Vera Warren Williams, owner of Community Book Center in New Orleans, La., describes her customers as thinkers who want to read about themselves and their history. "We sell some fiction, but that's not what they come for," she said. "And with the recent events, people are shaken up, searching for answers, and want to get their stuff in order." Her customers gravitate to authors Dr. John Henrik Clarke, J.A. Rodgers, Malcolm X, Chancellor Williams and Cheik H. Anta Diop, and popular titles at her store include G. Carter Woodson's The Miseducation of the Negro (African-American Images); Richard Poe's Black Spark, White Fire (Prima); Randall Robinson's The Debt (Plume); and Donnie McClurkin's Eternal Victim Eternal Victor (Pneuma Life Publishing).

The Nkiru Center for Education and Culture in Brooklyn, N.Y., was founded in 1976 as a community bookstore called Nkiru Books. After its purchase in 1999 by Talib Kweli and Dante Smith (Mos Def) of the hip-hop duo Black Star, it was restructured into a not-for-profit educational and cultural center that includes a 1,000-sq.-ft bookstore. Executive director Angeli Rasbury said that top-selling nonfiction titles there include Ngugi Wa Thiongo's Decolonising the Mind (Heinemann), Malidoma Patrice Some's The Healing Wisdom of Africa (Tarcher) and Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Seasons (Heinemann).

Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones (Doubleday) and Vernon Jordan's memoir, Vernon Can Read! (Public Affairs) are popular nonfiction titles at all the African-American bookstores PW interviewed. Martina Burnley, manager of the Apple Book Center in Detroit, Mich., said these two have been selling even though history and biographies generally do not do well at her store. Russell Simmons's Life and Def (Crown) is another new biography popular with her customers.

Biographies are, however, top sellers in the trade book section of the Howard University Bookstore in Washington, D.C. General book buyer Erica Johnson told PW that Quincy Jones sold 200 copies and Vernon Jordan sold 100 copies at their respective book signings.

Other popular nonfiction titles at the various stores interviewed include Dick Gregory's Callus on My Soul: A Memoir (Longstreet); and Women of Color Study Bible (World Bible Publishing).

Fiction

Contemporary fiction "does not move," said Rasbury at the Nikiru Center. "I think people are more interested in learning about what's going on in today's world. Even when they buy fiction, it's Zane's The Sex Chronicles [Strebor] or The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah [Pocket]—word of mouth stuff. It's not Terry [McMillan] or Omar [Tyree]." Her most popular fiction titles are older classics, such as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (Anchor) and Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat by the Door (Wayne State Univ. Press).

But other African-American booksellers report that fiction does sell for them. Top fiction sellers in various stores include Mary Monroe's The Upper Room and God Don't Like Ugly (both Kensington), Bebe Moore Campbell's What You Owe Me (Putnam) and Christian fiction titles from Walk Worthy Press: Victoria Christopher Murray's Temptation and Joy and Michele Andrea Bowen's Church Folk.

Without exception, all retailers contacted reported that their most popular fiction seller was The Coldest Winter Ever, still selling as well as it did when it was first published in 1999. The book's continued popularity seems to be generated from customer word of mouth. Andre Kelton, owner of Ourstory Books in Plainfield, N.J., said with a laugh: "When people ask for it, I say, 'You haven't read it yet?' "

"It's not your typical boy-meets-girl book about standard relationships," Joi Afzal, co-owner of The Hue-Man Experience Bookstore in Denver told PW. "It's very urban. The main character is 16, which I think helps it appeal to a younger age group."

Black Expressions Book Club editor Carol Mackey said the 500,000 members of the two-year-old club gave the book "so much buzz on our message boards that we featured it again as a Member's Pick."

Another hot title—in more ways than one—is Zane's Addicted (Pocket). "All three of Zane's books—Addicted, The Sex Chronicles and Shame on It All—have been selling off the shelves," said Kelton. "Apparently, the erotic thing is hot. Word of mouth is driving the sales, because there's no advertising that I've seen."

At Black Expressions, which Carol Mackey characterized as "a fiction-lovers book club," big sellers include Michael Baisden's The Maintenance Man (Scribner), Gloria Mallette's Shades of Jade (Villard) and E. Lynn Harris's Any Way The Wind Blows (Doubleday).

Forthcoming Titles

All the retailers PW spoke with expected strong sales from Randall Robinson's The Reckoning (Dutton), Patti LaBelle's Patti's Pearls (Warner) and Bernice McFadden's This Bitter Earth (Dutton). Carolyn Reed, store manager at Karibu Books in Hyattsville, Md., predicted that her customers will also snap up the paperback editions of Queen Afua's Sacred Woman: A Guide to Healing the Feminine Body, Mind and Spirit (One World) and J. California Cooper's The Future Has a Past (Anchor). Andre Kelton predicts that Maya Angelou's April title A Song Flung Up to Heaven (Random House) is "gonna be huge—as will the summertime books from E. Lynn Harris, Eric Jerome Dickey and Zane."

Joi Afzal has high hopes for the paperback edition of The Black Rose by Tananarive Due (Ballantine, Feb.), a biography of Madam C.J. Walker, America's first black female millionaire, who had ties with the Denver area.

Beyond those few titles, owners said that the pickings seem slim for the holidays and beyond. "I don't see anything," said Afzal. "I'm going into the Christmas season with nothing to offer. Maybe it's the part of the country we're in. We've bought and sent back a lot of different books."

"There is not a big book this year as there has been in other years," agreed James Fugate, co-owner of EsoWon Books in Los Angeles, although he feels Patti's Pearls will do well.

Martina Burnley of The Apple Book Center, isn't impressed either. "I'm going through the spring catalogues looking for some of the big names that already have a following, but nothing's jumping out at me."

What It Takes

These retailers have no illusions about what they must do to stay in business. "Staying tuned to what the customers are asking for" is key, according to Vera Warren Williams. "You don't buy according to your taste; you stock based upon what your customers want."

"You have to have more in your store than just new titles to compete," added Fugate.

"We try to make sure we have a mixture of contemporary books with things they can't find in those stores that are taking away some of our business," said Michele Lewis, owner of The Afro American Book Stop in New Orleans. "Once we get them in here, they see what we have, and with the handselling, we can help them make a selection."

"Anything that turns up on the New York Times bestseller list does not sell here," said Martina Burnley. "Our people are just not interested. But we call ourselves a multicultural store, so we'll sell John Grisham and James Patterson, the Oprah books and self-help authors Dr. Phil McGraw and Cheryl Richardson. We're trying to carry what sells."

"We have a core group of customers that we know," EsoWon's Fugate told PW. Last year, that knowledge helped him sell eight copies of a $500, signed, leather-slipcased, two-volume limited edition of The Complete Jacob Lawrence (Univ. of Washington).

Each retailer stressed the importance of handselling, knowing their customers and using creative ways to promote books—through newsletters, events, staff recommendations and eye-catching displays. Each bookseller offered his or her recipe for keeping on top of titles customers want.

"You have to encourage people to take chances on their reading choices," said Andre Kelton. "We are thinking about starting a shelf for underappreciated titles, such as Solomon Jones's Pipe Dream [Villard], Kenji Jasper's Dark [Broadway], Christopher Chambers's Sympathy for the Devil [Crown] and Percival Everett's Erasure [Univ. Press of New England]."

At the Community Book Center, Vera Williams solved the problem of too many galleys and not enough time to read them. She passes them on to her regular customers who have read practically all the books she stocks. "It saves them from always buying and gives others a chance to share their opinion."

Quality Control

Readers and retailers alike have begun to voice their dissatisfaction with badly written and edited books, many of which are self-published. "I don't normally buy the self-published books—my customers complain," said Joi Afzal. "So I don't even set them up for that. The covers don't look good, and there's poor editing."

"They're not worth the paper they're printed on," said one retailer about such self-published titles. "Everybody wants to write a book. They go to Kinko's and make copies and staple it themselves and want you to sell it and hold a book signing for them!"

Another store owner agreed: "Even a lot of the popular fiction writers can't write; [their books are full of] grammatical errors. I think it's disgraceful for a publisher to allow such mistakes. It's funny that often PW reviews of this kind of book will say it's badly written or that it has no plot—but at the end they say that it should do well for the audience the book's intended for. I would love to see editors become conscious of the fact that there's a resentment building among readers as to the quality of the books."