Calculating African American Bestsellers.

Essence magazine constructs a panel of independent black booksellers to chart a new bestseller list

The arcane business of tracking African American book sales has attracted new interest in recent months, with a proliferation of new best-seller lists and related offerings.

Some of the buzz stems from a decision by Essence magazine to compile its own list of best-selling books. Beginning with it's January 2001 issue, the new list displaced the Blackboard list in Essence, according to Patrik Henry Bass, the magazine's books editor.

Faye Childs, who founded Blackboard African American Bestsellers in 1991, now known as Blackboard Publishing Co., told BIBR that she was not happy to lose the Essence exposure, but that she took credit for making the magazine more book-oriented in the years she provided the list.

"I am very proud of that," said Childs, who is based in Columbus, Ohio "That is part of the goal in creating Blackboard. I feel I clearly laid the groundwork for them to do what they did."

Meanwhile, the Blackboard list, endorsed by the American Booksellers Association, continues to appear in respected trade publications. It will also debut in another national magazine for African Americans to be announced later this year, Childs said. Her own plans call for offering a newsletter about books on the list and publishing trends that would be free to bookstores and libraries.

Childs started research for her list when she tired of hearing the excuse that black people "did not read" as a reason she could not get a novel published. She is also working to become a spokesperson for BookSense.com, which compiles bestseller lists from independent bookstores and provides other services. She said her goat would be to get more black bookstores to report data for the list and help BookSense become the first list to track sales data specifically by race. "We are working on the best way to figure out how to do that," said Childs.

The proliferation of lists is in part because of concern over the accuracy of lists in general and which methods best serve such a specific target audience. Listmakers usually must depend on stores to tell them what is selling, and those who use the lists say there is room for manipulation of the numbers if stores want to move books already ordered.

Even in the overall book market, controversies frequently arise over how books are listed and counted. Independents and chain stores, for instance, have gone their separate ways to publish lists, and some major lists do not include independents at all, which leaves out many small African American sellers, as black industry experts point out. Differences in reading tastes by race, region or audience may make one list more relevant than another for the stores, publications and readers.

For the industry, the major driving force is money. For the writer, winning a slot on major best-seller lists can translate to higher advances on future books or bonuses tied to appearances on a list, usually the New York Times', according to the industry experts. For the sellers, reports of high sales lead to more sales, and many automatically discount best sellers. The more money involved, the more lists are scrutinized.

The Essence list is part of an expansion of the magazine's book coverage from its usual single page, up to as many as four pages that occurred last year when Susan L. Taylor became the publication director for Essence Communications Inc., and Monique Greenwood became the editor-in-chief of the magazine, according to Bass. "It's an issue of branding. We wanted to have our name attached to the booksellers lists, and we wanted to have the booksellers list available on our website," he said.

"We were looking at the book community because it is so huge--we've always known that the African American book-buying community was strong--from our parents, from our friends and co-workers, from our churches," said Bass. "It is a way to have our name out there, to show that we are very serious about our book coverage and to strengthen the brand name."

Essence bases its list of African American book purchases on data from actual sales--compiled from 20 black book stores, 19 in the United States and one in Toronto, Canada, for the first four-month reporting cycle. A different set of 20 stores will report for each four-month period. Stores were chosen from relationships developed by the magazine's marketing department for sales from the Essence book division and through outreach efforts at festivals and conferences, Bass said.

Cushcity.com started publishing a best-selling list about 18 months ago, according to Gwen Daye Richardson, Web Site Manager. Calculated from sales from the www.Cushcity.com site, combined with its Houston retail store, it is published at the website, and distributed to various African American magazines and newspapers.

Other lists that specifically track African American book consumption include QBR: The Quarterly Black Review of Books, African American Literature Book Club, which is affiliated with Barnes & Noble, and Mosaicbooks.com, an Amazon.com associate. Tracking book sales in the African American community has never been easy, because of the small share of the overall market even eager black purchasers often commanded. Books by major black writers rarely made top lists like the New York Times' until about a decade ago when African American writers like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Terry McMillan and others began enjoying acclaim and big sales in the mainstream market. Once they made the big lists, they reappeared and other African Americans made them, too.

"That is the power of lists," said Bass. Even as a young man growing up in rural North Carolina, he said, "I would see these lists and I have always had a fascination with them. How do they get this information?" According to the New York Times Book Review, "the rankings reflect sales at almost 4,000 bookstores, plus wholesalers serving 50,000 other retailers (gift shops, department stores, newsstands, supermarkets), statistically weighted to represent all such outlets nationwide."

Members of the Times' in-house polling staff that compiles the list from the data, say the stores receive a seven or eight-page list of books and are asked to report sales of each book and to report sales of any other recently released books they have sold. The list of stores represents the total continental United States, but the Times does not discuss specific stores, a representative said. Its huge base and control over number crunching gives it an edge in statistical accuracy.

While it remains the gold standard of lists, the Times has fended off controversies of its own over the last few years. It reached a legal settlement with Amazon.com, the giga-book seller that fought for the right to discount books on it, competing with the Times online partner, Barnes & Noble. The Times also spun off a children's list after the Harry Potter books threatened to swallow the main list. Amazon.com rebounded with a "Purchase Circles" service, a directory for thousands of bestseller lists, and is using the sales data to create a "recommendation engine" capable of automatically matching bestselling books with interested cyber-customers.

While consumers may use bestseller lists as buying guides, the lists are useful to booksellers as a marketing tool. Being able to cite bestseller lists "gives a little more oomph to the way you market a book," says Monica Harris, editor of Black Expressions, a direct-mail book club. "I wouldn't say we choose selections based on the lists," she continued, "but we do track some books." Now that the club has been operating for over a year it too has developed a database from which to draw and will begin using its own list of top-selling titles in its marketing later this year.