TERI WOODS LOADED up her Mazda sedan with 300 copies of her self-published novel True to the Game In December 1999 and drove to New York City from her native Philadelphia. Standing outside Harlem's famous Apollo Theatre in frigid weather, she hawked her book to passersby during the day and slept in her car at night. In four months, she'd sold out her first printing of 4,000 copies - despite having tried to interest more than 20 mainstream publishers in the book since 1992.
Today, her two novels and the three she's published by other authors have sold 1.9 million copies, she says.
In January 2001, Vickie Stringer was released from a seven-year prison term for dealing drugs. She came home to Columbus, Ohio, with 'prison shorts, T-shirt and gym shoes' - and a manuscript. What became Let That Be the Reason was based on her experiences in the drug trade and was written in her last six weeks behind bars. Like Woods, after rejections from many publishers, Stringer self-published her novel and sold it from the boot of her car and in Columbus beauty salons and car washes, racking up 1,000 sales in just one week. The next autumn, with another ex-prisoner/writer, Stringer co-founded Triple Crown Publications, which now has 14 authors with more than 400,000 books in print.
Both women are pioneers of the latest wave of so-called hip-hop lit, which also goes by several other names, including street and urban fiction. Regardless of the label, the books explore the same themes as hip-hop music - sex, drugs, crime, doing time - and use similar language. They take place in the ghetto, and most of their characters are black. Many include a moral lesson.
Rapper Sister Souljah is credited with having unleashed the trend with her 2000 novel The Coldest Winter Ever (Pocket Books). Decades earlier, Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim wrote tales of thugs, pimps and drug dealers. In a sign of the genre's newfound popularity, a movie based on Goines' 1974 novel Never Die Alone, about a drug kingpin's turf war, was released in US theatres in July.
Lately, ghetto storytelling has been garnering such strong sales that the mainstream publishers that once snubbed Woods and Stringer are signing distribution deals with independent hip-hop imprints and bringing out their own titles. In the same way that hip-hop music first took root in America's inner cities, then moved to its suburbs and to cities all over the world, publishers are banking on hip-hop lit to catch on with audiences beyond its core African-American readership.