Troy

Nice to meet you Tiah!

@Kwinine Harper I assume you are already familiar with http://heyjackass.com/ What does gun control laws have to do with gun violence? Fortunately the vast majority of people do not need a gun control law to stop them from shooting someone else.

Diane Cooper was sentenced to 40 Years for crime she didn't commit. Learn about this tragic, but ultimately redemptive and uplifting story in the book which tells her story Dark Justice. I shot this video on this weekend and was already familiar with the book, I thought it was a work of fiction. I did not know it was a true story until I was shooting the video. Basically I about two feet away from The authors whose real name is Pamela, and she say the story if about her. I almost dropped my camera. She was sentenced to 40 years! This was for a crime one might consider a relatively minor offense and with no prior arrests a 40 years sentence (effectively life) is just so extreme. She would have been treated less harshly if she killed someone. Pamela told me about all the things that was taken away from her and that she missed while she was locked up. But she explained to me that she could not give them her mind, they could not take that away from her. That is how she survived.

Hi Tolly, thanks for the feedback. AALBC.com's Website in General If you are interested in information about titles you may have missed I'm developing pages, on the new version of AALBC.com, that will help you discover those books: http://aalbc.org/books/newbooks.php (future versions will allow you to break out books by genre, or you can just search the site). Of course new and popular books can always be discovered on our bestsellers list:http://aalbc.org/books/bestsellers.php The is a page for every book, readers are encouraged to comment on each and every page. AALBC.com will be the "Google of Black Literature." The Discussion Forums in Particular The "vibe" of these discussion forums are driven by the participants. I have never tried to moderate the discussion forum by making them what I, or any other individual, thinks it should be. If I did that the site would be limited by my perspective which would make it far less interesting. If people do not participate the forum dies, if they do the forums will thrive. Tolly if you, or anyone else reading this, have discovered a great book it would be wonderful if you shared that information here. The Broader Web Today we are quickly moving to a place where we do not own the platforms where our cultural expression takes place. As a result, we can not control how our culture is represented; what is praised, uplifted, rewarded and ultimately successful is not under our control. This is particularly true for Black books. We have the power to change this, by simply supporting our own. Amazon's websites and social media are great, but they only care about your money. We can not continue to invest all of our resources into these platforms while neglecting our own. If we have learned anything in the last 10 years, as the Black book ecosystem has ben decimated, is that these humongous corporations do not have our best interests in mind.

Yeah he has been doing this work for as long as I could remember. I met him for the first time this weekend. one of the friendliest, down to earth guys you'd wanna meet. Plus he a really hard worker and a has a great memory. I don't want to bias your professional opinion by letting you know what I think.

I just posed this video unedited as I was anxious to read what Del thought. I'll be editing a more detailed presentation did at the First Reed Expo in Atlanta this weekend.

Constantly on the lookout for ideas more my homepage. I actually like the design of heyjackass.com and see that it is a WordPress theme based on the jquery masonry which I will experiment with. Content Wise heyjackass.com is actually an intriguing website. Unkel Ruckus as far was your comments regarding Cynique's observations, have to admit, I can't wait to read her reply

I think I'll share one of @Unkel Ruckus's "Fun Facts" everyday.

Chris as you mentioned sure the page views help the website. But seriously Unkel Ruckus's makes an important contribution because his sentiments reflect the beliefs of much of America and are not nearly as fringe as some may think. Sure, more politically correct white people may know better than to express these sentiments in public, but their behaviors reflect a cosign. But I'm less concerned with these folks. My concern are Black people who believe this stuff, because they were never taught the truth. Our behavior reflects this belief too. We are all, Blacks, whites and everyone else, are subjected to and fall victim to this same racist rhetoric. The statement about IQ reminds me about of a debate between Dr. Frances Welsing and Dr. William Shockley on Race and IQ. This should be required viewing for all American's. You see the exact same rhetoric was used but Germans against Jews. But today no one question the intelligence of Jewish people, for the narrative has changed. As far a Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Homer, and all the other Greeks Unkel mention anyone with a cursory knowledge of history knows everything the Greek knew was obtained from Black Africans.

I'd finished speaking at an event in Atlanta, GA. I this young, tall, attractive woman stepped up to me and introduced herself as JonRenee. I was like whoa, what a nice surprise, and she even had a gift bag for me! That was such a nice gesture. Thank you so much for stopping by to say hello @JonRenee' you helped make an already good event even better. I have a lot of video from the First Reed Expo here in ATL. I'm meeting a bunch of really interesting writers with fascinating stories. I'll share more of this over the upcoming days.

I was reading the Wall Street Journal yesterday saw an interesting article, "Betting Big on Literary Newcomers." Of particular interest to me were the sisters who garnered seven figure book deals. It looks like the focus on African female novelists will continue. The most fascinating thing is that these humongous advances are going to debut authors. Apparently auctions drive up prices, but this is classic bubble territory as far as I'm concerned. From a business perspective a big advance better come with a big marketing budget as well. As a bookseller, I'm expecting some ad buys for these books. Then again handing out million dollar advances is one way to get free promotion. I'm sure these books must be great reads. It will be interesting to see how well they sell next year. Homegoing: A Novel by Yaa Gyasi (Random House, Jun 07, 2016) Behold the Dreamers: A Novel by Imbolo Mbue (Knopf, Aug 23, 2016)

Hey man you know you can embed youtube and vimeo videos here just by pasting the URL (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SU5Gs3291k) without the brackets Also post your books ISBN13 here and I'll make sure I have all your book titrles on you AALBC.com page: http://aalbc.org/authors/author.php?author_name=D.T.+Pollard right now I only have 5 of your books. I can also use an updated bio. Is you have video for all your books list post your list like this ISBN13/AmazonID-youtube video ID B00SJ9N3BW-8SU5Gs3291k if the book is only an ebook provide the ASIN. The youttube video id is the last part of the youtube ID which I bolded above

Yeah not tracking what is happening with your website as far as search is concerned is like walking around blind. You can do it, but you really won't have any idea what is happening all around you. SEO is FAR more important that social media marketing as the impact of search is far greater than social.

Cynique, I think I'm going to link these posts to your webpage to--and definitely to the homepage. I've been trying not to add anything new to he current site, as it is just something else for me to move. I but I don't have a homepage design for the new site that is presentable yet, so I'll add them to this site's homepage. I've been playing around with the design on author pages. Take a look at your page again and let me know what you think: http://aalbc.org/authors/author.php?author_name=Connie%20Bradley in your case the main change is how I plan to link your content. Of a few articles this is probably find, but for someone with 100's articles like Kam this kind of list is impractical. Regarding the French--a tragedy for sure, but Boko Haram has killed more Nigerians than Isis has killed and show not sign of slowing up. Americans have already forgotten about them. Maybe I'll make one of those translucent images go over my social media avatars, but use the Nigeria flag instead. We'll forget about the French too, as soon as Beyonnce and J-Zay Break up of Catlyn adopts an Ethiopian.

Yeah I have a lot more content but I wanted to get the winners done first. If I made more money the coverage could have been better. It is interesting so little of the Black media seemed interested in this-the Academy Awards of the book world. A Huria Search yields nothing. The problem could be that Google (which drives Huria Search) simply has not indexed the any of the Black media pages yet--which speaks to a completely different problem if a newspaper's website (homepage anyway) is not being indexed by Google on a daily basis--at least. Now that I think about I have not added my test site to my own search engine or Huria Search. I fully expect to see my pages in a Google a search tomorrow.

Thanks for sharing this @CDBurns

The following is a report on the clicks from Facebook, based upon a post I make about my book club database. This was over a 2 day period, The first day resulted in about 940 clicks on my link; the rest were on second day. As you can see, the average time on the website is quite respectable and pages views are good, because the content on the landing page is very thin right now, there is nothing to read. Book clubs can check to see if their club is in the database: http://aalbc.org/bookclubs/ Two page views are expected because once you get to the website you then have to select the state your book club is in, which results in a 2nd page view. Now some out there is saying, "See Troy, despite all your bitchin' and moanin' about how useless Facebook is, this is an example of how good it is." If I were an internet novice, I could see how this might be a compelling argument. But the reality is Facebook did not do this, people did. This is exactly the same thing people did before Facebook was invented. The difference today is that we no longer capitalize on our efforts, Facebook does. And that is the problem. Plus, I have never gotten this much traffic from a paid Facebook promotion--not even close. Facebook simply can not do for us, what we can do for ourselves.

My record remains unbroken. Ta-Nehisi did go on to win the award last night. Of the 40 longlisted titles 9 were written by African American authors. That is more Black authors than were nominated during the first quarter century of the awards, which started in 1950. To be fair the first 25 years did not recognize so many titles. Still 9 is a record number of Black authors recognized by these awards.

Ta-Nehisi is a big time author now, and really does not have to do these types of things. Good to see Brothers continue to be supportive.

I'm familiar with a case where an author generated clicks from Facebook at an even hire rate. Over a 2 day period (3,200 one day and 2,200 a week later) there were 5,400 clicks on a link, for a single book, going straight to Amazon. But here is the kicker; there were only 3 books sold! Now that deifies logic! On a BAD month across my entire website I convert 4% of people I send to Amazon. Normally it is double that. So if I send 5,400 people to Amazon I expect to sell at least 200 books. Again, the "people" who clicked this link went straight to Amazon, so I have not idea how long the were on the site or what they did, but I do know they brought books at an alarmingly LOW rate--two orders of magnitude lower than normal! Needless to say this raised all kinds of red flags on the nature of those clicks. Like your case this was organic (free) reach from Facebook. I only previusly looked at the quality of my paid promotions. It never occurred to me to examine the quality of Facebook's organic reach. I have a a post on Facebook that generated 1,000 visitors in one day this early last week (the post I mentioned above with 17K people reached). I'm going to definitely look into that when i get a second. If I see the same type of activity (or lack of it), I'm going to share the data with a journalist, there definitely is a story here. Put you images on google drive and I'll grab them from there

You know Shirely I have a LinkedIn account and have never seriously considered using it for professional networks and I have thousands of connection as well. Maybe I'll begin working LinkedIn in earnest. Chris I actually just got back from Facebook and typed the reach in the comments section on all of my posts over the last month on my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/aalbcfanpage/ You might find that interesting. There is a direct correlation between the number of people sharing a post and the number of people reached. My most popular post last month reached over 17,400 people; 176 people shared it. For my page If a post is shared by a handful of people it may get seen by close to 1,000 people otherwise it hangs around the 150 to 200. Which is a pretty crappy 1% considering worked to get my fan base to well over 20,000. We already know this results in very little traffic back to the site.

@Shirley Gale I'm pleased that you took the comments as intended. Indeed your response is refreshing. I think others will benefit from your contributions and spirit on this discussion forums.

Interestingly, most of my friends and family are not active on Facebook. We may have accounts but we are not all that active. I have a cousin that uses FB to promote a business like myself, but neither of use get any engagement (I mean zero), from family. I get some engagement from friends, but those friends are connected to me through the industry. But that lack of engagement is just on social media. In the physical world there is more support, but even then it is far from universal. I would not have a business if I depended solely on family and friends. My family and friends, like most of America, does not read very much so this is not unexpected. Cynique, you are probably right about women really liking those type of posts. Honestly it is for this reason I sometimes contemplate that I'm not the best face for AALBC.com. I really think a middle aged, with a southern sensibility, the type of person to write and enjoy these types of posts that just get on my nerves would be idea. Do you all think this matters or it me? These irritating posts are almost enough to get me off Facebook for good. I keep saying I'm done with even logging into social media with the roll out of the new website, but we will see. Plus, I don't think I can develop a platform where readers and writers interact if I'm doing that on Facebook. I'm also going to build out a portion of the website for books clubs. I'm actually pretty excited about this prospect it is like going back to my roots so to speak - Maybe I'll even relaunch our online book club. I just need someone to pick the books and moderate the discussions... I'm definitely gonna do that (any lurkers out there wanna volunteer?).

These type of Facebook posts just work my nerves! They usually are right at the top of my wall when I login to Facebook to check my messages, so I can't avoid seeing them. I hate these types of message and ones where people boast about their children. I don't even really know the person whose message this is, so it shouldn't even bother me, but it does. I know Facebook is not beyond experimenting with manipulating people's moods, and they sure know how to get under my skin. I see one of these types of posts most days, which seems unlikely to occur naturally given the behavior of my actually friends. Maybe it bugs me because I'm just not the type of person to go around talking about how great my marriage or family is. To me those kinds of things don't need expressing unless it is a wedding or something, as these things are usually apparent from casual observation. My 25th anniversary is in 3 weeks. I just would never occur to be to go onto Facebook to write something like this. Besides who is this message for? My wife knows how I feel about her. My close friends and family also have a pretty good idea. As far as everyone else concerned, I don't think they really care. So what is the goal of the people who write these thing--other than to feed some internal selfish need? Still this really should not irk me at all. Maybe its that I get to avoid people who talk like this in the real world, but am forced to tolerate these bores on Facebook. Maybe I just really need to cut the 5 minutes a day I spend on Facebook out all together. Maybe I'm just in a bad mood. Maybe this upgrade has me behind the PC too much :-) I dunno....

Nov. 9, 2015 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Lois Smyth, Baton Rouge Area Foundation, lsmyth@braf.org, (225) 387-6126 Susan Polowczuk, Zehnder Communications, susanp@z-comm.com, (225) 448-0760 T. Geronimo Johnson Wins 9th Annual Gaines Award Award Honors Literary Legend Ernest Gaines BATON ROUGE, La. – “Welcome to Braggsville” by T. Geronimo Johnson has been selected as winner of the 2015 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Now in its ninth year, the Gaines Award is a nationally acclaimed $10,000 prize created by donors of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation. The award recognizes outstanding work from rising African-American fiction writers while honoring Gaines’ extraordinary contribution to the literary world. Previous winners of the Ernest J. Gaines award include Attica Locke for “The Cutting Season,” Stephanie Powell Watts for “We Are Taking Only What We Need” and Dinaw Mengestu for “How to Read the Air.” Award ceremonies take place at 6:30 p.m. on Jan. 21 at the Manship Theatre in downtown Baton Rouge. Johnson will read excerpts from his winning novel. The ceremony is free and open to the public, although reservations are requested at rsvp@braf.org. Johnson is a New Orleans native who lives in Berkeley, California, and serves as visiting professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He earned a master’s degree in fine arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a master’s in language, literacy and culture from the University of California, Berkeley. He previously held the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and the Iowa Arts Fellowship at the University of Iowa. In addition, Johnson has taught writing at Arizona State University, the University of Iowa, UC Berkeley, Western Michigan University and Stanford. His first novel, “Hold it ’til it Hurts,” was a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. “Welcome to Braggsville” offers a socially provocative and dark comedy about four UC Berkeley students who stage a protest during a Civil War reenactment in rural Georgia. In his review, Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin says Johnson is “a terrific storyteller, and he moves fluidly from past to present, place to place. In the end, no one is right and everyone is – or perhaps it’s the other way around.” Due to the exceptional quality of this year’s entries, Gaines Award judges short-listed two books – “The Sellout” by Paul Beatty and “The Turner House” by Angela Flournoy. The national panel of judges for the 2015 Gaines Award are: Thomas Beller, award-winning author and journalist; Anthony Grooms, a critically acclaimed author and creative writing professor at Kennesaw State University; renowned author Elizabeth Nunez, professor of English at Hunter College-City University of New York; Francine Prose, author of more than 20 books, including “Blue Angel,” a nominee for the 2000 National Book Award; and Patricia Towers, former features editor for O, The Oprah Magazine and a founding editor of Vanity Fair magazine. About Ernest Gaines Ernest Gaines, a native of Louisiana’s Pointe Coupee Parish and a literary legend, is a 2013 recipient of the National Medal of Arts, a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation’s Genius Grant, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal and a member of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Last year marked the 40th anniversary of publication of his critically acclaimed novel “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” which was adapted into a made-for-TV movie that won nine Emmy awards. His novel “A Lesson Before Dying” published in 1993 won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. About BRAF The Baton Rouge Area Foundation is one of the Gulf Coast region’s largest community foundations. Winner of the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ 2011 Award for Outstanding Foundation, BRAF connects donors to projects and nonprofit groups, along with investing in and managing community projects. For more information, visit BRAF.org. ###