Check out the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal, as Jeffrey Trachtenberg considers the question of where to shelve African-American fiction writers: “in African-American departments, a move that often helps nurture writers, [or] presented alongside other categories, such as general literature, allowing books written by black authors to take their place in publishing’s mainstream?” It’s a significant question because, at least for the first nine months of this year, black fiction appears to be performing at a better financial pace than the rest of the industry. Over at Bookspan, to take another perspective, the Black Expressions book club is more than 100,000 members ahead of the Book of the Month franchise and is “expected to generate double-digit growth in both its sales and membership through the next few years.”
Still, there’s the lingering question, as posed by Marva Allen of Harlem’s Hue-Man Bookstore: “How many white readers will browse through a book when the front cover depicts black characters and the author is black?” Trachtenberg talks to plenty of writers who accept that initial premise, dealing with it either as ghettoization or the existence of a built-in audience—it’s too bad there isn’t any significant challenge to the assumption, though, because the success of Walter Mosley or, on a lesser commercial scale, the late Octavia Butler does present some other ways to think about the issue.