What kinds of reactions do you get when you're on book tour-back when there were book tours?

Romance devotee Carole V Bell wrote about the most essential Black historical romances for Book Riot last year. But because it's not something else that's pictured in the mainstream movies and all of that, people had a hard time believing it, let alone wanting to publish it. If you look at the history right after slavery - the Black men who walked for months for miles across states and plantations looking for their wives - that love was real. Well, and not only the Black history, but to sell Black love. This must have been quite the experience to try to sell Black history to people who didn't seem to know very much about it. I mean, shared history is good, but if you don't share it with everybody, there's not much value in that. I had to put a very, very detailed bib list in the backs of my earlier books to answer the questions that I was getting in the run up to publication: Did black people really do this? And to also give my readers a place to start if they wanted to delve further into the history. One editor wanted Night Song anyway-but did Marketing know what to do with it? How were they gonna sell this oddball (to their minds) story? Your purchase helps support NPR programming. And they're like, what are we supposed to do with this? You know, there was no box for that!Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title Night Song Author Beverly Jenkins It's the story of a Buffalo soldier and Oberlin-educated schoolteacher in an all-Black town on the plains of Kansas in the 1880s. This is my first book, Night Song, which is still in print. So here I come with a story about a Buffalo soldier. The 'but' had to do with what we're talking about right here, because in publishing's eyes, a 19th century story concerning African Americans should have dealt with slavery. I received enough rejections to probably paper my house and yours! And most of the letters said 'Great writing, but.'

When I started the market was basically closed to African American romance writers. So I was basically just writing it for me and sort of stumbled into the publishing world. I mean, even when there was nothing in the mass media that reflected who I am and, you know, my cousins, and parents, and those people at church who had been married for 50 years and were still holding hands going to the car afterward. Many people know that you write romance-you are, as you like to say, a proud romance writer-but we don't all know why you write romance.

Indigo by Beverly Jenkins