Colleen Hoover: The talk of BookTok

Molly Melito, Staff Writer

From your average Texan social worker making nine dollars an hour, to a self-published best-selling author, Colleen Hoover has beat the odds to become one of the most successful novelists of the year. She currently holds seven out of the top ten books on The New York Times’s paperback fiction best-seller list and has outsold numerous popular authors like James Patterson and Dr. Seuss within the past year.

While her success may be unmatched now, it wasn’t always that way. Hoover was born and raised in Texas, and from a young age her dream career had always been an author. However, when she had three kids before the age of 26, she decided on a more practical job as a social worker and kept her love of writing a hobby.

She self-published her first novel in 2012 with the encouragement of friends and family. After months of making almost no profit off “Slammed,” it began climbing The New York Times’s best-selling list after its popularity grew by word of mouth. This experience pushed Hoover to begin cultivating a digital following long before other writers knew the benefits of using social media to advertise their work. Now, she has become an iconic novelist due to her increasing traction on Tiktok, more specifically ‘Booktok,’ a segment of the app dedicated to discussing books and authors. Booktok has rapidly increased Hoover’s popularity within the past two years by word of mouth and provided her a loyal audience throughout the world.

Since then, Hoover has expanded her writing to include romances, thrillers and paranormal genres, often intertwining one genre with another. Her 2016 novel, “It Ends With Us,” recently regained popularity and has remained on The New York Times best-seller list for the past 75 weeks. Her other books “Verity,” “It Starts With Us” and “Ugly Love” continue to thrive, remaining in the top 10 on the best-seller list within recent weeks.

With Colleen Hoover’s growing fame through her popularity on social media she is bound to continue breaking records across fiction writing worldwide.