Urban-fiction set to heat up the summer with hot new titles

Jet, April 7, 2008 by Melody K. Hoffman

Popular urban-fiction authors are pleasing fans with several new releases and sequels in the hot genre-just in time for readers to enjoy on their spring and summer vacations.

Author and CEO of Triple Crown Publications Vickie Stringer, dubbed the Queen of Hip-Hop Literature, is boasting four new releases under her independently owned publishing company.

Stringer, who publishes over 45 novels and 35 authors, is a veteran of urban fiction, also called hip-hop fiction, gangster lit and street lit. These stories are usually set in the world of crime, drugs, hustlers and thugs. The genre displays a street sensibility by using the language of people in the 'hood.

These stories have been repackaged for a new generation. It shares pedigree with the work of 1970s authors such as Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim, who mastered the gritty depictions of street life and shady characters.

Stringer penned her first novel, Let That Be the Reason, while serving a seven-year federal prison sentence for drug trafficking. In 2001, after completing her semi-autobiographical cautionary story detailing the consequences of street life, she says no one would publish her book, so she did it herself.

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"I remember praying and wanting to change my life and I believe God said to me write and tell your story and share the dangers of the drug game," explains Stringer, who was recently honored as Entrepreneur of the Year by Ball State University with the Ascent Award.

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"I was a first time offender, young girl ... and I thought being a drug dealer's girlfriend was what was up. That's how I got into a life of crime and ultimately I wrote for therapy and kept a journal while I was in prison. [Forming my company] came as a result of not being able to get a book deal to save my life, so I had no choice but to self-publish ... I got letters saying nobody wants to read this and there was no audience for this market."

Consequently, the audience eventually grew and so did the amount of authors in the genre. Mainstream book publishers were forced to take notice.

"Publishers started to see books like this were selling in non-traditional markets and with non-traditional tactics," notes Louise Burke, executive vice president and publisher of Pocket Books.

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"We here at Pocket published a book by someone who was literally in the subways screaming to everybody, 'Come get my book, it's fantastic.' It was the hip-hop story by Heru Ptah and that was one of our first entries into this genre. It reached critical mass several years ago and then we published 50 Cent's autobiography and talking with him, we learned he wanted to particularly get young male readers to books. So he felt he could lend his name to a project that would allow that to happen which is where we came up with our 50 Cent, G-Unit list," Burke says of the rapper's imprint with the book company.

Shannon Holmes has also found his niche in this market. Holmes' self-taught career catapulted after writing his acclaimed first novel in prison, B-More Careful. Since then, he's earned two six-figure deals with Simon & Schuster and currently with St. Martin's Press.

Holmes, who in June is releasing Bad Girlz 4 Life, the sequel to his major hit Bad Girlz, told JET he was attracted to this genre because of the "element of danger."

"The origin is it's street, it's grimy, it's graphic. This isn't a lifestyle; this is my life. What's ironic about the situation now is that some of the same things I did that got me locked up is the same things I write about," points out Holmes, who signed his first contract in 2000 while serving his last year of a five-year sentence for various drug convictions.

"Whatever got me in trouble, are the same things that are feeding my family. That's just poetic justice for me ... I went in jail a criminal and came out with a career."

Holmes says he gained inspiration from authors "already in the game" such as Teri Woods (True To the Game) and Sister Souljah, whose 1999 streetwise book, The Coldest Winter Ever, has become a phenomenon, selling over one million copies.

"It's only natural for people to write about the places that they spent most of their lives in, and I think that's the reason why you have so many authors who grew up in urban environments writing stories that have taken place in urban environments," Souljah explains to JET of the expanding genre she helped revive.

"The publishing industry did not realize that there was a huge market of Black readers. A lot of people in publishing fell victim to the same stereotypes that people in the mainstream fall victim to: Black people either can't read or can't write or don't read and don't write," contends Souljah, whose new novel will be available for purchase this year.

"When The Coldest Winter Ever came out ... it took to task those stereotypes and it showed that yes Black people love great stories like every other people from every other culture."

By Melody K. Hoffman

JET MAGAZINE

New and Forthcoming Urban-Fiction Titles