Troy

The Top 100 Publisher Imprints Selling Black Books It is really interesting to me to look at this report. There is a lot of information in here, and as I continue with the website upgrade I'll continue to share even more information and put some of this data in context. But the main benefit is that as I compile book club reading lists, bestseller lists, awards, reviews and more I'll be even better able to identify quality books readers will enjoy I'm just getting started...

Thanks Bridgette, but it is not likely I'll get a chance to read the whole book. As you might image, I get books everyday so it is no reflection on your work. I will however definitely look at it and certainly recommend it to readers looking for these types of books. I can also assure you the book will not go to waste.

My mother always talked about this even when I was a kid. She told me no matter what i do never let them put anything in your hand. She also said we would not recognize the seasons... Congrats on the book @Author Bridgette L Collins

More than 2,400 authors profiled, as AALBC.com website upgrade continues. When I first started AALBC.com website upgrade I hoped to have everything completed by March to coincide with our 18th anniversary, but as I designed and implemented the newly designed content management system, I finding I'm introducing far more content than I'm migrating. So the whole upgrade will probably take a year to complete. For you project managers out there this is classic case scope creep, but it all good as I'm doing things with the site I could not have imaged when I started. I'm also discovering tons of great writers and books.

Cynique I agree. I'm sure Pioneer has heard of the Maury Show and the white family dysfunction that is paraded in continuous loop. ,The distinction I was trying to make was that even white privilege has a component of class, which we tend to overlook. I think the kid in Sandford got off because he was rich, sure being white helped but his class mattered most. The judge could not put him away because he saw himself.

Hi Mel, I'm sure I see the same thing you see. Since they copied the page completely along with the code, I'm able to prevent them from displaying the content on their website by preventing that specific rogue domain from displaying content served from my website. I'm afraid if I got rid of too much Amazon would not have enough to go on.

My money was, literally, on Cleveland :-)

"...the problem is being a good husband" LOL Amen to that Brother! Seriously I can one be a good father while being a poor husband? So can I conclude, based upon what you wrote that you do not consider Christianity to be a "Good" religion? Pioneer I don't think you can call for the implementation of rites of passage and freedom at the same time. Rites of passages require that you buy into a hold system of rules or behavioral norms that are adopted and enforce before you can be called a adult. What happens when you disagree with the rules? You see what I mean? If you want a well behaved society where people don;t make babies they can;t take care of you have to give up on the fantasy of complete freedom. Cynique I think Pioneer has a point when he talks about the differences between white kids and Black ones, but I think he is mixing class with race. Think about the rich, white, Stanford University athlete that recently raped an incapacitated girl behind a dumpster. He essentially got a pass. You and I both know a Black boy (of any class) would have been buried beneath the jail. If it was a poor white guy from the nearest trailer park (which I'd image would have to be pretty far from Stanford's campus), he would be doing serious time too. Rich white boys operate in a different world than everyone else.

Actually the site is still up; I inadvertently picked up the period when creating the hyperlink. Here is the correct URL http://noturmomsfish.com/ At this point the site is serving my ads with my ad code, so any revenue should flow to me, but again that is for right now. Tomorrow the site could serve malware and victims might assume it is me. Again I don't really know what the ultimate motives of these people are, but it can't be good. Another problem is that I have linked to the domain and have visited the site several times. Lets assume I had not taken the actions of reporting the site to Amazon and Google, and that this was replicated against hundreds or thousands of other domains; this could be a great to generate traffic and backlinks to a new domain. I've seen similar scheme work. Those affiliate sites only work for the people selling them and they definitely degrade the web, fortunately Google deals with these sites quite effectively.

I couple of days ago I noticed a newly created domain has copied my site: http://aalbc.com. The offending site, created last week, is http://noturmomsfish.com. I noticed this because it is generating a large number of requests for my ads. Some may argue that this is a good thing because my content and ads are being is being displayed in more places and I'm generating more ad views which means more money. Actually this is the exact opposite of good. On may 18th one page on this site generated over 17,000 ad views. This type of activity, left unchecked could get me dropped from Google's Advertising network, which would materially impact my business. Besides, I can't have another site spoofing my content; this is bad for branding, it is terrible for SEO, besides I have no idea what the ultimate intentions are of the people who set this up, but I'm pretty confident they are not good. The software developer for my ad server Renegade Internet provided these tips. I'm sharing them here because the World Wide Web is like the Wild Wild West there are no rules that are not unbroken and there is no one responsible for ensure people work together. This is why I'm always writing about the importance of working together. This kind of thing happens all of the time, to varying degrees. In fact a few years ago a very large site wn.com apparent business model was to copy content from other website and serve a ton of ads. They only copied excerpts and even linked back to the source, but they did not generate their own content. This site copied countless pages of content from my site. The worse part was that they were beating me in search results on my own content! Which cost me real money for a many months. Ultimately after getting beat up by webmasters like myself Google updated their algorithm and essentially put these site types of sites out of business, but at the same time I also believe they hurt Black newspaper sites because they all rely heavily on wire services that all the other uses which makes these sites carbon copies of each other. But again I digress... So how do I stop this from happening? Contact the website owner Sent them a cease and desist letter. You can usually find the website's owner by doing a whois lookup. In my case the web owner has hidden their contact information privacy protected, (no surprise there) Contact hosting company and asked them to take down the site because it was hosting stolen/copyrighted material. In my case the web hist is Amazon. Now this is surprising because I full expected a non-american company. A company like Amazon is very likely to take care of matters like they provide a form for reporting abusive website they host: https://aws.amazon.com/forms/report-abuse Report the offending site to Google and request that they remove this site from their index. Google provides information on how to report malicious websites here: https://support.google.com/legal/answer/3110420?rd=1 In my case the site is too new to have been indexed by Google's search engines. But I'll report them nonetheless and hopefully preempt and potential damages. I also stopped my advertisements from being displayed on bogus domain to prevent my website from running afould of Google Advertising Network policies. There are no guarantees here and I'll let you know how I make out.

Pioneer when you were "very religious" your religion did not mandate abstinence from sex outside of marriage? I hate to read about the bad experiences some of the men you know have had been fathers. Do you think there should be a law against people bring children into the world if they are not financially independent themselves? @Pioneer1, it is probably a good time for you to adopt; seems like you'd be a very decent father.

Well to be clear while I recognize how lists attract visitors; I'm not interested in building list solely for that reason, and I'm definitely not interested in creating lists for the sake of having people click through multiple pages to see each item on a list--I hate sites that do that. (I'm not suggesting that you were saying this Chris, I'm clarify this for other readers who may not know this) I use list in the in the content of aggregating information about books. For example take a look at the page for Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming, you'll see that the book has been recognized in a variety of ways, bestsellers lists, awards, book club reading lists I think this is where the real value lies it helps readers find good books. I actually was not familiar with UPROXX until now. Honestly I'm not interested in replicating their model--though I can see why it would be much more lucrative than what I'm doing. You'll notice the site is much harder to navigate due to the prominence and positioning of ads.

Post the video here when you get a chance Chris. I still have not had a chance to watch the video from the Uber conversation, maybe I grab a notebook and watch these in one shot. I forgot to mention the other reason I'm hopeful is that more and more people are coming to this conclusion on their own, and I have seen immediate benefits; we just have not reached a tipping point. I'd image the situation is similar in the Sneaker and Music business huh? How do you keep track of some many different industries?

This morning I was researching the 2016 Wheatley Book Awards on the Harlem Book Fair’s website and saw a big “Web-Stat Traffic Analysis” button at the bottom of the page, intrigued, I checked it out. The chart above shows the top 10 sources of traffic to the Harlem Book Fair’s website. As you can see AALBC.com has provided the Harlem Book Fair with almost 7% of all of their traffic for 2016, more than all of their social media combined. The chart shows that, on average, I’m sending just under 3 visitors a day to their site. That might not sound like a lot, but if AALBC.com disappeared today, the Harlem Book Fair site would immediately lose 7% of their traffic. This is EXACTLY why are our websites struggle. Multiply this effect across all of the other Black book sites that have closed and previously sent traffic to the Harlem Book Fair’s site, and it becomes clear how this lost traffic adds up. The refferal traffic lost to sites like The Harlem Book and AALBC.com has been significant. Yesterday, I shared a graph that shows how my referral traffic has dropped from 12% in 2014 to 3% in 2016. But it gets worse... It is not just that fact that we have FEWER Black websites who would potentially link to our sites. The ones that remain simply do not link to each other as much as they used to. I noticed this trend a few years ago and have written about it to the point of exhaustion. Many of the these sites, particularly the larger ones, have brought into the myth propagated by corporations that linking other websites is bad for one’s website. For course the alternative solution these corporations have offered is to actively participate and buy advertising on their platforms—otherwise known as social media marketing. Today virtually all of the sites, including the Harlem Book Fair’s site, that have stopped linking to other Black sites now, enthusiastically, link to social media sites. I have failed to see a single instance where, and no one has ever demonstrated that, the traffic lost from referrals from other websites has been made up by social media. Unfortunately this point fails to resonate with people because; they have completely bought into the social media hype, they have no historical perspective from which to draw, or they have simply not looked at their own web site’s traffic over time. It is also worth pointing out that the exchange of links between the Harlem Book Fair’s site and AALBC.com is not an equal exchange on any level: AALBC.com has gotten more visitors, in one day, than the Harlem Book Fair has gotten all year. The benefit is derived when all sites, large and small, are engaged in the activity of linking to each other. If that was not depressing enough... Why did I stop covering the Harlem Book Fair’s activities? Honestly, it is because of a lack of reciprocation. If you run a search for AALBC.com on the Harlem Book Fair’s website you get NOTHING in return. However run a search for the Harlem Book Fair on AALBC.com and you get over 400 results! When I attend the Harlem Book Fair, shoot video, post the award winning books, and much more; this takes time, money, and energy. I did this because I enjoyed the fair and it provided great content for the website. But there many other events I can enjoy and generate content from AND receive the needed reciprocation—a simple link to my site will do. In today’s environment I have to be more conscious and strategic about the events I choose to invest my time in. Finally there is hope! Linking to other websites works adds value to your website. I’m not saying link to any site without discretion. What I’m saying is don’t let some corporation stop you from linking to another website, because you think it will hurt your search engine rankings or will send visitors away from your site. When someone visits AALBC.com and discovers another website they enjoy; I have provided a valueable service and most likely earned a repeat visitor. As a result, I have always linked to other sites I think are valuable—even if they never return the favor. In the case of the Harlem Book Fair, I used to share information on the Wheatley Awards, but stopped in 2013; my efforts were better directed to other activities. However, my new website design allows me to more easily add lists of books, so I decided to begin sharing the Wheatley Awards again. The value proposition in providing information about these award winning books to my visitors is worth the lack of reciprocation. Plus the web would be a less rich place if the Harlem Book Fair’s site went away or migrated to Facebook. Please link to other sites you find valuable, not just because it makes the World Wide Web a better experience, but because it will make your site more valuable which is critical to your site’s survival over the long term.

The problem with the so called Bullssit interviws that Obama does with comedians is that they will NEVER ask a tough questions; certainly nothing of importance to the African-American community. It may be smugness, considering his preference for Ivy League educated cabinet member, but it could be part of a brilliant strategy to remain above reproach, for the Black masses have no interest in challenging Obama on any level. Indeed, anyone who does is vilified. Instead of amping up Jimmy Fallon's ratings and having his ego stroked, Obama could have granted The Chicago Defender preferred access which would have bolstered the paper's profile and instead of struggling it could have grown as a direct result of Obama's support. A small price to pay consider the support the paper supplied candidate Obama. While I did not know about Ebony, the writing was on the wall for for sometime. I'm glad they found a buyer sparing us the pain of witnessing a their slow death. I have not hope that the publication will be of relevance to the Black community--indeed when was it last? On a brighter note I did learn about a Black owned newspaper today out of St Louis, called, The St. Louis Evening Whirl and has been around, family owned for almost 80 years!

Interestingly it is not just the Black media Obama blowing off These are quotes from a Washington Post article. “Remarkably, Post news reporters haven’t been able to interview the president since late 2009. Think about that. The Post is, after all, perhaps the leading news outlet on national government and politics, with no in-depth, on-the-record access to the president of the United States for almost all of his two terms.” “After early promises to be the most transparent administration in history, this has been one of the most secretive. And in certain ways, one of the most elusive. It’s also been one of the most punitive toward whistleblowers and leakers who want to bring light to wrongdoing they have observed from inside powerful institutions.” I know die-hard Obama supports ain't tryin' to hear any of this, but this stuff is important. We can't be surprised when people are so easily radicalized against the United States, when our own country won't even tell us how many civilians are being killed in the bazillion drone strikes we execute.

Thanks @CDBurns This discussion forum, in general, is not a major driver of traffic to his site. I think it should be, and could be, but for now social media owns that space. That said, two popular pages on this site for May (shown below) are here on the forums. Over 1,500 people who visited "The 10 Best Damn Websites Period" post and spent on average 6 minutes of the page. Even though there is not much conversation on these pages they are read frequently. The overall driver to the site is content related to books. The lists are very popular including the various bestsellers lists, children book lists, etc. These pages are far more popular than anything on the discussion forums. The articles I've written about the clousre of bookstores are very popular: http://aalbc.com/blog/index.php/2014/03/31/54-black-owned-bookstores-remain-america/index.html Even through this article was written over two years ago, it consistently bring at least a thousand readers a month often many more. But other sites link to this article and as discussed referral traffic is a key to our collective survival, though it is a tool few of us use.

Marc, man I guess you are right. But there is no denying that Obama courted the Black media initially; even appearing at the NNPA conference. Did you read his quote above? It seems much of the media was focused on Obama's marginalization of Tavis Smiley, when in reality he was indeed marginalizing the Black establishment, choosing to curry favor with those who appealed to the masses the Al Sharptons and Tom Joyners, people who were never, ever gonna hold Obama accountable. Several in the Black media, I'm talking about professional journalists, have already told me Obama has been the least transparent president they have dealt with! Why these very same newspapers don't write articles about this an explain way is beyond me. Perhaps they are too afraid to anger the few readers thay have left, or ever wors,e bear the brunt of Obama wrath.

I'm not sure if the graph on the right is legible, but it depicts the source of AALBC.com's traffic for the three month periods, May 2016, May 2015, and May 2014. For each of these periods more than 90% of my traffic comes from three sources Organic Search (visitors who arrive at the site as a result of a query on a search engine), Direct Traffic (visitor entering a URL directly or clicking a bookmark), and Referral Traffic from other websites. I picked May because it is a typical month, not the busiest month, usually February (Black History) and November (holiday shopping), nor the slowest month usually July (vacation time). While I'm not sharing my specific numbers, just percentages, the information should still be useful. AALBC.com's Website traffic has also steadily increased and improved on virtually every single metric. The website's upgrade which has been ongoing for the past 6 month, and will probably take a year to complete, has resulted in an anticipated improvement in engagement, based upon the average number of pages views, per visit. The number of pages viewed per visit more than doubled since 2014. This is on top of an increase in the number of overall visitors which continues to grow each year; up 108% from 2013, 80% from 2014, and 68% from 2015 for the month of May. Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, etc) has held steady at roughly 3% the past year I've greatly reduced the amount of time I spend engaging directly on social media--limiting my activity to posting links usually directly from the page I'm sharing, without visiting the social media site. So it is good to see that a tremendous reduction of time spent on social media has had no adverse impact on the traffic generated from social media. In fact, because website traffic is up overall that 3% actually an increase in visitors (all organic) from social media during the periods measured. The vast majority of social media referral come from Facebook, Twitter is a distant 2nd and all the others including Google+ and Pinterest are negligible sources of traffic to AALBC.com Referral traffic (visitors directed by hyperlink on other sites), as a function of percent of total traffic has declined steadily over the past three years dropping from approximately 12% to 3% of overall traffic. Referral traffic tends to be the highest quality traffic, visitors referred from other sites tend to stay on the site longer and view more websites than any other source. Sadly, the decline of referral traffic is due to a few reasons; (1) a decrease in the number of websites that historically linked to AALBC.com; (2) the trend of larger sites not to link to other websites; and (3) a trend toward Facebook away from standalone websites as one primary web presence. All of these problems feed on each other making the others worse. I've actually invested years trying to change this trend; obviously with little impact. All I can do is continue to link to other websites and continue to fight, because as referral traffic dries up, we all becoming increasingly dependent upon corporate website for traffic—which comes at a much higher cost. I'm sharing this information to potentially help other webmasters by giving them another website to which they can compare their stats and ideally, figure out ways to improve their traffic.

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Actual journalists have been saying the worst "since 911," or the "worst mass shooting," or some other language which is accurate, while at the same time sufficiently sensational to draw in viewers. In the world of social media where people are sloppy with language, ignorant of history, have an agenda, or are Trump supporters, pointing our McVey as if anyone has forgotten about him would be necessary. Memes like this and social media where these things proliferate never capture the nuance or complexity of any situation. They are designed to illicit an emotional reaction. Of course there have been countless atrocities perpetrated on U.S. soil. Some make the shooting in Orlando look like a garden party. Which sadly makes it "just another day in the USA."

Hi Kianna, Is there a website for this event? I would like to add it to our list of event: http://aalbc.com/events/ but I need a website (as oppossed to just the evenbrite page). Thanks!

Thanks man I will read this and get back to you. Just letting you know I saw the post.

Pioneer the operative word is culture. I used "Black" because it is what people are used to. The same culture has been called Afro-American, African-America, Negro. We also know the culture is not defined by skin color (assuming that is the criteria you use to define someone's race). Roping this conversation back to the original subject: Perhaps Obama feels no allegiance to the Black press, and has no problem ignoring it, because he is not "Black" culturally. Given who raised him, where he was raised and how he was raised, this would be perfectly natural. But even that does not explain, at least to my satisfaction, why Obama would blow off his biggest supporters. Maybe he lumps the Black press in with Tavis Smiley and Cornel West?

LOL. A regular wiseguy eh? I'll continue to assert that race is an artificial construct developed diminish our humanity. Keep in mind @Pioneer1 there is not such thing as race there is indeed a Black culture. Needless to say, I recognize we live in America where the vast majority of people won't let go of the fiction of race, so I'm forced to deal with the negative consequences of nonsense as a so called "Black man." So while our culture, or "race" for those stuck in the 19th century, is under constant assault, I'm inclined to defend myself. When the 1st Black President actively choose to ignore the Black press I'm offended. Check out the statement made by Obama in 2007 when he was courting the Black vote: Naming three Chicago black newspapers —the Defender, the Crusader and the Citizen — Obama said that when he served in the Illinois legislature, those papers would cover issues he was working on that the mainstream press would not. "My attitude is that if you were covering me when nobody wanted to cover me, then they should cover me when everybody wants to cover me. That attitude will continue when I'm in the White House," Obama said. Now can someone explain to me why Obama has not given a Black newspaper an interview? Obama gave a white guy, in his garage, an interview for Christ's Sake!? You may read the full report of then Senator Obama's appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Las Vegas in 2007 on Richard Prince's Journal-isms™ at the Maynard Institute.