Urban Lit is Dead!by Joey Pinkney Yep, I said it… Urban Lit is dead. Done. Finito. Flatline… Who am I to say that? I don’t have the same status in the Urban Lit industry as Nas has when he said the same thing for his music. I don’t have to. I read a lot of Urban Lit, and it’s dead. Why do I speak such blasphemous words? This sentiment stems from an email conversation I had with Therone Shellman after reading and reviewing his novel No Love Lost. (Read my review of No Love Lost, click here.) His novel was atypical and his approach to life after the streets was refreshing. Another one that comes to mind is Erick Gray’s Crave All Lose All. (Read my review of Crave All Lose All, click here. Read my interview with Erick Gray.) In brief, we discussed how Urban Lit doesn’t do justice to the situations that people are relegated to in hoods across America and beyond. The immorality and reality of the streets isn’t present in a lot of stories on the market today. Without going into detail, that book was the first one that I read in a long time that actually shined the light on the side of the game that most people see but few want to talk about. Call the Coroner… The Urban Lit genre is pumping out books with the same book covers and the same stories. Most of the authors have to boast their jail experience to get the attention and respect they think they need to sell their stories. (Sounds like rappers who have to talk about their hood exploits in order to be respected, instead of being lyrically proficient.) The Urban Literature landscape is taking the natural life cycle of all cultural trends. It’s just like Hip-Hop, born from desolation and neglect. Just like the Hip-Hop that influenced its current direction, Urban Lit has gone from being an obscurity to being shunned to being assimilated into popular culture. That’s why the larger publishing houses are following suit and creating imprints to cater to ravenous readership that Urban Lit definitely has. That’s why you can go to Barnes and Nobles or Borders or even Wal-Mart and see the latest and greatest in the (unofficial) Urban Lit section. It’s selling. Before it got it’s name, authors like Omar Tyree (who recently stopped writing Urban Lit), Sistah Souljah and Teri Woods wrote books that spoke to a group of people who couldn’t get the time of day from the larger publishing houses. The prevalent thought at the time was that “those people” don’t read. Urban Lit has now been digested and regurgitated by the large publishing houses just like Master P did to rap music during his hey day. And just like his albums covers, words are blinged out, the men look mean and the women look horny. From the Cradle… With a “for us, by us” mentality, what would later become Urban Literature was strictly a person-to-person enterprise. Authors were printing up there own books and selling them out the trunk, on the corner, mom-and-pop stores and beauty salons. Full of sex, violence and grammatical errors, these books and the readers who loved them were looked down upon by the mainstream book industry. Then the book industry got hip. “Those people” were buying those books terrible books. “Those people” were requesting sequels and anything else their favorite hood author put out there. Why? Because those books were entertaining, but they also had an underlining message. Readers could relate. Fast forward a couple of decades. Now every book cover either has a young black dude with braids, two ear rings, tattoos, sagging jeans and a mean mug or the book has a young female in her early twenties wearing something that makes it easy to figure out what the birthday suit is like. The stories are still about the hood, but nowadays there is a twist. The money, clothes, hos, jewelry, expensive cars, huge houses and the swagger runs the stories. Urban Lit authors still have to get on their grind, print up the copies and sell them by any means necessary. The difference now is that they have to compete for shelf space with the larger publishing houses. A lot of times, they have to compromise the integrity of their story to fit what the readers will buy. It’s no longer a novelty to have a book with the hood as the backdrop. To the Grave… The immorality and reality of the streets isn’t present in a lot of stories. This article actually stemmed from an email conversation I had with Therone Shellman, author of No Love Lost. Without going into detail, that book was the first one that I read in a long time that actually shined the light on the ___ side of the game. (Another one that comes to mind is Erick Gray’s ___.) Shellman is a person who has been there and done that, and it shows in his approach to his story. A lot of people complain that most of the Urban Lit books are the same three or four stories with a different title and character names. For that matter, most of the authors have the same felonious background story in their bios. It’s just like Hip-Hop nowadays. You could take a black male between 16 and 36 (because you know we stay young looking for a while) and give him a grill, some tatoos, a fitted, a throwback (or white tee), some sagging jeans (and boxers), a gold necklace with some goofy pendant, a diamond encrusted watch, and some Air Force Ones. Then put him in front of a mansion with a couple of Lambourghinis and Escalades with a buch of women in their early 20s in bikinis. Throw on some music, let him pose and point around aimlessly showing off that goofy pendant. Oh yeah, I almost forgot let him rap… That’s similar to what you see in Urban Lit. Most Urban Lit books has the guy that’s a drug dealer with all the name brand clothes and cars. He has enough jewelry to finance a small army. The problem is that that guy gets robbed and/or killed in real life. A perfect example is all of these rappers getting their chain snatched left and right. They talk all that stuff on the albums and still get robbed when they leave the studio. Where are the guns? Where are your boys? On top of the hood watching you, the cops are watching harder. Most of the dudes that make it to BET’s American Gangster get an episode because of one big mistake, being too flashy. Make a solid gold crown if you want, the cops will do everything they can to take that and everything else, including your life. Eulogy… I understand what’s going on. People don’t read Urban Lit to get the scoop on reality. Like my girl Davida Baldwin said it, “You don’t read Street Lit for self-help and motivation, you don’t read street lit to help out the community, you read it for entertainment.” If you put the average thug or hoodrat on the book cover, it wouldn’t sell. It would probably make it hard to sell the book right next to it, too. (LOL!) If it takes a model on the cover to get noticed, then sex has sold again. To be honest, authors don’t spend months and years to write a book for it to sit in a book store. They write it to hopefully put money in their pockets. The larger publishing houses are in the game to sell units. If you like it, they love it. Business is business, but we the readers should expect more from Urban Lit authors. Joey Pinkney is a freelance writer and book reviewer. He spends most of his time with his family and friends. At night he burns the midnight oil putting together articles for your reading pleasure. For more information visit: www.joeypinkney.com
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I'm out there. promoting on the streets, on the web It takes time to build a rep, especially if you're doing non-traditional African-American fiction like I do. I'm out there every day networking with Book clubs, vendors and online with readers in places like MYSpace, LinkedIn and BlackPlanet.com. Doing what I can to get sales. I see the market shifting from urban lit to more contemporary African-American fiction and I'm trying to get in on the ground floor.
How about you help a brotha starting out and buy a copy of my books? Both my titles Isis and The Cassandra Cookbook are on Amazon.com. All you have to do is type in Shawn James on the search page for books. If you buy one of mine, I'll buy one of yours.
I have been putting in countless hours pushing The Cassandra Cookbook. It's been a 24/7 promotion/sales job I've taken on since the book was published in August. As for all the black people in my neighborhood- Unfortunately I live in the South Bronx- Mostly Hispanic and many can't read in english or spanish. Worse, There are NO bookstores in the Borough; the lone one we had the Bronx Book Place closed in 2003 and was replaced with a Nextel Store. So currently to promote my book I'm traveling to Harlem to network with vendors and give them copies to sell- FOR FREE. I have dropped off books with bookstores in the area such as Hue-man, and contacted every Black Bookstore, Black Book club and review source in the country to get the word out. Waiting for my copyright to papers to come through so I can start handing out a copy to local libraries.
In addition, I've contacted my College Alumni Association, and posted flyers at the 125th Street Path Mark. I'm about to repost there again- All the flyers I posted are all gone! Maybe it's a good sign.
I'm going out and hand out flyers and just walk around Harlem to sell this book- I've got about 15 personal copies on me.
In addition, I've posted all the information for my novel The Cassandra Cookbook on my myspace page www.myspace.com/shawnsjames. I've made a lot of contacts at MySpace; hopefully this will lead to sales.
I've made it my mission to create positive stories about the African-American experience, and I'm committed to doing all I can to get people reading about stories that show how diverse the experiences of African-Americans are. I
and the diversity the company brought.I also started to see how prevalant hood stories had become to the industry sort of overshadowing over other genres of black fiction. This was especially so for black male writers. If you were a black male writer and your story was not about the streets, then you could expect very little support from critiques and book club members who were in their early twenties to thirties. The deeper issues like family, relationships were supposed to be written by women. "Love Don't Live Here" for the most part came to a surprise to many when they found out I was a guy. Lol! it's funny to think now how I would get emails from book cloub members or ladies in the industry, and they would say I told these ladies emotions just the way they would think in real life. When I would write back letting them know I was a guy, and heterosexual at that they wanted to know how I knew about these things. But I also got a sense of distance and they immediately started to pick through the story with a fine tooth comb. "Why this? Why that?" Nevertheless, without the help of the black book market I sold a lot more copies of the book then most hood books. And I still get called on to do events and speak on issues like urban affairs, family etc because of the book. I say this to say to other writers that you need to write what you want and be secure with yourself and the reason why you wrote that story. if you believe in it then you can make others believe in it to. Don't be fooled by publicity or marketing. Take it from someone who has financed vendors in the past, as well as sold other publishers books himself to the network of my own grass roots following. Visit: www.thirdeyepublishing.org and click on events and you can go all the way back to 2006. 2008 I've been bogged down with projects, but Feb starts my east campaign all over again before I head out to Cali in the Fall. If you have a good story, you need to push it that's all. I talk but I do. A lot of people complain, but there is no action behind their disatisfaction. So it's just a bunch of wasted energy. I really don't care what people write becuase in essence how am I really affected by a persons ignorance or intelligence. It don't affect me at all, 3 years 11 titles later and I've published only one street lit title which is not your average glamour and glitter. And even I've grown past that, writing, packaging, book manufacturing etc. Our books since the end of 2007 have changed, and I've been committed to advancing the manufacturing of our titles and developing a system of check points
so our books can be of top quality inside out. It's a process that every manufacturing business goes through. As far as we are concerned, some are already there, some will get there, others will continue to cut corners, and some don't and won't ever have what it takes to put out quality which will enable our books to not just compete with one another but amongst any other company in the book world.