Teri Woods (born March 8, 1968) is an American novelist from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,[1] and a successful, self-published pioneer of the urban fiction genre.
[2] Woods finished writing her first novel, True to the Game, in 1992 while working at a law firm in Philadelphia.
[3] She spent six years submitting the work to numerous publishers, all of which rejected her.
In 1998, Woods had copies of the book printed herself and began to hand-sell the novel to booksellers in and around the Philadelphia area and, eventually, across the United States, eventually starting Teri Woods Publishing, a self-publishing house to put out her own work and that of others, principally in the urban fiction genre, aimed at a demographic largely ignored by major publishers.
[4] Woods's breakout success helped her negotiate a multimillion-dollar contract with Hachette Book Group USA to re-release her previously published novels.