Troy

Luvvie Ajay has a new book coming out in September, it should be pretty successful, as Ajay is a very popular blogger. I was searching youtube for a good video of her for her webpage. I found a really good video to use, but I also found the video below where Luvvie describes the "power" Black women have on Twitter. I hear about the power Black women supposedly have on Twitter all the time. The reality is that this so called power is a myth, because power comes from ownership, and Black women don't own Twitter. In fact, if Black women are truly the dominant users of Twitter; then they are being exploited because they are not being paid anything in exchange for the wealth the create for Twitter Inc.

Well Malveaux is apparently calling into question Obama's community "organizing" credentials. I'm sure she understands what the term means, I posted this because Obama's community organizing background in Chicago is often cited as evidence of is support of and allegiance to the Black community. The idea that it all might be spin to make him a favorable candidate should come as a surprise, but it doesn't--at least not to me..

“After a sabotaged experiment leaves him with super strength and unbreakable skin, Luke Cage (Mike Colter) becomes a fugitive who attempts to rebuild his life in modern day Harlem, New York City. But soon he is pulled out of the shadows and must fight a battle for the heart of his city – forcing him to confront a past he had tried to bury.” I think the bald cut and hoodie, rather than the golden headband and 'fro, brings a nice contemporary touch to Luke Cage. In addition to cleaning of the street of Harlem, maybe Cage will go after rogue cops hell bend on shooting similarly garbed brothers.... that be fun. The first issue was published by Marvel Comics in June of 1972 and featured the cover art of John Romita, Sr. I purchased this comic and maybe the next 20 or so until I lost interest in comic books over 40 years ago. My copy is not in as goo condition as the version depicted here, but it is still just as valuable to me. Folks on Ebay are now selling this issue for as much as $1,800, I guess the value increased as a result of the film.

I ran into Grant Harper Reid at the Harlem Book fair last Saturday. A couple of years ago we published, a review of his book Rythm for Sale. I asked him to link to his page on AALBC.com and he did it immediately--from his homepage (screen shot below). I often lament the fact that reciprocal links (I link to your website and you link to mine) is a thing of the past--replaced by a drive to gather as many fans, followers, and likes on social media. I've always asserted this change in our collective behavior has weakened mission driven independent sites and strengthened revenue driven corporate sites. As the handful of massive sites gain strength and indie die off, the world web web becomes a less interesting place. But I sense the tide is changing as authors like Grant are much more willing to link to something other than Amazon and social media sites. Author Jewell Parker Rhodes supports and links to the bookseller Indiebound in her campaigns with us. Rhodes goes out her way to support indie platforms... There is hope for us after all

Hi Kida, create an account and you'll be able to share images about your book.

Time will tell, but if history teaches us anything, readers will not benefit... finger crossed nonetheless.

In an interview with our very own Kam Williams, Dr. Julianne Malveaux said Obama's image as a community organizer in Chicago might be more a “manufactured mythology” than reality. Read the detail in her book. Are We Better Off? Race, Obama and Public Policy

Since the book was voted in the Top Ten of Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century I have to, at the very least include it on the website. Please post a link to a website where I may review all of these titles.

@Pioneer1, I agree with most of what you wrote, but I'm not sure most people who go into the law enforcement can truly appreciate what the job entails until they actually on the job; but this is probably true for many jobs. I think cops are respected among their peers, because as you wrote a job paying 40 or 50 thousand a year with full benefits is considered a "good job" to most Black people--plus they get to carry a gun... Now folks in the arts crowd might feel different about cops--even if we make less money and have no benefits (but class is more than about income, right?). And of course highly paid and wealthy folks would look down on cops, but they look down on everyone. However, both of these groups are relatively small compared the masses of people who revere cops or would love to be in a position to be a cop. So I would not expect a cop to resign--especially if they have some years in. In NYC after 20 years they get a pension that pays a livable wage for the rest of their lives; some on the job frustration is not enough for anyone to give that up.

No worries @Sheryl. I have no expectation of an immediate response, and conversations here can be resurrected even years later I hope your health continues to improve, and thanks for the kind words.

Well you knew I would get a kick out of the Chris Of course this does not come as a surprise to me. You see, I used to get a lot of traffic from other indie sites before they all, effectively, dried up. I get traffic from your site as well. This is why I'm always telling folks to link to each other--because it works. You recall the post about the traffic I send to the Harlem Book Fair's site. Large and small sites benefit from this strategy; it is free to do it; and it scales. The problem is getting authors to simply take advantage of our collective strength. This is even harder than getting authors to use an Amazon affiliate code--seriously.

Yes, and the real benefit of YouTube is the service they provide for videos including embedding. In the early days hosting your own videos was expensive, and YouTube made it possible to share videos on your website and with others. Today hosting videos is cheap, but youtube gets you videos seen by more people that hosting them on your site alone. YouTube adds value to the WWW, where most other social media platforms attempt to horde and extract value from the WWW.

I'll share with you my YouTube revenue in another post. You can use it for comparison purposes. Speaking about Facebook, check this out: On Saturday and Sunday I got a combined total of over 8,200 visitors from Facebook. The visitors looked at over 19,000 pages. In case you are wondering, that is a lot more than normal. My initial reaction was that this is bogus, but after looking at the data, it looks like the traffic is legit. The crazy thing is that I did not even use Facebook on Saturday and did not post a link until late Sunday. Plus July is historically the worst month of the year for traffic and Saturday is usually the worst day of the week. But this may be my best July ever for traffic. Something changed at Facebook. Saturdays surge in referral traffic from Facebook, and the increase in referral traffic over the first 1/2 of the year, took place despite me dramatically reducing my activity on the platform. I wonder if Facebook is showing popular content in an effort to boost internal engagement? I dunno, but I'll enjoy it while it lasts... @CDBurns, I meant to ask do you like the scrolling that I added to your Blog feed or do you prefer it to be static?

I started adding ads to my YouTube videos exactly 4 years ago. During that time, my videos have received 301,400 views (just over 200 views a day). My channel has $675.37 during that time or about $2.20 for every 1,000 times my videos are viewed. There are many producers on YouTube getting this many views every few hours. Those "YouTubers" also can generate revenue from produce placement and other forms of sponsorship. A popular channel can generate a ton of revenue. My YouTube revenue is not much, but it is enough to cover my web hosting, and is a LOT more than I'm getting paid by any other social media platforms, who want you to pay THEM for the privilege of contributing content

@CDBurns, you can't argue with results, even if they appear counterintuitive. I'm still tweaking the web pages, but I have decided to call them "Enhanced Author Profiles." I'm still working on the pricing and features. Dr. Elizabeth Nunez is an author who uses her AALBC.com page as her primary web prescence: http://aalbc.com/authors/home.php?author_name=Elizabeth+Nunez I added an events calendar to your page. For authors with a bunch of events this is a cool feature. They can also manage their own calendars. I also added her press kit. I will probably add a slide-show of photos as well as a high resolution image for event organizers I think securing the domain is still a good idea because the underlying URL is a mouthful. It is just easier to say "elizabethnunez.com," but I will get rid of the masking so that the icon shows in the browser window I'm still thinking about the "tweet/facebook/boost." This is important because authors need help in effectively advertising their books. AALBC.com could be a part of a broader mix that might include, ad words, social media, Amazon, and other indie related sites with high traffic.

The winner were announced during the fair: http://aalbc.com/books/pw-award-winning-books.php?year=2016 I was unable to attend the actual awards ceremony but I got a chance to meet a couple of the finalists. Geri Spencer Hunter Saharra K. Sandhu

{sigh} "... the pleasantries of conversation and personal interaction continue to diminish..." A great conversation was tough even before the smartphone revolution, but it seems virtually impossible today. Conversation is replaced by groups of people scrolling through their social media feeds until they find something interesting to share. The cell phone is the focus, rather than the people in the room. For a while the WWW compensated by allowing people to converse that would never meet otherwise (waving at @Cynique). But the WWW too been adversely impact from the rise of mobile technology. Even Facebook is hampered by the rise of people people sharing memes and videos over and over on mobile devises rather than contributing directly to the conversation... For me, as I get older what seems more remarkable is how quickly the seasons seem to change. It also seems as though the summers were much hotter when I was younger, but I think that may have to do with the lack of air conditioning growing up :-) Speaking of conversation I'm going to head down and talk to some folks at the Harlem Book Fair, afterward I'll have a few friends over, share a few beers and not have to worry about anyone with their heads buried in the their "stupidphone."

We don't control the narrative and suffer as a result. I pretty much ignore mainstream media. I rather be ignorant than have my head filled with lies. I'll read about this stuff later, when the truth is available.

Hi @Melica Niccole, welcome to the forums. I just added the children's book fair to our events calendar: http://aalbc.it/adckid

Hi Danielle thanks for sharing information about your book. People who frequent the website will probably think, and rightfully so, that I sound like a broken record, but I strongly encourage all authors to use an Amazon affiliate code when sending people to Amazon to buy their books. Learn why by reading point #3 on this article. I also encourage authors to post their book covers as well.

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) reported the following: Washington, DC; July 11, 2016 – The U.S. book and journal publishing industry generated $27.78 billion in net revenue for 2015, representing 2.71 billion in units (volume), according to the Association of American Publishers (AAP) StatShot Annual survey. Revenues and unit volume were essentially flat with a decrease of 0.6% from $27.96 billion in revenue from 2014, and a 0.5% increase in units from 2.70 billion units in 2014 (Read the entire press release). The AAP also reports that eBooks sales are down from last year. This does not surprise me as ebooks sales peaked and leveled off more than a year ago. Even though I was a very early adopter and promoter of ebook technology, I still prefer a physical books. Interestingly, coloring books are major factor in book sales. FYI: the "Other" category includes calendars, maps, notebooks, etc.

OK got you @CDBurns. Again that type of service makes sense. I just need to think about pricing for promotion of these internal websites. I made a few more changes/enhancements; I updated all of your individual book pages to include your side bar widgets: Here is an example book page: http://aalbc.com/books/home.php?isbn13=9781502461759 I added the favicon (the image of you that appears in the browser tab to all of your pages. I removed the masking with your domain name. In other words; when someone browses to http://christopherdburns.com, they are actually sent to: http://aalbc.com/authors/home.php?author_name=Christopher+D.+Burns. Previously I maintained http://christopherdburns.com in the browser's address bar. Doing this might seem advantageous initially, but it has a few downsides; it prevented me from using the favicon; and the URL in the browser window never changed, which prevented visitors from hyper linking directly to any of your pages. So I removed masking. Here is an author where I still have the masking in place: http://elizabethnunez.com/ let me know what you think (note: there is no image on the browser tab). I added one house ad near the bottom of the side bar. I also plan to give authors the ability to add their own ads with tracking (using my ad server). I think I'm ready to roll out the service. I've already bounced the idea off a couple of authors who don't have websites and their is define interest

DuckDuckGo won't help very much in terms search engine marketing (Google still controls that), but they will certainly help you discover more of what is great about the web.

The following observation from the linked article was interesting: "Rates of violent crime in cities did not make it any more or less likely for police departments to kill people. For example, Buffalo and Newark police departments had low rates of police violence despite high crime rates while Spokane and Bakersfield had relatively low crime rates and high rates of police violence." I'm sure some would argue the rate of police violence is why homicides are low in Spokane and high in Newark.... Man's inhumanity to one another knows no bounds. Welcome to the forums @Ray Hollar-Gregory

Earlier this year we killed a project we worked on for over two years called the Power List. It was an attempt to fill in the void left when Essence Magazine abandoned their bestsellers list almost a decade ago. Unfortunately, the Power List was never embraced enough to make it worth the effort to continue producing. After I started the AALBC.com website upgrade, allocating resources to maintaining the Power List, was impossible to justify. Especially when you consider that I'm expanding AALBC.com's Bestsellers list The really interesting thing is that people still cite the Essence's list even though the list has been defunct for years. I received a galley in the mail and the publisher boasted that the author was a "#1 Essence bestseller." I'm saying to myself, "Well sheesh, I guess this authors must not have accomplished anything lately..." Even at it's prime the Essence's list and it's methodology wasn't anything to write home about. Once Time, purchased the magazine Essence's coverage of books suffered, skewing heavily toward the most popular and celebrity driven titles. It was not long before the bestsellers list was abandoned. After Essence ditched the Black bookseller at their music festival, I cancelled my subscription and have not really thought about them very much since. Still, the Essence brand carried a lot more clout and their bestsellers list definitely gained much more traction that the Power List ever did, and Black books and authors benefited as a result--which is all I really cared about. I hoped the Power List would recreated that benefit. But hey the AALBC.com list has been around 18 years and is getting stronger each period. The more authors who boast about making AALBC.com's bestsellers list the more we all benefit.