“It’s not that black readers aren’t buying books… [but] it’s extremely hard to have a viable career in publishing without support from a wider (read: not exclusively black) audience. And it’s difficult for black authors, especially of literary fiction, to develop the buzz that sells books. White readers don’t hear our books discussed generally (except, of course, the ones by heavy hitters such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and a few others). And without media exposure and water-cooler talk, they don’t know which of our books they might like.”