Publishers Working To Woo African-American Buyers

When Terry McMillan wrote “Waiting to Exhale,” she did more than pen a best seller.

She helped spawn a new industry.

Her 1991 book, chronicling the lives of four single black women friends, sold nearly 2.5 million copies and is one of Publishers Weekly’s current top-selling paperbacks. The movie version debuted as box-office No. 1 and took in $45 million in its first three weeks.

“Waiting to Exhale’s” commercial success prompted publishers to begin focusing on a market they hadn’t mined - African-American book buyers.

“This is a new, hot area,” said Paul Slovak, spokesman for Viking Press, McMillan’s publisher.

Beverly Robinson, a spokeswoman for Ballantine One World, said, “Finally, people saw that there was a market out there and that African Americans buy books.”

Although anecdotal evidence has long existed on book-buying among African Americans, a ground-breaking recent Gallup study shows that more than half of all black adults have purchased at least one book in the past three months.

The study was commissioned by the American Booksellers Association, a non-profit organization that represents more than 7,000 bookstores.

Researchers calculated that the nation’s 9.9 million black adults account for the purchase of 39.7 million books (including audio and multimedia books) during each calendar quarter.

The study, which included interviews with 662 African Americans, also found that nearly two out of five purchased books within the past 30 days.

Of these, 38 percent were fiction and 42 percent non-fiction. Another 10 percent were textbooks and 8 percent were for work or school.

The average price of books purchased was $17. Only 17 percent were sold at discount, the study said.

These findings don’t surprise some industry watchers.

“That report simply validates something that we culturally have known for quite a long time,” said Max Rodriguez, publisher of the Quarterly Black Review, a 3-year-old publication that studies the black book industry.

“We are voracious about reading books. We’ve always been.”

That hasn’t always been apparent because of the difficulty many black authors have had in getting published, Rodriguez said.

Publishers “just didn’t feel that the books would sell, so they didn’t bother,” said Dawud Abdel-Hakim, who owns Hakim’s Bookstore at 52nd and Walnut streets in Philadelphia.

Rodriguez agreed.

“Traditionally, the African American market has been underserved,” he said. “Terry McMillan was the flint that sparked that hunger for more books. She wrote the right book at the right time.”