Launched as an online book community in 1997, the African American Literature Book Club has started buying titles from small presses and self-publishers to sell through its Web site (www.aalbc.com). AALBC has sold books through the Amazon affiliate program, but the continuing popularity of self-published and small press fiction among African-American readers led the site to set up a warehousing and fulfillment operation to support its book sales.
AALBC was founded by Troy Johnson, a book-loving technology project manager, as a way to promote black titles and authors. It immediately attracted an audience to its message boards, and Johnson claims the site now draws nearly 300,000 unique visitors each month. AALBC also teamed with Earl Cox, CEO of Writers and Poets, a publishing, marketing and distribution company specializing in black books by published and self-published authors, in an effort to exploit the site's traffic and abundant author content to promote and sell even more books.
AALBC now uses W&P's Mountainside, N.J., warehouse to fulfill online orders for titles from indie presses and self-publishers. Cox also works with regional distributors like Bookazine and distributors that specialize in African-American titles, like A&B and Africa World Press. For a fee, AALBC will post titles on its home page and on its author profile pages and when customers click on the titles, they are sent to W&P for fulfillment. According to Johnson, the site offers 400 to 500 titles and sells 2,500 books—overwhelmingly urban fiction and women's erotica—each month. "The profile of our audience is black, female and well-educated," said Johnson.
W&P offers a range of services to self-published authors, and Cox also publishes and distributes Books That Click, a quarterly brochure that reaches 50,000 consumers through a variety of locations, including black social clubs, bookstores and beauty salons.
AALBC's content includes everything from author profiles, book reviews and online chat to writer resources and its own black books bestseller list. The site also offers advertising at rates that attract self-publishers. And because the site captures information about visitors and book buyers, AALBC and W&P can offer publishers and self-publishers marketing and promotional strategies based on the collected data and feedback from its message and chat boards.
"We look to see what people are talking about," said Johnson. "We want to promote good books, but it's self-published authors that are paying the bills." Indeed, self-published street lit sells so well, Johnson said, that he gives "deals to literary publishers to balance [the books advertised on] the AALBC home page."
Johnson chided mainstream publishers, claiming they don't really know what black consumers want. "They think they know what's commercial," Johnson said, but "self-published authors are much more sophisticated about promoting their books online than mainstream houses [are]."
