Each month at Books And... we will feature guest posts on various nuanced topics on the writing life. Each week's Wednesday post will showcase a different author. This week's author is Omar Tyree and our current topic is loyalty. It was born of a discussion on the observation of some black authors shifting gears in their writing genre or style to keep pace with other highly accessible and fast produced works. We asked our author to explore the writer-reader loyalty dynamic.

When we talk about a loyal fan base in the African-American literary community, we have to understand that we are mostly referring to a brand new audience of readers. The truth is, contemporary African-American readers have only been in existence now for roughly 20 years, starting with the phenomenal success of Terry McMillan and her classic women’s crossover novel, Waiting to Exhale, published in 1992. Prior to that, we had either slavery books, poetry and short story collections, civil rights memoirs, and of course, the street fiction of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines. There wasn’t much of a loyal fanbase going on there, outside of the prison systems who were sure to stock plenty of Iceberg and Donald. But once Terry hit the scene and hit it hard in the early 1990s, all of a sudden, new literary heroes began to pop up for the African-American community each year, including Walter, Bebe, E. Lynn, Rosalyn, Eric Jerome, Michael, and Omar.

For a solid decade, a new army of African-American readers could now expect to enjoy a new book from their new favorite authors. However, with everything being so new, there were new authors and new readers every single year, which led to fleeting loyalties, similar to what happened in the industry of hip-hop during the early 1990s before Tupac and Biggie took over and stabilized an East Coast / West Coast selection. But there was no giant new success story of a Biggie or a Tupac in the black publishing industry. Community activist Sister Souljah had the best opportunity to become big with her classic tale, The Coldest Winter Ever, published in the late 90s, but it’s pretty hard to build a loyal fanbase of readers if they have to wait for more than five years for your next book release. So by the time Sister Souljah had come out with something new, the anxious new fanbase had already moved on to twenty other authors.

Then there was the publishing house of Triple Crown from Vickie Stringer, who put out so many new authors that no one could even keep up with their names, just the company that publishing them all. There was Terri Woods and True To The Game, another novel that sparked a following of crash and burn street readers. Then came Zane and her Sex Chronicles release, followed by a dozen of other sexy books and erotic stories, seemingly twice a year, to keep her fanbase in tact. On the men’s side of the fence, Carl Weber began to stir up the pot with his relationship drama tales about The Other Woman and such.

But with all that being said, how loyal can we realistically expect a readership, or even an author, to be in less than twenty years of experience? We are all New Jacks to the game, and still experimenting with the fresh art form of contemporary African-America stories. And let’s be frank here, after 500 or so new authors have popped up on the scene, covering every possible present-day story of black America, even a new fanbase can get worn out by it all, especially with no movie deals to keep the stories large, lively, and on the pop culture consciousness of the people.

I had an opportunity to lock down a young, loyal fanbase with my own classic novel Flyy Girl years ago, but I was quickly derailed by my own desire to write books for my peer group of African-American men, who don’t seem to be a large part of any readership fanbase. So instead of me sticking to the young urban girls who brought my career to the promise land of New York Times best-sellers, I was more interested is discovering new ideas as a writer than sticking to one particular audience. Hell, my so-called audience were barely reading grade school text books before I came along with my series of urban classics. So I figured they would continue to grow with me as I elevated my skills and content from a New Jack to an old pro. Only I was wrong, and my young new audience did not budge from what they already liked and wanted to read. So it was more Flyy Girl books or nothing. And if I didn’t give it to them, they would seek and find another new author who would.

And there you have it. When a writer writes, we ultimately want a loyal audience, but if we write only for an audience and never for ourselves, are we really developing as writers? And as a loyal fan, if you are only interested in reading a certain type of book from a certain type of writer, can you really call yourself “loyal” when that author wants to try a different subject or genre, or when you yourself want to move on to something different? We have to think about all of that in this discussion of “loyalty”. But as my good friend and contemporary writer, Walter Mosley once famously stated, “We won’t really know what these new books are worth until some time has passed to see what work continues to stand out as significant.” Then and only then we will truly be able to figure out who has been loyal and who has not with the explosion of African-American literature of the 21st Century.
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