Troy

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.

Cool I will quote you :-) @CDBurns I'll update your individual book pages with the same widgets when I get a chance. Once that is done, I'll probably roll out the service. Well if you are talking about Facebook or Twitter promotion you can do that on your own as if it was your own website. The benefit however is that I can help you measure relative effectiveness of those promotions.

@CDBurns I figured out what to do with that extra space :-) Check out the revised page: http://www.christopherdburns.com/ and let me know what you think. For authors taking advantage of this service I've swapped out all the advertisements and replaced them with widgets. Take a look at my profile page for an example: A calendar widget (I'm using Google's calendar, but any embeddable version is supported) RSS Feed Widget (I'm pulling in my Blog) Facebook Widget Twitter Widget Related Content from AALBC.com Chris on your page you have everything by the calendar, if you want me to add a calendar let me know. My thinking it is that authors who do a bunch of events or who are on tour can benefit most from this. For authors who are active on social media, this is a way for them to capture some of the benefit their activity on their own platform. I can even create an ad unit such that the authors can monetize their pages if they liked. I plan to update the links for the book pages, so that they have the widgets instead of the advertisements. The real benefit to the author, and AALBC.com is that their website will get more traffic than if it was unaffiliated wiht AALBC.com and if the author does any promotion of their own site AALBC.com can benefit too. Win-Win! I'm almost ready to roll service out, so I'm still open to ideas and suggestions.

Sure Pioneer they way we look is indeed a factor of how we are treated; gender, height, beauty, race, weight, etc are all factors. You can say that Obama is treated like other Black folks because he is "black," but do you think a dumb, dark skinned, short, fat, Brother would navigate the world the same ease as Barack has simply because both are Black? Again, I assert Barack's upbringing, innate ability, ambition, and even phenotype, in combination is not typical of anyone, certainly not your garden variety African American. Either way, nothing in President Obama's background has predisposed him to doing anything more for Black people than any white politician.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that there just simply are not that many smart, conscientious, and righteous people. We all want police officers with all of these qualifications; but where are they going to come from? Cops are asked to put their lives on the line, work crazy hours, and deal with the worst of humanity all for a relatively low wage. It is simply unrealistic for us to expect exemplary behavior from all of them at all times What surprises me is that we don't have more low life racist cops doing evil things. If you want cops to behave better you really have to compensate these professionals accordingly. Cops as have to be treated professionally by their superiors. Cops in my neighborhood seems to be under a great deal of pressure to give out tickets. This is stressful for both the community and the police officers. Of course this increases the number of confrontations and the likelihood another brother gets killed. Usually the extra, and unnecessary, pressure cops are put under is political in origin.

The bestselling books for May and June of 2016 is a interesting mix of books published by major and indie publishers, newly published titles and classic books.

Interesting, I was looking at the thumbnail pic from the perspective of how it appears on the page. If you changed both the title and the thumbnail at the same time it would be tough to determine which one had the greatest impact on views. But I see you are already experimenting and evaluating (I must have forgotten who I was talking to ). As far as a plan for promotion drop me an email with your budget (monthly spend and duration), that will give me an idea of what I have to work with. I can even potentially do some off site promotion as well. Yes I agree the website upgrade has had a lot to do with improved engagement from Facebook. Visitors from Facebook also tended t be more engaged with the website that even visitors arrive via organic search. What is even more interesting, and I'll write about this in the article, is that while visitors from other social platforms has also increased, the relative increase from Facebook completely eclipses the other social platforms and is 88% of all social traffic. Now imagine if my strategy was to post the actual content directly on Facebook? Think of the value that I would have provided Facebook--without remuneration.

Man @hen81, those are slave hours (almost like a booksellers hours) I hope your were compensated in a way that matters to you most. You wanna send me an updated bio and link to a video for your aalbc.com profile: http://aalbc.com/authors/author.php?author_name=D.T.+Pollard

Oh ok I misunderstood Cynique. Lita, I doubt Hillary would say something that silly in public, but if you ever find a source please do share it.

Cynique, we have more options than Hillary, Trump, or nothing. We can vote for a third party candidate, I'll probably vote for Gary Johnson. He is calling for a consumption tax and eliminating the income tax (which would render the IRS obsolete) this is something I always thought was a good idea.

The 2016 Phillis Wheatley Award Finalists announced this week. There are some really excellent books on this list; including one we just reviewed, Bibsy by Brenda Ross.

Hey man I just made your requested changes. That is definitely a much better video to use. I also added it to the book's page as well. I would however change the default preview image on the YouTube video to one in which we can see you presenting. If you don't like the three images that YouTube provide I would consider creating your own, you can do a screen grab from a clip of the video or even use an image not actually in the image. Google better not have a problem with that book They are already giving me enough grief with Kola Boof and Karrin Stephans' books On a side note, my traffic from Facebook is much higher so far this year. This is despite Facebook reducing my organic reach on there website and my only using the platform for posting links. My year to date Facebook referral traffic is higher than all of 2015 and 2014 combined--dramatically reversing a two year slide. If the trend continues I well get more Facebook referral traffic this years than all previous years combined (I began measuring Facebook referral traffic in 2006). I will write this up in a day as part of an article on 10 years of social media.

I've deliberately avoided consuming any material related to this "controversy," on social media. As these things go viral on social media, they just strengthen the very structures and systems that we, and even Jesse, complain about. So while Jesse's spoken word piece was moving, it will not change a thing. Going viral on Twitter only enriches the owners of Twitter. The only thing that will change anything is a change in our behavior. White folks don't "extract" our culture we give it way, in many cases freely. We boast about writing for the Huffington Post for free, while turning our noses up a payments deemed to small from a Black owned platform. We even go as far as claiming ownership when none belongs, to the point when some people actually believe that "black Twitter" or BET are things that Black people own.

Oh yeah please give me feedback on the page. I'm going to roll out hosting an authors website using the template shown. I'm encountering too many authors who simply don't have a website. It will be much better than using a Facebook page as one main web presence. I also believe I can also improve upon what Amazon is doing with their author's pages. I've stripped out the right hand side ads for these users, but it does not seem like the best use of space on the page. I guess I'm so used to pages bombarded with ads when you see a web page missing them, it almost does not look right. I just have to figure out why your icon image is not displaying in the browser tab when I use your domain name, but it is showing up with the AALBC.com URL: http://aalbc.com/authors/home.php?author_name=Christopher+D.+Burns I've also added the Twitter feeds for some authors. I also need to find a good calendar widget so that authors can maintain their events calendar on the pages as well. Ultimately, I may grant authors the ability to make their own updates, but than brings in a whole 'nother level of complexity. Again, if you can think of anything to improve things let me know

http://chrisdburns.com/

Well considering that there are far fewer Black Lit sites today than 10 years ago, and many of the ones that remain are undiscoverable; you may not be over reacting. On the whole jumping through Google's hoops has helped make AALBC.com a better website. A few years ago Google made SSL a ranking signal for their search engine. I'm going to make AALBC.com secure as a result. Google are also behind making the while web secure, which is not a bad idea.

Mickey, I can't find any evidence that Hamilton Book Store And Art Gallery store is open. Facebook, Yelp, Yellowpages, all copy the same stale information. I've called the number listed and it is no longer valid. If you or anyone has different information that I can verify please post it here.

Here is a another notice from Google I got this morning (I don't post all of them). Google claims this page: http://aalbc.com/books/bookinfo.php?isbn13=9780446179980 violates one or more of the policies described below. I disagree and will try to fight this one. Google ads may not be placed on adult or mature content. This includes fetish content as well as sites that promote, sell or discuss sexual aids. Examples include, but are not limited to: sexual fixations or practices that may be considered unconventional sexual aids or enhancement tools such as vibrators, dildos, lubes, sex games, inflatable toys penis and breast enlargement tools sexual fixations or practices that may be considered unconventional sexual aids or enhancement tools such as vibrators, dildos, lubes, sex games, inflatable toys penis and breast enlargement tools For more information about keeping your content family-safe, please review our program guidelines and these tips from the policy team. Additionally, you can watch our short animated video & policy refreshers on this topic.

Classic Cynique...Thanks for that.

...so says the New York Times. I guess there is nothing we can do about it, huh? The article mentions as if it is some form of consolation; "The emergence of Black Twitter has also given African-Americans a powerful voice on social media." Black Twitter?! Please it is just Twitter; we don't own it, we don't control it, and it damn sure ain't benefiting Black people.

Missy B. Salick is an author and a blogger I met a few years ago and she really epitomizes the ideal of “Bloggers Helping Bloggers.” Recently she launched a Meet 50 Bloggers Tour #Meet50Bloggers and interview me as part of her effort. My interview may be found here.