Oftentimes as authors we have to make the pitch whenever we’re at a trade show, book festival or other places to sell our books in our booths, our hands or when cards are passed out. What we miss is that we actually have to open our books and show potential buyers why they should invest in the titles we write.

I learned this lesson all too well from a long time friend years ago at one such citywide event. He noticed sales weren’t picking up for me and I had a case of ‘standing behind the boothitis’ so he encouraged me by taking one of my books, opening it up and advising me to hold it in front of people as they’re looking at it. At first my ego wouldn’t let me understand the sound reasoning behind this gentleman’s words but I tried it a couple of times during the day and although sales didn’t improve, I felt better in opening myself up, so to speak by cracking the pages of my book wide for everyone to see. Aspiring and new authors have to understand this one fact if they’re going to make it past their first year; you’ll have to be vulnerable to everyone, including your critics by showing the insides of your book.

Because I write poems, I do have a choice in the pieces I prefer readers to go over and see if they like the ones I selected. There are times when readers will pick up your title and browse through it without going to the poems you chose for them. Sometimes a sale is made on a poem I didn’t suspect would be a favorite of the reader, sometimes they comment they don’t like poetry and move on. With prose, readers have their own method of deciding whether or not they want to buy the book. They’ll look at the beginning, then ending and will want to explore what happens in between, if they’re compelled to buy. That’s one of many examples I’ve found out in my discussions with other writers from their own experiences. Others may vary.

The time will come when you’ll have to open your book, all of it and allow the accolades, the polite brush-offs, and even the stinging critiques from passer-bys when the observe the pages of your book. We’re so protective of our ‘babies’ that we take it personally whenever a negative comment is said. Either it’s the cover design, the plot, subplot, theme and dialogue not favorable in the minds of the discerning reader. The fact as an author you published a book is a risk, going out and marketing your book by word of mouth, book fairs or other engagements is a bigger one. Yet, you have to take it because you wrote the book for a reason, so it’s your responsibility to see it through. Eventually, the more you make your book visible and appreciate the positive comments and shrug the negativity, the more you as a new author will find it’s part of the territory of what you do. You have to be vulnerable when you’re starting out, but if you’re persistent one day you’ll have the experience of being untouchable – of critical words anyway.

Stay on the path of your dream. No one can deny you passage of your goals but you.

As a writer and poet, I deal with using words to construct the ‘perfect story’. I use sentences to frame a crucial scene with the protagonist in the tale determining his survival or death. The trick of the trade, as it’s been often said.

Words also affect us in multiple ways. The addition or subtraction of one in a sentence even determined the fate of mankind:

“ye shall surely die” or “ye shall not surely die”

If you don’t believe that makes a huge difference, consider the fates of Adam and Eve, forever changing the course of eternity and the Creator’s plan. So whether we believe it or not, words not only through our lips, but our written papers, our keyboards, etc, can leave a huge impact on how a generation views an opposing country, opposite genders, even an entire race of people.

Case in point: the infamous Willie Lynch letter.

Recently, I was editing a manuscript for a friend of mine and found the passage where Mr. Lynch ‘allegedly’ mentioned his agenda for controlling slaves. When I first viewed the speech, the words struck a nerve with me. Not only was I offended by what the plan of slave control entailed, I was steamed to believe this ‘gentleman’ actually believed it would last for ‘300 hundred years’. I was so piss…wait.

300 hundred years? Isn’t that a grammatical error?

I admit slave owners may or may not have been fully articulate, but I’m sure they would know 300 and the wording of three hundred years meant the same, right? According to this historian, this is one of the pieces of evidence the letter read by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and resurfaced since the 1990’s, even posted on several select websites, is a hoax. Another historian also confirms the letter is not as authentic as we’re led to believe and in fact, false. Of course, the reaction to the Lynch letter has inflamed passions beyond belief among our African-American society and online sites debating the merits of the letter, from debunking the actual person who wrote it to insisting the cruel methods of control he mentioned back then are still in place for us now.

Whether you believe the Lynch letter is for you to decide. What is true is that even if Mr. Lynch never uttered those unfortunate prophetic words, they still haunt us today. For example, twenty years ago there was an anti-violence song by East coast artists warning us about Self Destruction. The West coast version was We’re All In The Same Gang. Not too many years after that, the regrettable regression among us occurred as we picked a side, or rather a coast in the battle of East and West, originally Tupac versus Biggie.

With this conflict, we made Mr. Lynch’s disciples proud. We even restrict ourselves with our self-hate slang words and unconscionable words of just ‘being real’. Real to what? Real to the author of the Lynch letter? Ah, but I digress.

No doubt as a race, Black people have faced a plethora of atrocities by America’s unmoral slave legacy and even the election of a President of a different hue can’t correct them or take them all back. However, it is interesting to see whoever penned those words representing Mr. Lynch has caused the firestorm of debate in the links posted earlier. Yes, we have serious problems among our young and old, but what about finding a solution to those problems? In the world of opinion, there are a thousand voices offering them, but not one definite solution as effective as the derogatory explanations explored in the Lynch letter.

We often find ourselves claiming to be unified, only to lose focus years down the road because we fail to keep in mind our causes, our dreams, our goals as a race are so much bigger than a ‘beef’ of two individuals. However, we wind surrendering to those myths we have about ourselves, such as beliefs the West coast Blacks aren’t as dedicated to the race as those on the East coast, or the internal House vs. Field Negro conflicts within our communities, and other fabrications we use as fact. Five years after the call for unity and stopping the violence among us, during which that time frame an entire city burned, we threw away any long lasting opportunities for achieving accord by allowing media to dictate who we are, where we stand and where we plan to go. What should have been a regular dispute by two musical artists and their companies and kept that way – wound up to a needless and wasteful amount of energy – thereby creating the Lynch letter’s ideals alive and without knowing it at the time, made self-destruction a prophesy instead of a rallying cry bringing us closer.

If anything, the Willie Lynch letter can either bring us together to create a new agenda of unity – and even that can be difficult even if it is achieved because no one will ever be pleased – or it can further cripple us for another plus ‘300 hundred years’ and more by repeating the same things the writer described, consciously or not, with no possible conclusion except to be eternally hampered by the words of one man. Not the words from an upright serpent mind you, but the sting is just as deadly.

One more thing: the second raging controversy is the fact Frederick Douglas addressed Mr. Lynch in one of his essays, but the great orator’s name is often spelled as Douglass with the extra S. Once again, this proves the power of words spelled or misspelled does have a powerful effect on the message and messenger.

For example, either the person who wrote this is Charles Chatmon or Charles Chatman. Click on both links for the example.

Take care.

What happens when suspense novelist Chandra Adams goes one on one with the acclaimed author of the Vampire Huntress Legend Series, Leslie Banks? You might get to enjoy a treat like this from the LA Black Book Expo, part of the North Bay Media Review/Empire Beat Magazine combo. Take care!

From the ‘reach out and touch’ department…….

The past couple of weeks have been busy with another successful writers workshop at AC Bilbrew Library in L.A., maintaining a mobile bookstore here in my new location of Northern California, and now that I’m done with book events for the rest of the year, I have time to finish my first novel which should be completed hopefully at the end of December.

For those of you who may not know it, I have made the move up to Vallejo and although the city is under a microscope due to a historic ruling, I’m enjoying my time here and from the change of pace that is Los Angeles. Chandra’s blog, Sweet Home Vallejo can fill you in on what’s going on in the city better than I can. Besides, I enjoy reading it anyway and maybe if I’m nice, she’ll let me write a couple of pieces.

Empire Beat Magazine has published a cute article about the L.A. Black Book Expo on their site in their Reviews section you can find (through some hard work) on their site. As far as the other projects, the only site neglected has been – you guessed it – Authors N Focus. Needless to say, despite the inactivity with interviews, I’ve been working on links for the Resource page and have found through my research on the publishing industry and their nemesis, Amazon.com, that digital readers are here to stay. I don’t have time to go into all the details right now but it is assured the Kindle, Reader, Nook and Knack (not a real device, just made that one up) are going to remain in our public consciousness for a long time to come. I’ll add that this opens up a new realm of possibilities for aspiring and new authors if they look at the signs. Obviously, Amazon’s on fire right now with not only the Kindle, but their entire website. So it’s worth taking a look at their model and witness how they are head and shoulders above their competition right now. Again, I don’t have time to go into details and offer my opinions about them, rest assured the time will come and since I’m pursuing my dream of opening a ‘brick and mortar’ shop in the near future, it’s best to express my concerns as a rookie in the bookseller game.

So there’s a lot happening with me, and more will be revealed as time goes on. Take care.

Here's the video of what happened back in July. Enjoy!