Hustle and Grow

(2 of 3)

When he talks, Relentless sounds more like a marketing executive than a burgeoning author. "My goal is to sell into the future," he says. "You can't just come out here and sell nothing. But more than selling now, I want to create an awareness that I have an entertaining brand." That's exactly the sort of sales-speak that makes publishers dance. While most editors claim a love for literature, they need to move the merchandise. "You're more likely to find that sort of hustler, business mentality among street-lit authors," says Monique Patterson, a senior editor at St. Martin's. "The streets are all about going out and being competitive and hustling your own stuff."

Putting it in business terms, some street-lit authors have transferred their core competency to publishing from other sectors. Like drugs. K'wan was still selling marijuana at the point where his Gangsta started to fly off the shelves. He moved out of public housing in 2004--the same year he signed a book deal. But he didn't leave everything behind. "In the morning I load up my trunk and hit the streets," says K'wan. "It's the same as when I was on the block hustling, except it's a different product. I hit the street vendors in the Bronx, Harlem and Brooklyn, talk to the kids and sign a few books."

Street-lit auteur Vickie Stringer has become vertically integrated to protect her market share. Currently, she's enjoying the fruits of a six-figure book deal with Simon & Schuster. In the early 1990s, Stringer says, she was trafficking up to 30 kilos of cocaine weekly to street gangs in Ohio. She was busted and served seven years in prison. When she got out, she self-published her roman à clef Let That Be the Reason--and got nowhere. So she developed a business plan. "I finished the book in 2001, and I sent out letters to over 26 agents and publishers, and no one would touch it," says Stringer. Instead, she self-published. "I just took it to the streets, just trying to recoup my printing."

Stringer has repeatedly reinvented herself for the shifting dynamics of her genre. When a number of authors rejected by mainstream publishers approached her for advice, she founded a company--Triple Crown Publications--in her kitchen. When mainstream publishers began competing with her for authors, she started a literary agency, ensuring herself a cut from the contracts of writers who went big. K'wan was her first author and her first client as an agent. "Even when I was a hustler, I never wanted to sit on a street corner. I always wanted more control," she says. "I always wanted to have the freedom. I wanted to be the check signer, not just the receiver."

The boom in street lit has led to an equally potent, if not predictable, backlash from black writers with a more literary bent. "I've heard from agents and writers, all telling me the same thing," says author Nick Chiles (In Love and War), who blasted street lit in a New York Times editorial earlier this year. "There's all this talent out there that five years ago editors would have been clamoring over, and they aren't getting a shot. I've seen a waning of the industry's interest in contemporary black fiction."