I had the pleasure of interviewing three great authors who have written three very different urban fiction books.

Erick S Gary has been on the scene since the early 2000s with Money Power Respect, Ghetto Heaven, Flexin & Sexin: Sexy Street Tales Volume 1 (Sexy Street Tales) (Sexy Street Tales), Nasty Girls: An Urban Novel, Booty Call: Who Would You Call?, Booty Call *69 and It’s Like Candy: An Urban Novel. His latest offering Crave All Lose All follows the hard hitting trend that his fans have come to enjoy.

Relative newcomer Gary Ford took Milwaukee by storm with his debut novel Give Me Mine. We get to speak about his recently released autobiography Touched and the impact Give Me Mine still has two years after being released.

Many know Conrad Glover for his work in the movie industry with straight to video releases Bottom Out, Woods of Evil, Maya’s Soul and Street Revenge. I get to speak with him about his urban fiction debut King of Stowevillage as well as future projects in film and literature.

I’m in the process of transcribing the interviews. You’ll be the first to know when the interviews are posted on UrbanBookSource.com.

Stay tuned.

Jonathan Cunningham wrote an interesting article about the (disputed) queen of Urban Lit, Vickie Stringer a couple of years ago. (via jewel’s vox blog)

I enjoyed this article because it got past the glitz and glamour of the drugs to jail to top of the urban lit industry, international publisher, rags to riches story that everyone pumps.

Don’t get me wrong, it covered that ground as a prelude to the Vickie before that time.

Did you know:

• She wouldn’t curse as child. (Way different from now)
• She used to carry a bible in her backpack everyday.
• She went to college and never went to a single class because she fell in love with a drug dealer.
• She’s from Detroit? (I thought she was from Ohio…)

On the flipside, her life makes for a good story but not a good experience. A lot of time stories like these makes people believe you have to have a terrible life to be validated in the Urban Lit industry.

I would go as far as to say that Urban Fiction is like that rap game: you have to be hood to be good.

In that regard, Ms. Stringer is like my boy O’Shea Jackson. Who? Oh, my bad… Ice Cube. He had both parents, grew up in a middle class household, gang free, blah blah blah… But look at him now. One of the kinds of gangster rap. Go figure.

I digress. It’s good to know that Vickie Stringer is human like the rest of us and has turned lemons to a big tall glass of million dollar lemonade.

(hover your cursor over the book cover to get the Amazon prices)

Although only 31 poems, Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes takes the reader in a million different directions as author Linda Addison ponders life, death and the love between. While some of the poems in this book are disturbing, like “Mourning Meal,” others are so personal that the reader may find themselves feeling like they are looking into a mirror more so than reading the words of another.

Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes is a personal collection of poetry that is timeless in its approach to be an offering of one’s soul. The level of introspective creativity will call the reader to come back to the poems in this book time and again.

The Mari Walker interview can be found here.

Urban Book Source sent me Never As Good As the First Time, and I thought it was going to be just another romance story. I was wrong as couple be since this book was anything but typical.

After UBS published my review of the book, Mari Walker actually sent them some kind words in my regards. Fast forwards a couple of weeks, I interviewed this very talented author.

Ms Walker is a very giving person, and you will be able to tell that in the interview. This informative interview couple help many authors who desire the inside track on getting published by one of the major publishing companies.

Read Mari Walker’s interview. Come back and tell me what you think.

I came across an interesting blogpost at DearAuthor.com about the way African American Romance Authors are automatically pushed to the “black section” of book store. This is done regardless of the nature of the book, the author or the readership.

(For an interesting read, check out the discussion about this subject found at Smart B’s and Karen’s blog. Also check out a related posts on JoeyPinkney.com by clicking here and here.)

Interesting? I think not. I mean, let’s think about it. This has been going on for centuries. As long as Black people have been able to write, Black literature has been lumped together. Scholars and illerate authors (oxymoron?) have had to share shelf space in the African American section of bookstore since those books were even allowed in the first place.

Back to the DearAuthor blogpost. The title is: Solutions for Greater Equality in the Romance Market. At least this group of people have taken the time to some up with viable solutions to this phenomenon.

The First Solution: Stop the niche marketing of African American novels altogether

That would bring all romance novels together.

Problem. Some African American Romance Authors like to market their novels to African American people. Just like watching a TV show just because there’s a Black person on the screen, some people pick up the book because there is a Black man and/or woman on the cover. THEN they read it for the story.

(I find myself channel surfing and stopping on a channel just because there’s a Black person on the screen. Sometimes it’s so bad that I stop just because the commercial has a Black person in it. Then a couple of minutes later I’m like, “Oh, snap. Gotta find something to watch…this is wack.”)

The Second Solution: Let authors pick and choose where they want to be shelved

HA! Yeah, right! Major corporations, in any industry, cannot afford to let the little people make the big decisions. Not gonna do it…

Although this would allow authors the power to choose how they want to be perceived, from a business standpoint things would get way too complicated.

And who cares what the authors think? If the readers are truly loyal and curious and active, they will find the authors and books they like to read. Bookstores are like pastures for grazing livestock. They show you what’s hot. You buy it. Please come again. Period. The only reason the books are on the shelves in the first place is because the bookstore thinks it will sell.

Somewhere down the line bookstores must have figured that “Black people buy Black books so let’s make it easier on them and put every Black author in one general section, unless they are a mainstream celebrity”. Thanks, but no thanks.

There was a third solution, but it’s so similar to the first one that I’m not going to cover it in this blog post.

I’ll end this one by saying this (reminds me of Springer’s final thoughts) authors can’t waste time worrying about where their books pop up in bookstore. Market to the people that read your books, and let them walk to whatever section your book has been placed.