At Striver's Row, the black imprint at Villard, Melody Guy at times gets over 100 submissions a week, which gives "an idea of how excited black writers are about the possibility of being published by someone other than themselves".
"I'm not sure it wouldn't take customers out of black bookstores," said Denise Stinson, who is also founder of a new black imprint for Warner Books, Walk Worthy Books, specializing in Christian fiction and nonfiction.
Anita Diggs, head of Ballantine's black imprint, One World Books, said that she was publishing 11 hardcover titles between now and August and that so far recession was not affecting black book sales.
Melody Guy, an editor for Strivers Row, a black imprint at Villard, which started publishing trade paperback commercial fiction in January, said that "most of our first novels have an initial printing of between 17,000 and 20,000 copies, and a majority of them went back for second and thirds, and most are paying royalties".
Janet Hill, who heads Harlem Moon, Doubleday's black imprint and who also edits and acquires hardcover African-American books for Doubleday, said that black readers "tend to be very, very loyal to writers they like and come back again and again, so we have to search for quality" and not lean toward buying a book simply to help the writer.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the Afro-American Studies depattment at Harvard and editorial consultant at Basic Civitas Books, the black imprint of the Perseus Books Group, said: "This reflects the new capacity of the broader American reading public to identify with black characters; the black experience is a metaphor for the larger human experience.
Random House Inc. has three of the black imprints.
A couple of mainstream publishers decided against black imprints.
The major publishers started their black imprints partly to capitalize on the marketing potential of that grass-roots network.
He warned that the current interest in black imprints is a fad and that mainstream publishers are fickle.
One would suppose that sooner or later the book publishing companies in New York would contribute to these programs for aspiring black authors, if for no other reason than that the black imprints in publishing will need a constant supply of good writing.
