Street smarts: book vendors count on foot traffic, marketing instincts and the First Amendment in the battle for profits

Black Issues Book Review, July-August, 2005 by Wayne Dawkins

Selling books on the street can be intimidating and confusing, yet it's a lucrative business for the aggressive and savvy, say authors and booksellers who play the game.

It is played hardest on the sidewalks of New York City, specifically in Harlem, explained Clara Villarosa, who operated a bookstore in Denver and in 2002 opened Hue-Man Bookstore on 125th Street with her partners before retiring earlier this year. [See BIBR, May-June 2005, "Starting Over."]

"There is no street like that," Villarosa says. "For three to four blocks, there is a high concentration of wall-to-wall African American street traffic; you can hardly walk."

That's why street bookselling is a New York City phenomenon that does not really exist in other black metropolises, says Villarosa. In Harlem, she adds, "Vendors number about three to four per block, from St. Nicholas to Lenox Avenues. They set up their card tables on the south side of 125th Street."

These vendors offer variety. "They're selling what people ask for," says Villarosa. "They offer mainstream best-sellers like The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (Doubleday March 2003), as well as books by black authors from mainstream houses or self publishers."

Vendors also move many "remainders," publisher overstocks they obtain at 80 percent off the retail price, then sell to customers as half-price off bargains. For example, Terry McMillan's k Day Late and a Dollar Short (Signet Books, January 2002) is an old overstock to the publisher, but it is a reasonably new, saleable book to African American customers, says Villarosa.

Also popular with black customers are softcover school workbooks and children's books, she says.

Urban Lit Hits

Vendors carry a wide selection of the dries because they want to have what people ask for. But a handful of booksellers and authors say so-called urban literature dominates the street scene.

Villarosa says initially many self-published authors hawked their books on the street, but over time, chain bookstores saw an income stream and this genre ended up on bookshelves of Borders, Barnes and Noble or Wal-Mart, as well as on Web sites like Amazon.com. Mainstream publishers and new urban-oriented publishers have also begun turning out the books, often contracting with authors who were once self-published.

Julia Shaw, a Queens, New York-based book publicist and former bookseller, says urban fiction writers and other self-published authors who sell on the street create a climate "that is almost equal to having their books in retail stores."

"Why? The books on the street are there in front of the people," she says.

"Self-published authors are using their own money. They're under pressure, and selling on the street is a quicker way of making their money back than working with distributors,"

Brenda Piper of Queens, New York, says she and Carol Rogers began street book vending in the late 1990s and continued through 2002. Now they operate C&B Book Distribution. Their customers include street vendors.

The Peddlers' Picks

What are the hot titles that vendors want?

The top five titles carried and sold on the streets, according to distributors and street sellers are: Caught in the Struggle by C. Rene West (Primadonna Publishing Inc., December 2004); Dutch by Teri Woods (November 2003); A Hustler's Wife by Nikki Turner (Triple Crown Publishing, March 2003); The Last Kingpin (Relentless Content, February 2004), Platinum Dolls (February 2000,) and other titles by Relentless Aaron; and The Willie Lynch Letter and the Making of a Slave by Kashif Malik Hassan-el (Lushena, March 1999).

Piper says that all popular sellers each move at least two to three cases of books a week, or about 100 to 150.

If vendors don't have certain titles in stock, says Villarosa, customers might ask the street seller, "can you have it tomorrow or in three days?" The vendors go to the local distributor and get the product.

David Reeves, of Sellers Books, Inc., "also in Queens, New York, says a number of his regular street vendors ask for five to 10 copies each of about 20 different authors.

"Conspiracy books" says Villarosa, sell well on street, too. Popular sellers, Reeves and Piper agree, include The Willie Lynch Letter and the Making of a Slave. It is a perennial on the BIBR FLYING OFF THE SHELVES list (see page 78) and is based on 18th-century writings about how to control the master/slave relationship. Another is Behold a Pale Horse (Light Technology Publications, December 1991) by William Cooper, which explores various theories on assorted, alleged government "conspiracies."

The Art of War

Street-book selling inspired an independent film, Book Wars by Jason Rosette, that in 2000 took viewers inside the sometimes zany world. A review that year by John High explained that street booksellers acquired stock from estate sales, remainder bins, foundations, used books stores and trash heaps.

Black street vendors, says Shaw, can trace their starts to Luther Warner of Lushena book distributors in Chicago about a 12 years ago. Shaw worked for the company then and explained: "He used to give the vendors books on consignment, then they would 'balance' and pay for what they sold, sixty percent for Lushena, forty percent for them."