There’s a moment at every LA party where someone asks what you do. As the industry has changed over the past few years, some of the answers—whether it’s agent, casting director or actor—may carry less weight than they used to.
While remaining employed at all in the current entertainment industry today is no small feat, I’ve noticed from running an LA-based hybrid book publishing company for entrepreneurs since 2017 that the people you’d expect to see walking through the doors at CAA are now the ones penning authority-building books that will give them the kind of career longevity Hollywood can’t provide.
They’re sports agents and Emmy-winning casting directors and actors with #1 Netflix shows and fashion entrepreneurs who once ran marketing for Richard Branson.
They’re usually not coming to me because they’ve wanted to be writers their whole lives, but because they’ve figured out something the traditional entertainment industry hasn’t quite caught up to: a book, in 2026, might be the single most powerful business card in existence.
The authority-building hybrid publishing book industry has been quietly booming for years now, powered by companies like Austin-based Scribe Media and Greenleaf Book Group and Advantage Publishing out of Charleston, as well as my own company, Legacy Launch Pad, in Los Angeles.
While Legacy Launch Pad’s clients are all over the world, our LA authors have evolved beyond CPAs, lawyers and real estate investors to entertainment industry veterans who have watched the traditional paths contract and decided to build something that no algorithm, strike or studio executive can take from them.
Darren Prince is the founder of Prince Marketing Group, whose client roster includes Magic Johnson, David Goggins and Charlie Sheen. Prince didn’t write his 2018 memoir Aiming High to grow his business—he wrote it because he’d spent years bottoming out on drugs and alcohol while brokering deals between icons, and he needed to tell the truth about that.
But within a week of publication, he’d signed a six-figure spokesperson deal.
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More surprising to him was what happened in the rooms he’d been walking into for decades. “What used to be business negotiations became conversations with friends, because they knew my story,” he told me. When he handed David Goggins a copy in a green room, Goggins flipped through it and said (in very Goggins fashion), “I know who you are, motherf*cker”—and signed with him not because of Prince’s Rolodex but because of his story.
Prince’s book has since spawned the Aiming High Foundation, a 501(c)(3) that’s sent roughly 200 people to rehab on a full scholarship. When I asked Prince to estimate the total financial impact of the book, he paused. “It’s millions of dollars collectively,” he said, “between how it’s impacted my business, my brand and most importantly the foundation.” All from a book he only wrote to help people.
Then there’s Christos Garkinos. If you were clubbing in LA in the 90s, you may have crossed paths with him at Dragstrip, when he was head of marketing at Virgin Megastores, orchestrating midnight record launches with fake snakes and free trips to Greece.
Fast forward through addiction, bankruptcy, the death of his mother and two aunts in rapid succession, and Garkinos is now running a live shopping empire called Covet by Christos with a community so devoted that its fans have been known to spend $20,000 in a sitting.
When we published his memoir, Covet the Comeback in 2025, he didn’t just quietly let it sit on Amazon. There was a 300-person launch party, a dinner at Spago with Kathy Hilton, Garcelle Beauvais and Selma Blair, a billboard near Paramount Studios that stayed up for five months, and a multi-city book tour that drew 80 people in Omaha (as in Nebraska).
But the moment that still gets him was when he was driving around LA, phone GPS guiding him to his billboard locations, and he realized the route was taking him down La Brea—to the exact block where he used to stumble to an ATM at 3 a.m. to pay his drug dealer. He looked up and there was his face, with the words “Covet the Comeback.” Just then his GPS announced, “You have arrived.”
“What I love about LA,” Garkinos told me, “is that you can reinvent yourself, whoever you want to be. You can’t do that in New York.”
Richard Lawson’s reinvention has been playing out on a global stage. His acting career started with an epiphany during a college musical in 1969, survived a plane crash that killed 27 people and has included teaching acting to George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer. Tyler Perry’s Beauty in Black, in which he played the shady patriarch Norman Bellarie, has been the #1 movie on Netflix multiple times.
When Lawson’s book The Artist’s Roadmap was released in 2025, he cared less about the accolades and more about the next steps. He launched a Substack, started building an audience he actually controls and began thinking about his career the way Beyoncé thinks about hers: multi-platform, multi-revenue stream, impossible to shut down.
“A book is the ammunition against getting canceled,” Lawson told me. It’s also the one thing nobody can take away from you in a world where algorithms hide your comments and platforms decide who sees your work.
John Frank Levey is a four-time Emmy-winning casting director responsible for ER, The West Wing and Shameless. When the industry started shifting in ways that made his decades of expertise less valued, he could have quietly retired to his house in Burbank. Instead, Levey published Right for the Role, which led to a podcast, which led to touring acting schools across the country, which led to directing a staged reading in New York City with Julianna Margulies in the cast. He made his New York theater directing debut at 78.
“When some people might be beginning to fade out, I am connected to my five-year-old self and my 12-year-old self and my 78-year-old self, and all those Johnnies are coming together to make this chapter into maybe one of the most fulfilling chapters yet,” he says.
The pattern keeps repeating. Comedian and podcaster Kelsey Chittick wrote Second Half: Surviving Loss and Finding Magic in the Missing after her husband—former NFL player Nate Chittick—died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 42. The book led to speaking engagements, a five-year podcast with Zibby Owens, a life coaching practice and a grief group in the South Bay that’s now being pitched as a scripted television show.
Chris Joseph had been a longtime LA resident when his book Life is a Ride, about his experience surviving stage three pancreatic cancer, was released in 2020. The book led to five podcasts and a health coaching business he never anticipated. “It gives you street cred,” he said. “People say, ‘Oh, he wrote a book. Yeah, go check out his book.’”
None of these people wrote a book to get rich off royalties. Garkinos gave his away at signings. Lawson sees his as the foundation for a media ecosystem he controls entirely. Prince’s memoir accidentally became his most effective client acquisition tool. Levey’s book was “spring-loaded” with opportunities he couldn’t have predicted.
What interests me is how many of them are in LA—not New York, where publishing lives, and not Nashville or Austin, where personal branding is already currency. Los Angeles, the city that built its entire identity on one kind of storytelling, is now quietly pioneering another. The people who once would have waited for someone to cast them in a story are deciding to tell their own instead.
In a town that has always worshipped the green light—that mythical moment when someone with more power than you says yes—it turns out the real power move is the one you don’t need permission to make.