Deneen White’s Relentless, co-authored with Lisa Nichols, went up on a Times Square billboard during VIP Ignite Live’s New York event. For a first-time author, that is an unusual place to land — and it says something about how books like this now reach readers.
Times Square sells roughly 300 things at once. Musicals, sneakers, streaming series, phone carriers, the occasional cryptocurrency. Books almost never make the wall.
Publishing does not usually buy that kind of space. A debut author appearing on a screen above Broadway is not how the industry has ever worked, which is exactly why it was worth doing.
Deneen White’s Relentless got there.
What the Book Is
Deneen White’s Relentless is a collaboration with Lisa Nichols, published through SuccessBooks.
Nichols is one of the most recognizable figures in the personal-development world — a motivational speaker and author whose reach expanded enormously after The Secret, and who has since built a publishing platform around bringing other voices in alongside her own. Relentless sits in that series, next to titles like Unstoppable and Rise Up.
The format matters. These are multi-author books, where each contributor writes their own chapter and the collection carries a shared theme. It is a route into publishing that bypasses the traditional gatekeepers entirely: no agent, no acquisitions meeting, no eighteen-month wait for a slot on a house’s list.
Critics of the model say it lowers the bar. Its defenders point out that the bar was never about quality in the first place — it was about access, and about who publishing already knew.
That argument will sound familiar to anyone who has spent time around the entertainment business.
Why Times Square
A billboard is not a distribution channel. Nobody buys a book because they saw it above Seventh Avenue on the way to a show.
What a billboard does is confer something harder to buy: the appearance of consequence.
For a first-time author, the practical value is not the passing tourist. It is the photograph. A writer standing under their own book, lit up over the busiest pedestrian intersection in the United States, produces an image that travels — through social feeds, into media kits, onto speaking-engagement pages, in front of the people who book rooms and panels and podcasts.
It converts a book into evidence.
That is a real mechanism, and it is worth being straightforward about it rather than pretending otherwise. The billboard is not marketing to readers. It is marketing to the industry that decides which authors get treated as authors.
The VIP Ignite Live Context
The billboard went up around VIP Ignite Live’s New York event.
VIP Ignite Live has spent twenty years on a single proposition: that talented people fail in the entertainment industry less often for lack of ability than for lack of access. The company began in 2006 with hotel conference rooms holding a dozen people. It now runs multi-day summits, operates the Truth Mgmt talent representation arm, and has moved into AI casting tools.
Its New York programming has grown accordingly — red carpet events, keynotes, live casting showcases, an Inner Circle gala.
Putting an author’s book on a screen in Times Square is entirely consistent with that. The company’s whole model is the manufactured moment of arrival: the room where the decision-maker is actually standing, the showcase where the casting director is actually watching, the billboard where the book is actually visible.
Whether you consider that a shortcut or a correction depends largely on what you think of the front door.
The Wider Point
Publishing has changed less than music or film, but it has changed in the same direction.
Authors now arrive with audiences instead of being given them. The platform precedes the book. A speaker with a following and a chapter in a Lisa Nichols collection can reach more people than a debut from a mid-tier imprint with no marketing budget behind it — and both of those authors know it.
What that produces is a publishing world with two separate ladders. One runs through agents and acquisitions editors. The other runs through platforms, collaborations and the ability to be seen.
Deneen White’s Relentless, on a screen in Times Square, belongs firmly to the second ladder.
It is not the traditional route. For a growing number of authors, it is the available one.
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