Non-fiction book reviewing source geared toward an African-American audience?

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This is a professional (library-related) question really. I often feel that mainstream reviewing sources are inadequate for locating books and authors specifically of interest to African-Americans. Specifically, I've somewhat belatedly realized that while African-American patrons often come in asking for books from an Evangelical &/or Pentecostal perspective, simply ordering bestsellers or well-reviewed books from the major Evangelical/Pentecostal publications (that I know of, anyway) produces very mixed results (i.e., plenty of those titles end up sitting on the shelf).

Any suggestions? I'm looking for something for a popular, not primarily academic, audience (although the latter might be useful too).

― Rockist_Scientist (RSLaRue), Monday, 23 January 2006 15:28 (nineteen years ago)

I wonder how helpful your area booksellers would be about this -- there's definitely stuff on that end of the trade, aimed at book buyers and such.

― nabisco (nabisco), Monday, 23 January 2006 19:48 (nineteen years ago)

That's a good idea (that I should have thought of before). I can think of a couple stores off-hand that would be worth talking to about this.

― Rockist_Scientist (RSLaRue), Monday, 23 January 2006 19:57 (nineteen years ago)

Dude, a couple months ago I talked to a random guy in a coffee shop who I'm pretty sure worked for a publication like that. But I can't for the life of me remember the name.

I think it was actually an unusual sort of combination of higher and lower-brow African American lit. The guy was telling me about "street lit" -- those self-published romance-type books that get sold off of carts.

― Abbadavid Berman (Hurting), Monday, 23 January 2006 20:21 (nineteen years ago)

specifically of interest to African-Americans. Specifically

Ugh.

― Rockist_Scientist (RSLaRue), Monday, 23 January 2006 20:59 (nineteen years ago)

Ugh.

It's just the interweb, dude.

― Aimless (Aimless), Monday, 23 January 2006 21:31 (nineteen years ago)

http://www.bibookreview.com/

― scott seward (scott seward), Tuesday, 24 January 2006 00:10 (nineteen years ago)

two weeks pass...

Hi, I don't know what this board is, but I happanned to come across it and I wanted to help if I could. As a librarian your distributers -- Koen, Ingram, bookpeople, etc -- may make catalogues of books of special interest to African Americans. There also used to be a few distributers of african american books here in brooklyn; I can't recall their names but googling might uncover them. And of course black issues book review, as referenced above.

Best of luck.

― Sara Gran, Tuesday, 7 February 2006 22:07 (nineteen years ago)

Thanks, I do sometimes order directly from catalogues. I only select books on religious topics, actually, so that narrows things down a bit.

scott, that looks okay, but I'm not sure there's that much there in my subject areas.

― Rockist_Scientist (RSLaRue), Wednesday, 8 February 2006 01:02 (nineteen years ago)

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