This Christmas, publishers, booksellers and street vendors are hoping for the coldest winter ever—make that hoping for other novels to repeat the phenomenal success of rap artist Sister Souljah's 1999 bestseller of the same name. The Coldest Winter Ever is not only credited as being the book that sparked renewed interest in the ghetto realism of the 1970s—and the writings of Donald Goines and Robert Beck (aka Iceberg Slim)—but it continues to sell so well that Atria reissued it in hardcover last month.
However, it's not just Sister Souljah's cautionary tale of drugs and thugs that makes today's hip-hop literature, street fiction and urban stories—as they are variously known—so hot. What helped ignite the current boom in urban African-American fiction is the unusual confluence of hip-hop culture, cheap softcover printing and, according to former John Wiley editor Earl Cox, the burgeoning prison population. "In the '80s and '90s, a lot of folks got locked up and wanted to write about it," says Cox, who now offers publishing, agenting and marketing services for African-American authors through his New Jersey—based company, Earl Cox & Associates Worldwide. "Printing got a lot more affordable. Print-on-demand technology really did help, and most printers are willing to work with authors," he notes.
Admittedly, with its urban sensibility and gritty dialogue, street fiction isn't for everyone, but where it sells, it sells extremely well. According to Barnes & Noble fiction buyer Sessalee Hensley, "It's very cut and dried. Stores that sell it sell hundreds of copies. Where it's not selling, it might as well be a brick." Not surprisingly, street lit works best in cities with large African-American populations, such as Atlanta, Boston, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, Houston, Oakland, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
For Emma Rodgers, co-owner of Black Images Book Bazaar in Dallas, "It's helping us pay our rent and lights. This category really started popping in the last year. We have a slat wall fixture when you walk in the store. You can't miss it. We even have a window with a banner that says, 'Urban Stories.' "
Street fiction is also having a positive impact on the bottom line at chain retailers. "We're experiencing double-digit growth in the category," Borders Books and Music category manager Joe Holtzman told PW. "And we'd take more. It's not overcrowded yet."
While trade paperback street lit editions sell most to black women and girls between the ages of 13 and 30, it is also read by an even more elusive and desirable demographic group: young black men. "We've been publishing for black women since the '60s," says agent Manie Barron of the Mensa-Barron Agency, citing such well-known writers as Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. "We've forgotten about the men. Up until now there wasn't anything that spoke to them. We had Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim, Down These Mean Streets, Manchild in the Promised Land, Makes Me Wanna Holler and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. That was it for us."
Bright Spots: Small Presses and Self-Publishers
Sister Souljah may have carved out an audience for street fiction, but it is self-published authors who continue to stoke the market for books about the inner-city black experience. "It's the language. There's an authenticity in the voice," says Barron. For him, the inconsistent grammar and nonexistent punctuation of many self-published street lit books, which can make mainstream editors cringe, contribute to the immediacy that make them so appealing. He also praises self-publishers and small presses for their quick response to current events. "They're not trying to turn the QE2 in the middle of the ocean. They have a dinghy," says Barron. For example, when J.L. King's On the Down Low: A Journey into the Lives of "Straight" Black Men Who Sleep with Men (Broadway, Apr.) emerged as one of the most talked-about nonfiction books of the spring, two-year-old Black Print Publishing in Brooklyn followed up with Asante Kahari's novel Homo Thug in June.
"To me, it doesn't matter who's publishing the author," says Cox, who finds many self-published novels to be every bit as good as their mainstream counterparts. "The stigma is attached to poorly edited books or memoirs only the family could care about. There are lots of bad books published by major publishers; look at remainders." His criteria for taking on a self-published author is the ability (or the clear potential) to sell more copies than many mainstream novelists, including, he quips, the combined sales of this year's National Book Award finalists.
Cox says, "I'm looking for them to move 10,000 to 15,000 copies of their book in a year. If you don't, you're not trying hard enough, or you don't have a strong enough story." One of his recent self-publishing discoveries is Alex Haley descendent Andrea Blackstone, whose Schemin' Confessions of a Gold Digger (Dream Weaver Press) came out last month.
One author who doesn't need a marketing consultant for help is Vickie Stringer, who self-published her first novel, Let That Be the Reason, in 2001, and started Triple Crown Publications in Columbus, Ohio, with a partner the following year. Stringer, who began writing while serving a prison term, has been so successful at picking books and authors that Borders's Holtzman calls Triple Crown "the Knopf of African-American books." He adds, "We love her." And with good reason: Stringer's roster of writers reads like a who's who of hip-hop literature—Nikki Turner, Tracy Brown and K'wan. Earlier this fall, Stringer added another jewel to her publishing crown when she plucked Shannon Holmes from Simon & Shuster's Atria imprint and signed him for a five-book deal for a series due out next year. (The last title in a two-book deal with Atria is due in December). But when was the last time a small indie publishing house lured an author away from a big New York trade house?
In addition, Stringer's sales have been so strong that she is planning to do her largest first printing ever, 25,000 copies, for Lisa Lenox's Crack Head (Dec.). How does Stringer settle on a print run with no sales force to call on accounts and get advance orders? She explains that she goes by preorders and e-mails through her Web site, www.triplecrownpublications.com. Although Stringer had been considering moving TCP's distribution to a larger house, her talks with Simon & Schuster recently collapsed. "A distribution deal would leave my staff—the people who stood in the trenches with me—unemployed. I can't put people out of work," she says. Ironically, Atria is Stringer's own publisher and released her most recent novel, Imagine This, in August. As an agent, Stringer also works closely with Atria, which signed with her for author Danielle Santiago's Little Ghetto Girl (originally self-published in April by Two of a Kind).
Former paralegal Teri Woods also went from self-publishing her first book, True to the Game (Meow-Meow, 1998), to publishing and distributing other authors under the Teri Woods Publishing imprint. Altogether, she has sold nearly 800,000 books, but three-quarters of her sales come from just two titles: True to the Game and Shannon Holmes's first novel, B-More Careful. What's the secret of her success? Woods says, "It's really about putting out a story that lets people, no matter who they are, bond with the characters." Being selective also helps; she publishes only one or two books a year.
For Woods, there's no advantage to going with a bigger house for her own bestselling books or for distribution. "Financially, I don't need to," she says. She can afford a 50,000-copy first printing for her next novel, the second book in her Dutch trilogy (Jan. 15). This summer, Woods started a film company to produce True to the Game and expanded the scope of her publishing program beyond street fiction. In October, she published a suspense thriller by white author Eric Enck, Tell Me Your Name.
Not a self-publisher, bestselling author Carl Weber aligned himself with a large player, Kensington Books, from the start. Perhaps it's because he's s an entrepreneur. He's got an MBA, he's co-owner of African American Bookstore (with 10 outlets in Long Island and Queens, N.Y.; Philadelphia; and New Jersey) and he's the owner of Brother Books, one of the largest sellers of books to the prison system. His first novel, Looking' for Love (2000), was a bestseller for Kensington; his newest hardcover, The Preacher's Son, is due from the company's Dafina imprint in January.
Given his history with the press, it was only natural that when Weber started a publishing house of his own, Urban Books, he signed a worldwide distribution agreement with Kensington, which took effect for his very first release, La Jill Hunt's Drama Queen (2003). "I love the Kensington family," says Weber without the tiniest trace of irony. He writes and publishes stories with "drama," because that's what his bookstore customers ask for. "I spend a lot of time in bookstores to find out what people are looking for and what self-published authors are doing. I haven't found anything exciting in the last 10 years that hasn't been self-published," says Weber.
Weber has big plans for Urban Books, which published 13 titles this year and will release two a month in 2005. He is currently negotiating to start a production company and will add a line of mass market titles as part of a joint publishing venture with Kensington. "There are so many people that want books they can throw in their bag," says Weber, who, in true urban fashion, thinks of these as "commuter books."
Big Houses Gotta Have It
Many mainstream houses have been less quick to embrace the fictional equivalent of rap, and some editors do a slow burn at the media attention these books get, to the exclusion of other titles. "The black reading audience isn't a monolith," maintains Dawn Davis, editorial director of the Amistad imprint at HarperCollins. She notes two other African-American trends: mainstream commercial fiction—Erica Kennedy's Bling (Miramax Books) and Tonya Lewis Lee and Crystal McCrary Anthony's Gotham Diaries (Hyperion)—and literary fiction—Edward P. Jones's Pulitzer Prize—winning novel, The Known World (Amistad). "We need to publish in all three areas," says Davis. One recent street fiction title that is working well for Amistad, which does four to six books a season, is Darren Coleman's Essence bestseller, Before I Let Go (Aug.), which he originally self-published through NVision Publishing. Amistad will release the sequel, Don't Ever Wonder, in fall 2005.
St. Martin's was a relative latecomer to the urban fiction trend. "I've been interested in it for a while," says editor Monique Patterson, "but K'wan's Street Dreams [a St. Martin's Griffin paperback, Sept.] was the first one. We wanted to do it right. It's so important that you do the things that are at the heart of that market. You have to go where the audience is and you have to do your research." To reach the prison market, the press worked with K'wan's agent, the ubiquitous Vickie Stringer at Triple Crown. For cover art, Patterson searched popular hip-hop magazines like Don Diva, and the company did advance galleys, posters and postcards to get the buzz going. "The main thing," says Patterson, "is word-of-mouth. It's worked very well for us for Street Dreams, especially as the shelf gets more crowded." After one trip back to press before publication, St. Martin's has close to 40,000 copies in print and is going back to press again. Meanwhile, several more hip-hop novels are in the works: Tracy Brown's Criminal Minded (May), Lisa Lenox's If I Ruled the World (June) and K'wan's Hoodlum (Aug.).
Although some critics complain that street fiction glorifies the drug world, Melody Guy, senior editor for Ballantine/One World, sees these books more as "urban Cinderella stories about the consequences of your actions." She cites former gang member and writer Y. Blak Moore (The Apostles, Sept.), whose life and work represent that kind of turnaround; his street nickname is now "Random House." Guy says, "He traded drugs for a word processor. Writing has been a way for him to change his life." She says her job as an editor is to help writers like Moore and Nikki Turner (The Glamorous Life, May 2005) grow as writers. "Nikki wants to elevate her writing," says Guy, "and we've really worked on the craft. There's a rawness to the language, and it creates a texture."
Malaika Adero, senior editor at Atria, applies the same criteria to street fiction that she does to all submissions: "I worry about the quality of the material. Is it a great read? Is the author promotable?" As for sex and violence, she says, "I don't think it's any worse than what's portrayed in other categories of fiction or in film. Whether a novel glamorizes unsavory activities depends on the reader." Although hip-hop fiction is hot, and Atria has strong authors like Shannon Holmes (Never Go Home Again, Dec.), Adero says, "we're not looking to load up." In addition, she sees the audience expanding into nonfiction, like former Def Jam Records exec Kevin Lyle's Make It Happen: The Hip-Hop Guide to Success (Sept. 2005) or Victor Woods's A Breed Apart: A Journey to Redemption, which will be reissued in paperback in January. "We have a method to the madness here at Atria," says Adero. "We publish fiction and nonfiction with the lifestyle in mind."
Kensington editorial director Karen Thomas is bullish when it comes to urban lit, which the company publishes and distributes in hardcover, trade and mass through its Dafina Books imprint. "Whenever we as an independent are able to reach a new market or pull people into bookstores, that's a positive," says Thomas, noting the number of young people buying these titles. Like Adero, she includes nonfiction by and about hip-hop artists in urban lit. Dafina titles in this genre include Carl Weber's more relationship-oriented novels and Daaimah S. Poole (What's Real?, May 2005), as well as Angela Ardis and Tupac Shakur's Inside a Thug's Heart (May).
"The good thing about being in this market is it makes you be innovative," says Thomas, who regards radio interviews and giveaways as key. She also advocates advertising outside the traditional book market, in magazines like Vibe, the Source and Double XL. And Kensington doesn't stint when it comes to flexing its publishing muscle to sell rights. "We sold Polish rights for Inside a Thug's Heart. That's something self-publishing can't do," she says. "And that's indicative of where this market can be."
Firing Up the Market
Although publishers do their best to reach out to readers, occasionally it's the other way round. For instance, former librarian Jacqueline Edwards and other members of the reading group she cofounded in Antioch, Calif., Sistahs on the Reading Edge, attend both BEA and ALA in search of new books, especially by self-published writers. The club makes a point of inviting, and paying for, two self-published authors to speak at its annual book event at a local water park. In addition, the club sponsors a monthly reading group for high school students and middle schoolers. Usually, the books the kids pick are urban lit. "That what the youth want to read," says Edwards. "What I like is that it's not glorifying things like the drug culture."
This summer, Earl Cox started a quarterly book brochure and a Web site, www.booksthatclick.com, to promote forthcoming hip-hop lit and other African-American writing to Sistahs on the Reading Edge and other book clubs, street vendors, African-American booksellers, libraries, churches, hair salons and barber shops. In less than a year, the 50,000-copy glossy brochure has been so successful that he plans to take it bimonthly, possibly monthly, in 2005.
Borders's Holtzman believes mainstream publishers could learn from the guerilla tactics of small presses, who use the Internet well. "The Internet," he says, "is one of the ways the buzz gets going." He also thinks self-publishers are pricing books right as trade paperbacks. "We see people much more willing to spend $12 or $13 rather than $25 for a hardcover," he says. Of course, that hasn't stopped some houses from experimenting with hardcover, whether it's Atria's release of Shannon Holmes's Never Go Home Again or a new edition of Teri Woods's True to the Game (date not set yet).
Clearly, publishers are on the right track when they have convinced reluctant booksellers to stock their titles. "They are books I tried not to carry, but people want them. As a retailer we're not going to say, I don't want to sell 100 copies of this," says James Fugate, co-owner of Eso Wan Bookstore in Los Angeles. In fact, it can be a little too popular. Most stores stock street fiction up front, in part so they can watch for shoplifters. Although Robin's Bookstore in Philadelphia moved its display from behind the counter a few months ago, it's now "right here at the front door where we can see them," says customer service rep Kat Lakey. Robin's displays urban fiction separately, next to African-American Studies, one of its strongest sections; stores like Borders and Walden mix the two together.
Although self-publishers do a good job of reaching out to their audience, with one enterprising New York City author even setting up a signing right on Broadway where the prison bus stops, distribution can still be a problem. Culture Plus and A&B, an African-American—oriented wholesaler, service many booksellers, but Barnes & Noble's Hensley still finds distribution to be problematic. "In many cases, it's actually taking longer than three months to get them into the store," she says, citing an example of a book she spotted at BEA that only just shipped. Because of her sourcing problems, she adds, "I'm happy about mainstream publishers getting into street fiction. When they republish a title, it's just like a brand new book."
How long the urban fiction trend will continue is anyone's guess. Triple Crown, Urban Books and Teri Woods are all getting involved in feature films, and that will likely keep the market for these books hot, even if many of the movies go straight —to video. Experiments with both hardcover and mass market formats are also hopeful signs.
"This genre is going to have longer legs just because of its ties to rap music and young people," predicts Weber. "They're going to remember this for a long time—the same way I remember Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim."
