Mark Sullivan wrote:
> miker wrote:
>
> "I had to smile when I read the part about
publishers being leery of
> marketing books with a black male
protagonist."
>
> I got the impression from the article that the
problem was the type of
> black male protagonist, a street one with few, if
any, redeeming
> qualities. As the article points out, Ellison,
Wright, Baldwin, etc,
> who were thought to appeal to a more literary
audience all found major
> publishers. And the same class battle goes on, as
seen in the reaction
> to the pretty much stillborn Syndicated Books, which
had planned to be a
> younger version of Holloway House, attaching a
tie-in hip-hop CD to each
> of its books.
It's also worthwhile to keep in mind the difference in the
marketplace for black books, and the unique problems that
publishers of black books have, namely the self-sabotage of
black American readers. Whereas I think most white literary
audiences (due to geographic factors, mostly) will not
purchase books from guys selling them off blankets or
collapsable tables on street corners, audiences for black
books do it openly. Take a walk in my neighborhood, or in
East New York, or along Lenox Avenue in Harlem, and you'll
see dozens of guys selling bootleg CDs and (since books are
harder to bootleg) shoplifted books. These books come from my
store, and stores like mine.
When most all of the books are sold at or below cost, it
doesn't take a genius to figure out where they come from.
When one copy of something gets stolen, it's possible to
assume that the thief is taking the book for his own personal
reading pleasure. When people are stealing 10 or 15 copies of
one single book at a time...they're not giving them away as
Christmas presents.
The result of this, is that while there is now a big boom of
black readership
(in my area, at least), actual sales are stagnating, or even
declining. Most of this has to do with the elaborate security
precautions I have to take...e.g. keeping certain books under
glass, or out of reach of customers, and keeping the black
fiction section next to the cash register. These things all
discourage browsing and discourage sales. But they keep me
from getting robbed blind every day, too. Many times I have
debated--as much as I like Donald Goines--dropping his books
from my store entirely, as we barely break even with the
sales we make versus the copies that are stolen. Luckily, I
didn't have to make that decision, as the Goines-theft
eventually trailed off to an acceptable level, in favor of
theft of black erotic novels, like Zane's
"Addicted."
To bring this back in a roundabout way to being
on-topic...this is not just a problem with Black America, but
I think reflects a larger problem for publishers of books
about violence, sex, drugs, political revolution or other
counterculture or bohemian topics...which happens to be the
category that an overwhelming majority of Af-Am fiction fits
into. When I worked at a large independent bookstore in NYC,
Donald Goines was a high-theft author. But even more
high-theft was Jim Thompson.
David Moran
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