Lloyd Hart has sold 190 copies of The Covenant with Black America from his two kiosks in Boston and online.

“I would have sold more if it hadn’t been for the fact that we couldn’t get more books for about three weeks,” Hart told BlackAmericaWeb.com.

Brisk book sales around the country have boosted the 240-page book -- conceived and edited by Tavis Smiley and published by Third World Press -- to the top of the New York Times bestseller list to be published on Sunday, April 23.

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The Covenant with Black America

The Covenant with Black America is the first non-fiction book published by a black company to reach and top the best seller list, Third World Vice President Bennett Johnson told BlackAmericaWeb.com.  The Chicago-based company has sold more than 250,000 copies of the paper back book since late January.  “We’ve been selling 10,000 to 15,000 books a week,” Johnson said.

Johnson said Third World published The Covenant in record time.

“We received the manuscript in November, and within 60 days, we had published 50,000 copies,” he said. “We’ve been doing this for 30 years. We know the business.”

He estimates that 250,000 new book titles are published each year, and less than one percent of those titles come from black-owned publishing companies.

“This is history. It says to the industry, ‘Just because we are black-owned doesn’t mean we can’t be successful,’” Johnson said.

One of the greatest challenges for Third World has been keeping up with the demand. “We know we are behind,” Johnson said. "These books often are already committed before they are delivered."

The advertising for the book has been handled by R.J. Dale Advertising and Public Relations, a black-owned company also based in Chicago, he said.

The regular price for The Covenant in most places is $12, but Hart sells it at $7.99 through his Black Library Booksellers website.

“This is a community service. I just want to get the message in this book out there,” Hart said. "I realize I may just break even on this one. I can take that loss because, really, it’s a gain.”  He has one kiosk in downtown Boston and another in a transit station in Roxbury.

When he learned of Hart’s commitment to The Covenant, Smiley told BlackAmericaWeb.com: “Every time I hear a story like that, I am emotionally moved, often times to tears. It says that there are so many in our community who want to do their part to help make black America better.

“This notion of us not caring about our destiny is wrong," Smiley maintained. "It says that the old adage of keeping a secret from black folks by putting it in the pages of a book has now been crushed.”

Robert A. Smith, professor of political science at San Francisco State University, said the success of The Covenant is tied directly to the man behind it, the message it presents and the marketing tools used for getting the word out.

“The Covenant presents a fairly comprehensive identification of problems in the black community, and its presents solutions,” Smith told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “But it also comes with a follow-up. What happens in the next political race? What happens next year?”

A nationally known politician would not have had the same success in presenting the book, Smith said.

“All things being equal, if Mel Watt of the Congressional Black Caucus had presented this, the appeal would not be the same,” Smith said. “Tavis has that star power.”

The Covenant was introduced in February at Smiley’s annual State of the Black Union in Houston. That event attracted some 35 top political, economic and social leaders in the country. It was broadcast live on C-SPAN.

After the Houston presentation, Smiley took the show on the road, holding Covenant forums in key cities across the country such as Oakland, St. Louis, Atlanta, Memphis and New York. Other forums are being planned in Harlem, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Indianapolis.

The next step is the Covenant Conversation and Celebration Weekend, set for Friday, May 19 to Sunday, May 21. Smiley is encouraging the public to host book parties nationwide and continue the book’s dialogue. And he's even got a special incentive.

The first 1,000 party hosts to mail Smiley a invitation to their celebration will receive a special Covenant gift pack. One party host will be selected to have Smiley and Princeton University professor Cornel West as their guests. West contributed an essay to The Covenant, along with other scholars such as Dr. David Satcher, former U.S. Surgeon General; Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League; Edmund W. Gordon of Columbia University, and Marian Wright Edelman, the nation’s most noted children’s advocate.

At the end of the city tours, Smiley said he will present strategies for putting The Covenant to work.

“We’ll wrap up the tours around the end of June. Somewhere around that time, at the close of tour, we will be sharing with black America a next-step strategy which we are working on now,” Smiley told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “How we can make The Covenant operational? How do we keep it from just being a bestseller book?

“We don’t want this book to eventually start to gather dust," he said. "How do we make this text a living breathing document? That is the next-step strategy we will unveil.”