The American Slave Coast's Next Printing

amazilla still has copies but CRP itself ran out. The reprint took 5 weeks to manufacture, but they'll have copies again either today, tomorrow or Wednesday. So orders for CRP's  Christmas deal of 50% off will be able to be serviced -- before Christmas arrives, yay.

Of course CRP's e-book edition continued / continues to be available even though they sold out of the hardcover print copies.

At the party yesterday, four people ordered copies of TASC via their phones, right before our eyes, after our hostess brought out her copy to show the other guests. And then, of course, we had to talk about it.  This was fun, since we hadn't seen a lot of the other guests since a party at the 4th of July, when we were killing ourselves to get the final book turned in.

This was a party of latinos, mostly Puerto Rican and from the Dominican Republic, mostly young or youngish. For those whose roots are in the DR, many of them were first generation here, coming to NYC mostly when adolescents, to live here with other relatives and get an education, leaving their parents in the DR. They work in fashion, music, art, film, theater, marketing, publicity: for instance, one of the women from the DR had played a role in the Lincoln Center

performance of John Guare's Free Man of Color at Lincoln Center and for a limited Broadway run, (2010 - 2011) based on The World That Made New Orleans. Not exactly intellectuals, but sharp, well-informed, well-rounded, inquiring and, of course, fun. And very good dancers.

So, I think the Publisher's right about The American Slave Coast. No matter how ignored by the mainstream white publishing industry [ a/k/a to quote one of our African American friends, "Welcome brother and sister to being black!]  whenever anyone finds out about this book, they want to have it, and they go and get it. So Publisher categorized this as an "evergreen title," meaning one that will, like

The World That Made New Orleans, and Cuba and Its Music, continue to sell for years.

The reviews at amazilla (when someone else reads the new ones to me) seem to indicate this is so as well.

And soon, The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans, about experiencing last annual New Orleans cycle before Katrina and the developer/politician agenda shredded so much of what had been as constant as the Nile River's cycle before Aswan -- will be re-published in a trade paperback.

Not bad Christmas news, this.