Teri Woods (born March 8, 1968) is an American novelist from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and a successful, self-published pioneer of the urban fiction genre. Woods finished writing her first novel, TRUE TO THE GAME, in 1992 while working at a law firm in Philadelphia. 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. Woods's breakout success helped her negotiate a multimillion-dollar contract with Hachette Book Group USA to re-release her previously published novels. In 2015, it was announced that TRUE TO THE GAME was being produced into a film of the same name.