REPOST: Rearrange a Bookstore Day

We’ve been meaning to repost this blog from our friend Debra Owsley since we read it back in January. Deb is a passionate reader, a die hard true blue, supporter of authors AND a business woman—please check out her site (http://www.simply-said.net/index.html) for amazing reading accessories. But What Doesn’t Kill You came out, the tour started and life got kinda crazy. However, in this case, late is better than never and we TOTALLY believe any day can be

Rearrange a Bookstore Day !

(Originally posted January 12, 2009 at http://simplysaidreadingaccessories.blogspot.com/2009/01/rearrange-bookstore-day.html)

I’ve been known to go next door to my job, to the Wal-Mart, and rearrange books. Sure I have better things to do but I do it regularly. At first the store manager would, ask me what I’m doing and I simply told him “I’m straightening up your book shelf”. But then I guess they realized they were not just straightened up but also rearranged. LOL They are not going to raise hell when I have a $100.00 worth of merchandise in my shopping cart now are they?

Why do I do this? Well first off , I don’t think we should be segregated. I will stick some Donna Hill’s and some Marcia King Gamble’s and most recently Cheryl Robinson’s, (just to name a few off a very long list), books into the Main Stream romance section.

They ARE romance authors that just so happen to be black.

Yesterday I was at the Books A Million, here in Florida and I caught an attitude big time. the romance section was 43 feet long yes I counted. Each shelf was either 5 rows or 7 rows. The 5 rows were hard backs and mass paper backs and the 7 rows were trade paperbacks.

As I looked to see if any of us were sprinkled in, my attitude worsened.

I then went to the African American Literature section and really got pissed. The African American section was 9 feet long and each rack was 5 rows per, and very sparse. Not only was it romance it was also fiction, non fiction, and bio’s scattered in or shall I say peppered in. I started looking for some authors I know recently released new books. Hmmmm I am not happy, one Seduction and Lies, Donna Hill’s newest release, one Gotta Keep On Tryin’ De Berry and Grant one Tempting The Mogul, Marcia’s new book, 6 Something On The Side, Carl Weber’s book released last January 2008, and I could keep going be you get the point.

Yes maybe they were sold, it was the weekend, but re-stock damn it. It was not kept and not in order at all. I went to my friendly African American salesperson and asked her what’s up with this??? And why are we segregated?, Ain’t Obama in office now? We both laughed but she understood where I was coming from. She said the same argument that I’ve heard repeatedly, half the people want an African American section and half don’t.

That was still no excuse for the way the section looked.

I remember years ago when I wanted one too. The names of authors I wanted to read I did not know unless they came out in Essence magazine each month. I would run to the store and look for them and sometimes be disappointed because they weren’t there, or very annoyed when the salesperson said ”WHO”? GRRRR. E. LYNN HARRIS was the book I was requesting and it was not his first one either.

So I spent the afternoon doing my chosen task, putting the books in order, “peppering the salt” and I did a top shelf of new releases.

Hey, it’s all about love lol

While I was doing this I was thinking about Carlene Brice’s blog about give a black book to a non black reader.

Hmmmmm

Light Bulb Moment

What if I could get all my friends, bloggers, readers, and authors, to do this too??? THIS COULD BE BIG!!!!

If you spend as much time in bookstores as I do...

Let’s pick a day and we all do it.

Rearrange, pepper in and spread us around, put us on the top shelf on an end cap at the check out counter. If they have several copies. If not ,face the book forward in the African American section.

The only thing I wish was I had way of tracking the results.

Are you willing to rearrange a bookstore?I have even left notes to say “LOOK IN African American ROMANCE SECTION”….. by the way, it works both ways.

Put your favorite authors and new releases on top “Pepper” them in “Main Stream” sections.

Order some books they will add it into inventory or you can, when they hand them to you.

Demand that books are in store and on shelf on release date

Talk to browsers about your favorite book or author

Place new books or your favorites face out

Don’t put them in a weird place; we do want folks to find them

Leave a book review

Leave a post it note

Leave a bookmark in the book from an author

Leave information about your book club

Start a African American club in store

Readers, do you want to add to the list?

Are you willing to adopt a African American book section?

I would love feedback on this

Just My 2 Cents, http://www.simply-said.net/index.html Posted by Simply Said Reading Accessories

From our friend and sister author Carleen Brice

December is National Buy a Book by a Black Author and Give it to Somebody Not Black Month. Check it out: http://welcomewhitefolks.blogspot.com/


So seems like it's time to resurrect the post we did last year about reading in black and white... look for it soon.

And the survey says...

When we asked you to break down the five ‘must have’ scenes for Tryin’ to Sleep in the Bed You Made—the Movie, we knew it was a hard assignment. Even David Letterman does a top ten list. Some of you flat out told us it was impossible and gave us more. Some combined events to make a kind of flow of scenes. Hey, we can work with it. Thanks for taking on the challenge. Here are the results:

5—TIE—Pat and Gayle’s reunion at A Hand Up, the shelter.
&
Ramsey finds Gayle at the cemetery, asks for the picture frame. Then Gayle finds there is money hidden in it.

4—Gayle meets Ramsey and falls for him. They elope.

3—Pat and Marcus kiss in the basement.

2—TIE—The hotel room. Pat has confronted her father, storms back to her room, but doesn’t realize that Gayle is the maid.
&
Pat goes with Marcus for a trip on his boat. They admit they are in love. They elope.

And the number one ‘gotta have it’ scene—this one was on pretty much everybody’s list:

Pat, Gayle and Marcus walk home from school. Freddy is accidentally shot.

There were several scenes that just missed the list:
--Gayle loosing her house.
--Gayle and Pat fall out after Gayle does not accompany Pat for the abortion.
--Pat on the ferry for her Martha’s Vineyard summer

The good news is we get to bring you more than five scenes, but it’s still hard to make choices! Thanks for your input. We’ll have other questions to ask you along the way.

And congratulations to our winner of the galley of our next book, MELISSA WELLS of Florida!!! Her galley of What Doesn’t Kill You –coming in January of 2009—is on the way.

BOOK SOUP

Happy President’s Day to all who are enjoying an extra day of rest...or shopping!

You know how you make soup from lots of good stuff that’s leftover in the refrigerator. We do. Soup is a major food group, especially when we’re writing. Well, we’ve got a bunch of juicy tidbits to share, while you have a few extras moments to check ‘em out, so here goes :

First, thanks to Connie Briscoe who has included us among her interviewees at
Connie Briscoe Presents — Page One –our Q&A is posted now.


And in honor of Black History Month, some of your favorite authors are being featured on two websites:

www.Apooo.org
“29 Days of Wit, Wisdom and Perspective”
During the month of February, join us as each day we will spotlight a different author and recognize their contribution to African American Literature.

www.EDC-Creations.com Celebrating African-American History- It's Authors, Poets, and Leaders - Welcome
SLS Black History Month Online Book Fair
“Vision Driven by Some Higher Power”
February 1-29, 2008
Event entirely ONLINE
In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.Martin Luther King
Get Started with the Book Fair by clicking this linkhttp://edc1creations.squarespace.com/how-online-book-fair-worksNightly Panel

Discussions with Featured AuthorsBlack Authors Network Internet Radiohttp://www.blogtalkradio.com/Black-Author-NetworkListener dial-in number (646) 200-0402Chat live in the BAN Black Author Network BlogTalk Chat room

And our friend Eisa’s Blog, http://eisaulen.com/blog/ features two posts about writing awards from Go On Girl! Book Club—

They are sponsoring a fiction competition for unpublished writers with a hefty $500 prize. The postmark deadline is March 15, 2008. The other award is a $500 scholarship for an aspiring writer. Application details are on the blog. Sounds like a great opportunity!

Go On Girl! Book Club was founded in 1990 and now has 30 chapters around the country. We were fortunate enough to receive their New Author of the Year award for Tryin’ to Sleep in the Bed You Made in 1998.

OK—enough for now. We don’t want to take up the whole day. Later in the week we’ll share another bowl full—more photos from book tour, and more items of interest.
By the way, thanks for all of you who have watched our video on YouTube ( http://youtube.com/watch?v=W7zB01MdqEE)—we have almost a thousand views!!! Please tell all your friends to take a peek there, on deberryandgrant.com or bookvideos.tv. If you haven’t had a chance, and you find yourself with a spare 2 minutes and 21 seconds, please give us a peek—it’s a quickie look at where we write and how.

READIN' & WRITIN' : WHO? WHAT? AND WHY?

As we traveled on book tour we always mentioned that if there are authors you love, you need to support them or you won’t find them on the shelves any longer. Readers are generally horrified to find that we did not have an easy time finding a publisher—either back when Tryin’ to Sleep in the Bed You Made was published, or eleven years later for the sequel. We’ve even wondered whether Tryin’ or any of our other books would be published now at all, given the current climate. This always led to the hot topic—the prevalence of “street lit” and erotica in African-American fiction. Whether we’re talking with book clubs or solo readers—even booksellers—we hear concern about the direction of fiction written by and about Black folks. Where are the “good” books? they ask.

In an article in thedailyvoice.com written by Linda Villarosa (see excerpt and link below) discussing the formation of ringShout, “a group dedicated to "recognizing, reclaiming and celebrating literary fiction and non fiction by black writers," she hits upon the difficulty of defining “good”. And for us the even word “literary” sets off alarm bells, since we have been dissed and dismissed, more than a time or two by “literary” writers.

With any form of media—television, movies, music, the written word—the argument can be made that people buy what they want to consume. Does that mean that by and large readers are happy with the available offerings? Are they buying erotica and street lit because it’s readily available and fits in the budget? Because it’s an exciting escape from “real life”? Because it is telling some truth about “us” that is not being spoken elsewhere?
So we ask are you satisfied with the Black fiction you find on the shelves now? If not, what do you want to see more of?

Bookz in da Hood? by LINDA VILLAROSA

Posted February 12, 2008 1:00 PM

Novels like "Making Him Want It," "Crackhead," "Freak in the Sheets" and "Nasty Girls," are hip-checking literary superstars like Toni Morrison off the shelves. Other authors never make it into print, squeezed out by dirty girls (and boys) like Zane, Nikki Turner, Karrine Steffans and their lower rent offspring.

For more on author and journalist Linda Villarosa, go to http://lindavillarosa.com

A new group offers an alternative to "street lit."

A few weeks ago, publishing's Talented Tenth gathered at Random House to celebrate the launch of ringShout, a group dedicated to "recognizing, reclaiming and celebrating literary fiction and non fiction by black writers." The organization's founders--authors Martha Southgate, Eisa Nefertari Ulen and Bridgett Davis; Cave Canem 's Alison Myers and Random House editor Chris Jackson--call ringShout "a place for black literature."

But even as the night sparkled with writers, editors, booksellers and other black literati, a 10,000 pound elephant sat squarely in the center of the room: ghetto fiction, street lit or as one writer has called it "ho for dough books." --- (To read the rest of the article please visit http://thedailyvoice.com/voice/2008/02/bookz-in-da-hood-000079.php )

2008!!!! REALLY?

Weren’t we just partying like it’s 1999? How can it be 2008?!

Time can slip by so fast, it’s easy to let it slip through our fingers. For us, this last year has been so packed with great highs and tremendous challenges, it’s hard to believe it all happened in 365 days!

Well, we’re ready for the new year and excited about all of the possibilities. We’re eager to hear what readers think about Gotta Keep on Tryin’. We’re excited about working to get Tryin’ to Sleep in the Bed You Made, the Movie into production. We’ll also have more movie news—about another book to film project—for you in the coming year. And we’re both looking forward to some time to kick back—haven’t had any of that in quite a while.

We wish you a New Year that fulfills and inspires you, the good health and well being to enjoy it, and great friends and family to share it with! Bring on 2008!

WRITING WHITE?

Crossing Over—Mirror vs Window

When an African American writer or entertainer achieves success with a wider (read White) audience, a la Will Smith or Terry McMillan, they are said to have cross-over appeal. Why isn’t the reverse true? When Blacks watch CSI, Spiderman 3 or pick up the latest John Grisham, no one attributes that to cross-over. Is it assumed that everyone will find these diversions entertaining? That race doesn’t matter as long as it’s White? That Blacks, Mexicans, Chinese, Lakhota Sioux, Lebanese and whomever else the census separates out will “get” the storyline and generate the dollars requisite for success?

Even in the racially diverse “Grey’s Anatomy”, the central character, intern Meredith Grey, is a White woman, despite the fact series writer/producer Shonda Rhimes, is African American. Happenstance or economics? Quiet as it’s kept, in our first novel, Exposures, we “wrote White”, deciding it was the surest way to test our joint writing chops--and get published. It worked; the novel sold in two weeks. It took a lot longer to find a home for our first book with Black characters. At the time we didn’t fit the established categories (we weren’t Toni or Terry), so many editors didn’t believe we would find an audience. They were wrong.

Are these situations silent testimony to the more refined racism that lives with us everyday—the kind of de facto pecking order largely unrecognized by those who perpetuate it, and unchallenged by those of us who are aware, but just grateful to be in the game? Maybe it’s not so silent. The movie “Crash” asks questions about who we are, and what we think about all those other people. There was awkward, knowing laughter in the theater when our not so secret little prejudices were laid bare.

A few months ago, a White reader (one of many who identify themselves that way) emailed to say how much she enjoyed one of our books, but wondered if she was welcome to read our work since she wasn’t Black. We were stunned by the question, but it spoke to the segregated reading habits which are more the norm than we would like to admit. Are we so tired of dealing with each other at work, in the supermarket, on the bus, that it’s a relief to open a book and find people with strange accents and hairdos banished from our fictional world? Or is it more insidious? Are books our mirrors, and we only look for reflections of ourselves?

Shouldn’t reading provide a window to the greater world? We read Anna Karenina without being Russian, The 100 Secret Senses without being Chinese, Catcher in the Rye without being teenaged prep school boys, Shelters of Stone without being Cro-Magnon—Anne Rice without being a vampire. We delight in Carl Hiassen without being Floridians, Sandra Cisneros with no experience of being Latinas from Chicago, understand the plight of a Nigerian girl as told by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, never having set foot in Lagos. Since childhood we have read thousands of books about people who didn’t look like us and found them enlightening, hilarious, heartbreaking, and know, without doubt, we are better people because of it.

Why then is it so surprising when works of fiction, save for “literary” efforts like those of Alice Walker and Edward P. Jones, which mostly recount our collective, tragic, post middle passage history, cross over? Are we to believe that as fully franchised, contemporary Americans living a variety of social, educational, and economic circumstances that our stories are so foreign as to be incomprehensible? That we share no universal human truths?

After the surprise success of Tryin’ to Sleep in the Bed You Made, which featured drawings of two brown-skinned women on the cover, our publisher made a conscious effort to cross over our next book. That cover was dominated by a house flanked by a lush tree. Our three main characters were rendered the size of carpenter ants, their color indistinguishable. So, to appeal to a wider audience we had to lose face? What must we sacrifice to be palatable to the culture at large?

Some bookstores even have separate African American areas. Is this to make us more comfortable in unfamiliar territory? Does this highlight our work, or let other people know they can skip this aisle? Granted, some argue that having a unique section celebrates the Black experience. But are they really separate but unequal niches, a publishing ghetto with very different real estate values?

Until Waiting to Exhale made publishers understand that Black people buy books, we were mostly left outside the gates. Clearly they did not learn in American history that we risked and often lost our lives to learn to read. The Exhale phenomenon is the reason many of us were given a chance. Walter Mosley reached a wider readership thanks to the endorsement of President Clinton. But is it really so hard to throw open our windows and get some fresh air? Browse a bookstore section you usually pass without Oprah to lead the way? If you like Janet Evanovich, try Valerie Wilson-Wesley. Ask a librarian or a co-worker for a recommendation; that’s how many non-Black readers found our work. You might discover a good read on an unexpected shelf—maybe gain insight into someone else, or surprisingly, yourself.

NBCC-Chi-Town

As we mentioned in Monday’s blog, we spent last weekend in Chicago at the National Book Club Conference Click here: National Book Club Conference , presented by Black Issues Book Review Click here: Black Issues Book Review . The conference is usually in Atlanta in August, but this year, NBCC founder Curtis Bunn arranged for the event to take place in Ghana. We understand it was a life changing journey and that Curtis had the ultimate hook-up—a college classmate of his is a Ghanaian king, so the group was treated royally! (There will be tons of photos and info about the trip on their site in a couple of weeks).

Chicago presented an opportunity for those who were unable to make the trip to Ghana to get their book club/author fix. Probably because it was the first year, attendance wasn’t as robust as it is in ATL, but that also meant the weekend was a lot more intimate.

We arrived on Friday—after an uneventful plane ride—an amazing feat these days, but Chicago was still reeling from some UGLY weather—storms the day before had caused downed trees, flooding, and power outages. Now Chicago traffic is usually no joke, but it took us 2 ½ hours to make the usually 35 minute drive from O’Hare to downtown in a HOT taxi—there was an oscillating fan clipped to the safety partition, blowing HOT air. Then there was the heat coming from under the seats—nobody wants a hot seat in August. But we got to the hotel in plenty of time to freshen up for the welcoming reception—a casual gathering for the early arrivers on Friday evening.

The good stuff began on Saturday morning with our breakfast speaker, the incomparable, funny and bold Tina McElroy Ansa. After that we settled in for a day of book news and readings from sister authors ReShonda Tate Billingsley who has movie news, Kimberla Lawson Roby, whose Rev. Curtis Black is back, Mary “Sweeter Than Honey” B. Morrison, Terrie Williams, whose book “Black Pain” about depression in African Americans (she scratched the surface of this subject in her Essence article last year) is coming in January, and Eisa Nefetari Ulen whose reading from “Crystelle Mourning” her debut novel was so impressive we can’t wait to finish it. And oh yeah, we read from Gotta Keep on Tryin’. We’re getting used to having those words on our tongues—we’re off to Michigan in October to record the audio book, a first for us. We’re pretty jazzed about that. We capped the conference with a pretty raucous dinner on Saturday night with Tina and Eisa—(no we didn’t get kicked out of the restaurant but we were the liveliest table in the joint—for sure!)

All in all it was a great weekend. Not only did we get to hang out with readers and writers from around the country, but we also got to meet Eddie Levert and co-author Layah Beth LeFlore—who talked about I Got Your Back, the moving father-son collaboration that was finished right before Gerald Levert’s untimely death.

For those of you who belong to book clubs and haven’t attended one of the Atlanta events, we highly recommend you check it (and the author line up for 2008) out. And for those of you who are regulars—see you in Aug 1-3, 2008 in ATL!! We just made arrangements to be there too!




Curtis Bunn, National Book Club Conference Founder
telling us about the trip to Ghana.




Our NBCC-Chicago Class Picture!

Seated l to r:
Eisa Nefetari Ulen, ReShonda Tate Billingsley, Kimberla Lawson Roby, Terrie Williams, Tina McElroy Ansa, Virginia, Donna, Mary Morrison
Standing l to r: Ken Smikle, Publisher Black Issues Book Review, Susan McHenry, Editorial Director BIBR, Curtis Bunn, NBCC founder




Sugar and Spice Book Club Members with Tina McElroy Ansa: ah the magical
mysteries of the digital camera!