flies! I wrote about this in a new conversation. Black book sites have two significant problems Google controls access to book sites in exactly the same why it is described in the video above Even if you do manage to rank in search and get visitors people will only by from Amazon

The following is a reaction I received via email. I actually met this respondent, Deborah Day, during the Sacramento Black Book Festival last month. She is a bookseller, publisher, and author. Hi Troy, This is a great article and I will post it on Facebook. You are so right. We as Independent Booksellers can compete against Amazon, when we really look at all the benefits we have to offer our customers. Knowing our market and community needs, can help us greatly provide the best offer, whether it's product, price, selection or delivery to "get the business". And our market footprint should be local, national and international. And since, there are only 80 owned black books stores in the U.S., there is no threatening competition among each other. My belief is that we need to do all we can to build and protect our markets. If it is our creativity that birthed the book and the business, then we should profit the most from that effort. Yes we can write, illustrate and produce our own books and tell our own stories, but the other important factor is that we must also control the distribution. This is why our Independent Bookstores are so important online and in our communities. We need to keep our eyes on the ball and not loose our grip on this market. It's not just Amazon's dominating presence and practices eroding our market share, but there are other undercurrents online that threaten our businesses that include hate cyber attacks and corruption. Now I am not totally against Amazon, because I buy books from them too, but only if I can't get a book from the publisher or a distributer, and I need a book quickly to complete an order. But, I didn't like it when Amazon started allowing resellers to undersell publishers with the same new or used book. Because, my book, "Mindful Messages", got stolen and bootlegged on Amazon and I lost money. Now I am seeing many black authors, bypassing Amazon and selling their books direct from their own websites. Which can be successfully done with lots of social media. Like someone said, "We are who we have been waiting for." And when we have the right conscious mind, we will seek each other out to do business with one another. And we will go out of our way if need be, to support one another in sustaining black businesses. And we will recognize the importance of the full circle of exponential economics and it's impact on empowering our communities. And then and only then will it be an ever continuing reality. Deborah Day Ashay by the Bay I'd heard about bootlegging up books for year, but Amazon has really created a major platform for selling knock off products, including books. Debirah said she wanted to sue, but Amazon was not helpful at all.

Wealthy white people don't care about this. The aspire to own the teams. We aspire the work for them. While the issue was raised as a racial one. It is really one of class (it always is). Poor white people locked out of factory jobs, farm jobs, and now the NBA. No one really cares. Jerry West clearly doesn't. This is why Trump is appealing to poor whites; he give voice to their rage,

The attorney Margrethe Vestager is my new hero. While 3 Billion dollars is chump change to Google. It is a step in the right direct and U.S. regulators really should be ashamed of themselves. They have been pathetically inadequate for failing to act on this at all. I guess that is because Google owns American politicians. The video below sums up the problem quite succinctly. Y'all know I've been complaining about for years.

Librarian of Congress (Carla Hayden) Names Tracy K. Smith Poet Laureate Press Contact: Jennifer Gavin (202) 707-1940 Public Contact: Robert Casper (202) 707-1308 Website: Poetry at the Library of Congress Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden today announced the appointment of Tracy K. Smith as the Library’s 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2017-2018. Smith will take up her duties in the fall, opening the Library’s annual literary season in September with a reading of her work in the Coolidge Auditorium. Smith, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and a professor at Princeton University, succeeds Juan Felipe Herrera as Poet Laureate. “It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching,” Hayden said. “Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and memory to life; calls on the power of literature as well as science, religion and pop culture. With directness and deftness, she contends with the heavens or plumbs our inner depths—all to better understand what makes us most human.” “I am profoundly honored,” Smith said. “As someone who has been sustained by poems and poets, I understand the powerful and necessary role poetry can play in sustaining a rich inner life and fostering a mindful, empathic and resourceful culture. I am eager to share the good news of poetry with readers and future readers across this marvelously diverse country.” Smith joins a long line of distinguished poets who have served in the position, including Juan Felipe Herrera, Charles Wright, Natasha Trethewey, Philip Levine, W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, Charles Simic, Donald Hall, Ted Kooser, Louise Glück, Billy Collins, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass and Rita Dove. The new Poet Laureate is the author of three books of poetry, including “Life on Mars” (2011), winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; “Duende” (2007), winner of the 2006 James Laughlin Award and the 2008 Essence Literary Award; and “The Body’s Question” (2003), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Smith is also the author of a memoir, “Ordinary Light” (2015), a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in nonfiction and selected as a notable book by the New York Times and the Washington Post. For her poetry, Smith has received a Rona Jaffe Writers Award and a Whiting Award. In 2014, the Academy of American Poets awarded her with the Academy Fellowship, given to one poet each year to recognize distinguished poetic achievement. In 2016, she won the 16th annual Robert Creeley Award and was awarded Columbia University’s Medal for Excellence. In the Pulitzer Prize citation for “Life on Mars,” judges lauded its “bold, skillful poems, taking readers into the universe and moving them to an authentic mix of joy and pain." Toi Derricotte, poet and Academy of American Poets chancellor, said “the surfaces of a Tracy K. Smith poem are beautiful and serene, but underneath, there is always a sense of an unknown vastness. Her poems take the risk of inviting us to imagine, as the poet does, what it is to travel in another person’s shoes.” Born in Falmouth, Massachusetts in 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California, Tracy K. Smith earned a B.A. in English and American literature and Afro-American studies from Harvard University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University. From 1997 to 1999, she was a Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University. Smith has taught at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York, at the University of Pittsburgh and at Columbia University. She is currently the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor in the Humanities and director of the creative writing program at Princeton University. Background of the Laureateship The Library of Congress Poetry and Literature Center is the home of the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, a position that has existed since 1937, when Archer M. Huntington endowed the Chair of Poetry at the Library. Since then, many of the nation’s most eminent poets have served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and, after the passage of Public Law 99-194 (Dec. 20, 1985), as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry—a position which the law states “is equivalent to that of Poet Laureate of the United States.” During his or her term, the Poet Laureate seeks to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry. The Library keeps to a minimum the specific duties required of the Poet Laureate, who opens the literary season in the fall and closes it in the spring. In recent years, Laureates have initiated poetry projects that broaden the audiences for poetry. For more information on the Poet Laureate and the Poetry and Literature Center, visit loc.gov/poetry/. Consultants in Poetry and Poets Laureate Consultants in Poetry and their terms of service can be found at loc.gov/poetry/laureate-2011-present.html. To learn more about Poet Laureate projects, visit loc.gov/poetry/laureate-projects.html. The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United States—and extensive materials from around the world—both on site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. Explore collections, reference services and other programs and plan a visit at loc.gov, access the official site for U.S. federal legislative information at congress.gov, and register creative works of authorship at copyright.gov. ### The other Black “Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry” (the official title) were Rita Dove (1993–1995, 1999–2000), Natasha Trethewey (2012–2014), Gwendolyn Brooks (1985–1986), and Robert Hayden (1976–1978).

No, of course not. Whites are focused on things that matter more, getting educated, building and maintaining wealth. They leave the entertaining to Negros and foreigners. Have you attended a professional basketball game lately. it is a sea of whiteness. Especially in the seats where you can actually see the game. The owners, who are virtually all white American men, are interested in winning and they take the best players. They don't care what color they are or where they are from. Professional athletics is perhaps only place in America, where talent matters most. Unfortunately professional athletics, entertainment in general, is viewed by Black people as the best way to become wealthy. A poor kid from the Dominican Republic and come here and play baseball--he doesn't even have to be able to speak English--and become a millionaire. We used to have a lot of Black Americans playing baseball. Why not inquire about a quota for Black baseball, Ice Hockey, or Tennis Players? Don't worry white folks will be fine, even when the NBA has nothing but foreign players in it.