The RomerReview

All your life you've been in love with books. So much so that they were intimate, close at hand, and inseparable. You grow up with them, and in your adult life you somehow have to figure that nothing is intact until you make time for those books to redefine why they are so important to you. Enter the dawn of a new age where computers have ascended to levels of such importance that they've given your books yet, another way to be exposed to them. The internet spreads its wings, becomes a must visit location, and you're hooked! You've become disenchanted with your live book club, and you want to explore your aspirant nature to become a writer, never mind that you're reading more and more. What are you to do? Alas! The online book club is more than a germ and you find yourself joining several of them to satisfy your literary muse. Does this sound familiar?

In the world of literature, the stakes are high and everyone is jockeying for position to make sure that books are sold and authors can gain household names to insure future marketability. The American publishing industry and mainstream bookselling keep raising the bar, and everyone else scurries to keep pace. They know all too well that people in book clubs buy a lot of books, especially black folk. The advent of ways to stay solvent and to get the word out is prevalent and widely advocated by the popularity of the internet. It is this phenomenon that has fueled the ongoing need for high visibility and viability in the growing membership in black book clubs. This can be witnessed on and off of the internet. Nowadays, publishers are bending over backward to accommodate book groups, and are always looking for ways to talp in to the book club market.

Every major publisher prints readers' guides, fills its web site with discussion tips and author biographies and sets up conference calls between groups and authors. In the African-American community we are reading, writing, and running to the bank as we endeavor to let the powers to be that we still need to be reckoned with. We have established and embellished the bastions of our bailiwick (see December 2002 of The Romer Review, and know how important it is to support our constituents, and network effectively. There's something for everyone.

Last year I read a report where one of the more popular book clubs, The Sistah Circle of Dallas got fed up with ennui and decided to rent a bed-and-breakfast in Gainsville, Texas...some eighty miles north of Dallas so they could do something different. AA book clubs for the most part varies and offer different venues. Take for instance, the unique African-American Book Club Summit at Sea. This annual floating retreat grew out of the Good Book Club in Houston founded in 1996 by a group employed at the Johnson Space Center. More than 500 plus members strong now via their cyber unit on the internet the idea was planted to meet in person. Making the call were 160-200 members from various other book clubs and twenty-seven willing authors for the inaugural cruise. Now celebrating their third year together, this group leaves from such ports as Galveston, Tx; New Orleans, and Miami. Stepping out of cyberspace is just what two other clubs did this year -- The GRITS and Tee Cee Royal's RAWSistaz Reading Group.

With all of this in mind, I still ask the question, Are Online Book Clubs Necessary? The current issue of The Romer Review, attempts to delve into this in an informal way in reporting about online book clubs and their effect on the African-American literary industry. In this, we have queried a few authors, and other industry-related personnel to hear their take on the overall book club scene. In order for our feature to be truthful, balanced and accurate, we felt that a few good people who could shed light on issues should amplify meaningful input.

In upcoming issues, online AA literary sites will also be selected as featured entities that will be discussed here subsequently. We will give insight in a relative three-part report. Keep in mind that this is not an in-depth report which is definitive to our community, but touches deep enough to give our readers enough to chew on. We realize that books clubs have come a long way in how books are sold, distributed, and discussed, as well as other bigger-than-life portals where content can be viewed. Authors too, realize that having a site to tout their books and give the reading public windows into their personas is par for the course. More often than not, avid readers and the people that write these books are using cyberspace as an effective tool...and we want to know why. Suffice it to say these book clubs and related sites have their own agendas and mission to accommodate various options for the type of readers they cater to, just as its different things to different people.

To wit: Marlive Harris, the co-founder of The GRITS Online Reading Club stated that, "our book club is involved in its first service project ever -- a children's book drive, where we are donating books to the kids in the Read Columbus Read program . We ran four separate $1.00 raffles with books donated to our event to raise money to buy books for the kinds in this program", when asked to comment on what can a book club do to give back to the community.

Leah Mullen in an earlier interview asked the founder of AALBC, Troy Johnson to elaborate on the main purpose of his site. Troy enthused that, "the main purpose of the site is to promote literature, which is indicative of two trends: the publishing industry's discovery of a hungry African-American book buying community, and the ever involving use of the internet for everything from socializing to shopping!"

I surmise that books clubs are here to stay, and the only rule about them appears to be that will always be par for my course would be to read the books and turn around and talk about what you just read! Stay tuned for part two in this series -- Literary Sites: Forging A New Path For AA Literarture.

In this first segment, authors Evelyn Palfrey, Lori Bryant-Woolridge, C. Kelly Robinson, and Earl Sewell were asked a few questions about their take on books clubs. Read Interview

Past TRR Issue