I am building a company around a catalog the industry has been renting one title at a time
- Company
- Coleman Story Labs
- Sector
- Media and entertainment
- Role
- Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer
- Years
- 2026–present
I am a co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Coleman Story Labs, a creator-owned entertainment company built around the storytelling catalog and creative vision of New York Times bestselling author JaQuavis Coleman. Over more than twenty years JaQuavis has published more than 50 novels, sold approximately 5 million copies generating an estimated $40 million in gross book sales, and built one of the most recognizable brands in contemporary Black fiction.
The company controls film, television, audio, publishing, and licensing rights to approximately 37 intellectual property assets, including the Cartel, Dopeman, Streets, Carter Diamond, and Murderville franchises, along with ten completed screenplays. I lead corporate strategy, brand positioning, investor relations, partnerships, planning, and governance — working alongside JaQuavis as founder and chief creative officer, Terence Greene as president and chief operating officer, and Keith Clinkscales as strategic partner and executive producer.
Two things are true about JaQuavis that the industry has always valued separately. The first is the catalog: proven stories, recurring characters, and a readership that has already paid for them. The second is the man — a creator whose audience trusts him, whose credibility was earned over two decades, and who has the instinct and standing to develop other writers.
The conventional path asks a creator to option one title at a time and lets someone else capture the value of everything built around it. We are inverting that. We are not asking investors to bet on whether JaQuavis can write; the market settled that question years ago. We are capitalizing the commercialization of a library that already exists.
The second insight is about sequencing. Hollywood develops first and discovers the audience last, at maximum cost and maximum risk. We are reversing the order. Serialized audio, vertical microdrama, and an owned membership community come first — lower-cost formats that generate recurring revenue, build a direct relationship with the audience, and produce real engagement evidence. That evidence raises the value of the underlying intellectual property before a franchise is taken to television and film.
Books become audiences. Audiences become communities. Communities become recurring revenue. Recurring revenue increases franchise value.
This is the work I have done at every stage of my career: converting insight into operating reality. That means the corporate and rights architecture that keeps ownership and creative control with the founder while making the company financeable; the capital strategy and the investor materials behind it; the brand architecture for both the studio and the JaQuavis Coleman name across publishing, audio, microdrama, community, licensing, television, and film; the partnership and distribution relationships that give the company genuine access; and the governance, planning discipline, and operating cadence that allow an ambitious creative company to execute.
I am also helping build Story Labs, the internal division that tests characters, pilots, and audience response so the company invests behind evidence rather than enthusiasm. The intent is to build the enterprise around the creator without making it dependent on him — franchises strong enough to stand on their own, an audience the company owns directly, and a team of creators and operators who can build alongside him rather than in his shadow.
The JaQuavis Coleman Story Foundation — “Every Story Matters” — is being built in Flint, Michigan, where JaQuavis grew up. Its flagship program, the JaQuavis Coleman Writers Academy, takes middle and high school students through finding their voice, story structure, editing, publishing, intellectual property ownership, and entrepreneurship. Every graduate becomes a published author in an annual student anthology, Voices of Flint.
The Foundation and the studio are separate organizations with complementary purposes: the studio demonstrates what becomes possible when a creator owns their stories; the Foundation makes sure the next generation of writers knows that path is available to them. Philanthropic intent is designed into this venture from the beginning rather than appended to it after success.
A creator-owned franchise studio: intellectual property and audience relationships that remain in the founder’s hands, a catalog that produces value continuously across formats instead of one transaction at a time, a platform where other writers and creators can build durable careers, and a foundation in Flint funded by the business it belongs to.
This work is early and active. I am including it because it is the pattern in real time — an asset the market has underpriced, a creator whose strengths deserve a larger stage, and an operator building the structure that allows both to become real. It is also personal. I spent nineteen years unable to say what I was thinking. A company whose purpose is to help people find a voice, and to prove that a voice has value, is work I understand from the inside.