Congratulations and gratitude

Marian is the winner of Panther Baby! Congratulations! You can leave your email in the comments or email me your mailing address through my website.

Thanks so much to everyone for entering! If you didn't win the book you wanted, please consider buying it.

Thanks to authors Bernice McFadden and Trice Hickman for the autographed copies! And thanks to publishers Agate Bolden and Algonquin Books for providing copies.


Next week watch for an interview with Vaunda Nelson, author of No Crystal Stair: A Documentary Novel of the Life and Work of Lewis Michaux, Harlem Bookseller.

Get your free ebook of Wading Home!

The good news: Agate Bolden is allowing free downloads of Rosalyn Story's Wading Home. You can go here until the end of February to get yours.

The bad news: It's because the publisher is so discouraged with the lack of attention the book has received. Publisher Doug Seibold writes on Agate's blog:

Please note that I’m stressing the “attention” Wading Home attracted, as opposed to “praise”; while I certainly believe it praiseworthy, my first-order concern is the dismaying lack of exposure the book got upon release--even from places that had singled out Rosalyn’s earlier work for very high praise indeed. In fact, to its publisher’s embarrassment, Wading Home has gotten hardly any attention at all--despite the hundreds of advance reader’s copies we distributed months before it was published, despite the efforts of PGW’s excellent sales force, despite the author’s appearance at BEA, despite how the book’s publication coincided with the fifth anniversary of Katrina. And despite the fact that I’ve had a hard time finding any other such novels from trade presses--novels by black writers addressing this event, which had such a huge impact on how both black people and others think about the lives of black people in this country today. Next to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Katrina and its aftermath may have been the most consequential event of the last decade. You wouldn’t know it by the response of the book publishing industry***....

I was put in mind of this issue earlier this month when I noted all the attention devoted to the statistics assembled by VIDA about women’s representation in major magazines. Ha, I thought to myself. Wait til they look at African-American people’s representation in those places. Then I thought some more: Don’t hold your breath. Black writers and editors talk about this problem all the time, but that doesn’t appear to be having much impact on the gatekeepers at the major review media, or at the major book publishers and retailers. This is an even older story, unfortunately, than the fall-off in reviewing. What’s the effect? Less good work is published, and fewer people find out about the good work that does get out there. Even for a writer like Rosalyn ... whose first book seemed like such a solid start career-wise, in terms of both reviews and sales--this diminished attention can make it impossible to build on that initial success and reach new readers, or even the readers who loved her first book.

I said of Wading Home in my mini-review about books about Katrina:

I just finished reading Wading Home by Rosalyn Story. It's a novel about a young jazz musician who has left New Orleans seeking fame and fortune and goes back in search of his father after the hurricane. An accessible, uplifting story about family set against the backdrop of New Orleans immediately after the storm. It comes out September 1st. It's published by Agate Bolden and reminds me a bit of their novel Before I Forget.

But whether or not I liked the book or not is beside the point. The real issue is how much more "worthy" of media coverage (reviews, articles) does a book's subject have to be before the so-called mainstream media pick up on it? A book that takes place during Katrina released on the 5th anniversary of Katrina seems like a no-brainer. Why wasn't it? Read Seibold's entire blog post and draw your own conclusions. Then download the ebook and then go over to Amazon and leave a review. Post a review on your own blog. Tell your book club members. Maybe the buzz will help sales starting next month.

Hat tip to Agate Bolden for attempting a re-launch of one of their books. Most publishers would have sadly moved on and cut the author loose. Let's hope like that saying "it's never too late to have a happy childhood" that it's never to late to launch a book!

***Jewell Parker Rhodes' novel Hurricane is coming out in April and is available for pre-order now.

In the news

Some interesting links:

The Root offers some "cross-cultural" book recommendations.

Tieffa Harper, talks about why she started recently Plenary Publishing, which will publish its first books in 2010. From the article: Harper’s philosophy is “there are many voices missing from the marketplace, but particularly from writers of color…We are not one dimensional people, and publishing shouldn’t reflect that…Yet when you walk into the black section of the bookstore, you see that the industry at large thinks that we only want to read about gangsters, side chicks, ride or die wifeys and scheming preacher’s wives.”

Doug Seibold, the founder of Agate Publishing, talks about why he focuses on books by African-American authors, including Leonard Pitts, Jr.

The Guardian, in England, is on the search for good popular fiction for black men. (Trust me: black American writers are still hearing that our work won't sell overseas.)

The Bottom of Heaven takes on Newsweek's review of a graphic novel.

School Library Journal is running a cool series, Writers Against Racism: interviews with different writers and how racism impacted them.

After hearing me on Tavis Smiley, a reader started a discussion on Yahoo Answers. Her question: do you read books written by authors who are black, Latin, female, etc.?

See what's coming up on Conversations Live: a book radio show with C.A. Webb.