Whoopi Builds A Bigger Bookshelf
Long before she imagined shepherding other people’s manuscripts into print, Whoopi Goldberg was quietly building her own track record as an author. The EGOT-winning performer and longtime co-host of “The View” has written more than a dozen books, moving between children’s stories, essays, and memoir. Her most recent project, “Bits & Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me,” published by Blackstone Publishing in May 2024, pushed that literary side of her career firmly into the spotlight. The book became a New York Times and USA Today bestseller, turning her reflections on family and public housing in New York City into a commercial hit.
On “CBS Mornings,” Goldberg described the world that shaped that memoir and, by extension, her ambition. She remembered taking 15-cent bus rides with her mother just to see different parts of the city, not because they had extra money but because her mother refused to let their lives be confined to one neighborhood. Curiosity, she suggested, was the family’s great inheritance. Her mother believed that the more her children saw, the more they might imagine for themselves. That early lesson in exposure and possibility now sits behind Goldberg’s newest move in publishing.afrotech
With the launch of a new imprint called WhoopInk, Goldberg is stepping into a formal gatekeeping role—and trying to hold the gate open for others. The imprint is a partnership with Blackstone Publishing, the same company behind “Bits & Pieces.” According to the Associated Press, WhoopInk is designed as a home for “fresh, diverse new talent” across multiple genres, an effort to bring writers from underrepresented backgrounds directly into the commercial marketplace. Goldberg has made it clear that she does not intend to be a distant figurehead; she plans to be deeply involved in the imprint’s promotion, packaging, and presentation.
That hands-on stance reflects the way she has approached most of her career pivots. Goldberg has already authored over 12 books, giving her a front-row view of how manuscripts become finished titles and who gets prioritized along the way. Now, instead of simply pitching her own ideas, she is helping to build a platform that can lift other voices alongside hers. WhoopInk, then, is both a business decision and an ideological one, linking her personal success on the page to a larger effort to shift who gets seen and heard.
The imprint’s first moves blend new ambitions with familiar collaborators. WhoopInk will publish the next book in Rick Bleiweiss’ “Pignon Scorbion & the Barbershop Detectives” mystery series, extending an existing relationship between the author—who is also a senior executive at Blackstone—and the company. At the same time, Goldberg intends to release additional work of her own under the WhoopInk banner. Plans include a follow-up to “Bits & Pieces” and a co-authored title with her business partner, Tom Leonardis, AP News reports.
Those choices signal that WhoopInk will house both established names and emerging talent. Bleiweiss’ series gives the imprint immediate continuity, while Goldberg’s future books ensure its catalog will include projects deeply tied to her voice and perspective. Around that spine, she envisions a broader collection of authors whose backgrounds and stories reflect the audiences mainstream publishing has frequently sidelined. In that sense, the imprint functions like a small ecosystem, with commercial anchors helping to support riskier or less familiar work.
Goldberg’s public statement about the venture underscores that ambition. She says she is eager to seek out brand-new writers, collaborate with authors who already have careers, and “bring influential voices into this curated imprint.” The emphasis on curation suggests that WhoopInk will not simply be a volume play but a selective list shaped around impact. It’s an attempt to create a space where authors can benefit from Goldberg’s visibility while also being evaluated on the strength of their own stories.
The decision arrives at a time when conversation about representation in the book industry is still intense. Surveys and reports have repeatedly highlighted how few decision-makers in publishing are people of color and how that imbalance influences which stories get championed. Celebrity-led imprints sometimes invite skepticism, but Goldberg’s long-standing engagement with writing complicates the idea that this is a purely cosmetic effort. She is entering the role of publisher with lived experience on the other side of the equation.
Taken together, Goldberg’s childhood bus rides, bestselling memoir, and new imprint form a kind of narrative arc. As a kid, she rode through a city her family could not always afford to fully access, learning to see beyond what was immediately available. As an adult, she has turned that sense of possibility into a series of careers across film, television, and books. With WhoopInk, she is trying to transform her individual trajectory into a pathway that others can walk, inviting writers who have long been on the margins of the industry to imagine their names on a spine, too.
