BOOK Industry

BREAKING IN WITH BOOK WRITING

“Most people have this idea that creative writers are making stuff up, but you’re really not,” Tyree explains. “It’s more like regurgitation of what you already know, what you find out, what you’re interested in, and how you change and add things to fit the story you want to tell.”

As a confident hustler with an independent Aries mind, instead of waiting around to find a publisher who agreed to publish his work, Tyree started his own publishing company, MARS Productions from his one-bedroom apartment in Hyattsville, Maryland, and published his first three books; Colored, On a White Campus in October of 1992, loosely based on his college years at Pittsburgh, Flyy Girl in April 1993, the urban classic all about the 1980s era of Uptown Philadelphia teenagers, and Capital City in April 1994, detailing the drug culture of Washington, DC, during its most treacherous “murder capital” years of the early 1990s.

“At the time, I was the only one writing books about contemporary urban street culture,” Tyree says. “We had older writers dealing black history, psychology, poetry, short stories, science fiction, and romance, but I was the only one with the contemporary urban, so that’s what I called it, ‘urban classics,’ and it caught on.”

Tyree’s Flyy Girl title ushered him through the doors of Simon & Schuster, a major publishing house in New York, for a two-book deal in 1995 with a whopping $250,000 advance.

“They don’t give it to you all at once, but you’ll eventually see it all broken into four or eight installments,” Tyree explains. “But I tell young writers all the time, if you really wanna be a writer, then focus on writing the next book and not the money. And that’s what I did for thirty books straight and eighteen with Simon & Schuster.”