As the literary agent Byrd Leavell was developing a memoir with Arnold Schwarzenegger a few years ago, it occurred to him that other muscular stars had stories to tell too. He set up a meeting with Sylvester Stallone, who happened to be one of his childhood heroes, and pitched him on the idea of writing a book.
"We hit it off,” Leavell recalls, and Stallone approached the process with "an extraordinary level of openness.”
This month, Stallone’s memoir, The Steps - which focuses on his early years of striving in New York, sleeping in the Port Authority Bus Terminal and cleaning lion cages at the Central Park Zoo - premiered at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list.
The Steps is the latest entry in a genre that’s been thriving in recent years, defying the general gloom in non-fiction sales.
"Celebrity memoir is seen as one of the only categories that’s still really working,” says Anna Sproul-Latimer, a founding partner of the agency Neon Literary.
Last year, according to Simon & Schuster editor Sean deLone, only seven of the top 25 bestselling hardcovers were non-fiction, compared with 19 a decade earlier.
"It’s just a cultural desire for escape,” says Carrie Thornton, publisher of Dey Street Books, a division of HarperCollins. "The world sucks. People want to go live in another world.”
In an age of artificial intimacy, the celebrity memoir offers both authenticity and privileged access.
"Books that make a parasocial or emotional connection with their readers are still clicking with the marketplace,” says Sproul-Latimer.
Prince Harry’s 2023 memoir, Spare, which provided a window into his cloistered palace upbringing and included revelations about royal family feuds and his own teenage drug use, sold 1.6 million copies across formats in the US in its first week; Britney Spears’ 2023 The Woman In Me, which disclosed raw details about her breakup with Justin Timberlake and the custody battle with her ex-husband, has sold nearly three million copies in the US across formats, according to her publisher.
"Book publishing is an exercise in calculated risk,” says United Talent Agency’s Albert Lee, who’s represented books by Kendrick Lamar, Stephen Curry and Paris Hilton.
"The celebrity insulates them from that risk.”
In a landscape in which "traditional book coverage and reviews have largely disappeared,” Lee says, a celebrity author "guarantees a certain level of national media attention, social media chatter and reach.”
And so publishers are continuing to bet on public figures: This fall alone brings new releases from Maye Musk, Danny Meyer, Eric Dane, Dustin Hoffman, Alice Cooper and Kyle MacLachlan.
Books about history and current affairs are losing readers as podcasts and documentaries continue to grow. Meanwhile the market for self-help, traditionally another mainstay of nonfiction, is in free fall, with print sales down 24.3% in the US in the first half of 2026. (Why buy a diet manual when you can have ChatGPT analyse your workouts and nutrition 20 times a day?) "People can get what looks like true information for free,” says Sproul-Latimer.
But celebrity memoirs don’t face the same threat from artificial intelligence.
"You’re buying that book because the author exists in the real world and you’re a fan of that person,” says David Kuhn, co-chief executive officer of Aevitas Creative Management, who’s represented memoirs by Amy Schumer, Pamela Anderson and Emily Ratajkowski.
Kuhn believes readers of commercial romance and genre thrillers will eventually accept AI-generated texts, "whereas AI will never replace the celebrity memoir.”
Celebrity memoirs may even benefit from the downturn in the rest of the industry: As book deals shrink - in the second quarter of 2026, publishers offered nonfiction authors 41% fewer six-figure advances, year over year - top-tier writers are increasingly available to ghostwrite books for better-known names.
The ranks of celebrity ghostwriters now include New Yorker staff writer Ariel Levy, who co-wrote Demi Moore’s 2019 memoir, Inside Out, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist J.R. Moehringer, who’s collaborated with tennis star Andre Agassi and Prince Harry. Spears’ team included bestselling author Ada Calhoun and former Time editor Sam Lansky.
"People who used to make a living writing non-fiction books are needing to do other things,” says Kuhn.
"I would say one out of 20 non-fiction books published is by someone who can make a living doing just that.”
At talent agencies such as UTA, Creative Artists Agency and William Morris Endeavor - which represent celebrities as well as writers - an agent might assemble a short list of possible ghosts, complete with CVs and headshots, then arrange a "beauty pageant” for the celebrity to assess the candidates, says University of Southern California English professor Emily Hodgson Anderson, author of the coming book Ghostwriting: A Secret History, From God To AI.
Listening to the author’s story, in their own voice, offers yet another level of access. Celebrity memoir audiobooks can match or even exceed hardcover sales, with the most ardent supporters buying both editions.
"I’m a big fan of the elasticity of that format,” says Dey Street’s Thornton.
Comedians can add off-the-cuff tangents and riffs in the recording booth; musicians can incorporate their own performances. Stallone’s audiobook features new music from Bill Conti, composer of the original Rocky soundtrack. Barbra Streisand’s 2023 My Name Is Barbra audiobook includes dozens of excerpts of her songs.
Not coincidentally, then, celebrity memoirs have benefited from - and perhaps contributed to - the boom in audiobooks: US audiobook sales grew 9% last year, with revenue reaching US$2.43bil (RM9.9bil) in 2025; total estimated industry sales, meanwhile, increased 2.5% in the same period. In October, Spotify Technology SA announced plans to expand its audiobook programme from 22 markets to more than 180.
For all that, agents can’t simply call a publisher and let them know that a big-name client would like a book deal, please.
"We need to all be fiscally responsible,” says Thornton.
These days editors are looking for pages with a narrative arc and an idea that transcends the author’s celebrity status.
"What is it really about?” Thornton asks, when she’s evaluating a celebrity’s proposal.
"Is it about shyness, an eating disorder, trauma? How do we find the big hook the reader feels connected to?”
Blink-182 co-founder Mark Hoppus’ 2025 Fahrenheit-182, for example, was a memoir both of being a rock star and of surviving cancer; Jennette McCurdy’s 2022 I’m Glad My Mom Died was about growing up a Nickelodeon child star and about recovering from anorexia.
In a world where reading appears increasingly irrelevant - in 2023, according to one study, only 16% of Americans read anything, even a newspaper or magazine, for pleasure, on an average day (down from 28% in 2004) - why do celebrities, who presumably have more lucrative and pleasurable things to do, want to invest months or years in the painstaking process of putting together a book?
"The bad news is that you’ll likely make less than when you star in a movie,” Kuhn says he tells his actor clients.
"The good news is you have final cut.”
They don’t have to worry that their performance will be "butchered in the editing room,” he says.
Celebrities used to working on screen appreciate the level of control and creative freedom afforded by the format.
"On the page, your budget is unlimited,” says UTA’s Lee. "And you can be more playful with structure than perhaps a traditional film or TV show might allow.”
Often, Lee finds, some "hinge moment in their life” has inspired the celebrity to want to reflect at book length.
"It could be that their last child has gone off to college. It could be the death of a parent or sibling,” he says.
Or it could be ageing. This season’s celebrity authors include Willie Nelson (93), Judi Dench (91) and Gloria Steinem, who died in September at 92.
Stallone, who turned 80 in July, "had to be able to talk about his parents” - his mother died in 2020 - if he was going to tell his story, says the agent Leavell.
Some celebrities aren’t stopping with memoirs. Having discovered their voice on the page, they’re turning to fiction, though often not straying too far from their usual turf.
After writing three memoirs, Dolly Parton released a thriller in 2022: Run, Rose, Run follows a young country music star in Nashville. In the past few years, McCurdy, Keanu Reeves and Reese Witherspoon have made their debuts as novelists.
Last week it was announced that another celebrity and memoirist will be joining their ranks: Arnold Schwarzenegger. His coming novel (a collaboration with James Patterson) is about a crime-fighting California priest known as "the Protector.” – Bloomberg
