‘It’s like comfort eating’: why readers are hungry for Colleen Hoover

The first Colleen Hoover book I read was It Ends With Us, and when I opened it on the tube, I saw that the woman next to me was reading It Starts With Us. This is not likely to happen with many authors; but as of last year, Hoover was the bestselling novelist in the US, occupying the top six places on the New York Times bestseller list. “To even compare her to other successful authors,” wrote Alexandra Alter of that newspaper, “fails to capture the size and loyalty of her audience.” In the UK, her dominance is somewhat challenged by the remarkable sales of Richard Osman, who had three books in four of the Sunday Times top spots in 2022, but she was still named by that paper as “undoubtedly the biggest author of the year”.

A classic Hoover novel circles round the imperatives of romantic love with distinctively 21st-century impediments, two twentysomethings kept apart not by their parents or society or class or money, but by their own emotional affectlessness. They’re too busy, or too damaged, or too empty or numb for love; they just want no-strings sex. The strings then duly appear and catch them in a formulaic but solid cat’s cradle.

Hoover has said in the past that she defies literary genre, and her legion of fans sometimes describe her as a genre in her own right, but she is often, for brevity, called a young adult (YA) author. “There was always young adult romance, teenagers in high school, then it went to contemporary romance, stories about older twentysomethings, then indie ushered in college-age romance, what we now call ‘new adult’,” says Maryse Black, a seasoned book blogger credited with first discovering Hoover in 2012. Black uses “indie” to mean anything outside traditional publishing, and is usually referring to authors who at least started out self-publishing, as Hoover did.

Whatever you call Hoover, she is not only read by the young. “The big reveal of YA lists,” says Hannah Griffiths, former publisher and now a book scout for TV, “is that the average age of the reader is 35. The books are young emotionally, but they’re not being read by young people. It’s like comfort eating.”

The success of Colleen Hoover isn’t a story about an author who can’t get published and through sheer self-belief builds an audience, forcing the industry gatekeepers to listen. She has always been very clear on her legend: she never tried to get a publishing deal, and is very lo-fi and hands-off. She self-published her debut, Slammed, because her mum had just got a Kindle and she wanted to have something to show her. That was late 2011, and within a couple of months she had a sequel, Point of Retreat, uploaded to Wattpad, Amazon’s self-publishing platform. Wattpad is huge for fanfic – self-published fiction at any length, written by fans of an idol: a musician or actor, or a character from a TV show or video game or other book. Fanfic is idiosyncratic and, as often as not, erotic, for obvious reasons.

One YA reader, 14-year-old Ash Taylor, tells me Hoover’s is “writing for people who don’t like reading”. Then they amend that: “It’s like fanfic whose inspiration is the novel itself.” Hoover writes to the novelistic form, but isn’t trying to be it. She’s deft, she’s witty, her plots propel and her characters stand up on their own; if she wanted her books to read more like regular, commercial fiction, she would have no problem writing them like that. That’s just not the effect she’s going for.

There’s a parlour game I remember from being really small: unfortunately, I fell out of a plane; fortunately, I had a parachute; unfortunately, it had a hole in it etc. Potboiler fiction has always been an exercise in taking that “Oh no! Thank God!” emotional journey and complicating and finessing it. But what if you don’t complicate and finesse it? What if it’s absolutely bare bones: “Oh no, your dad is dead”; “Thank God, because he was violent and abusive”; “Oh no, your mum is sad”; “Thank God, now she’s happy you have a boyfriend”; “Oh no, your boyfriend is violent and abusive” (OK, I have now ruined It Ends With Us, but don’t sweat it, there are tons of Colleen Hoovers). What if you can see joins, and the lurch is part of the enjoyment?

Black was a guerrilla online reviewer when she started writing about Hoover. “I would write my reviews as if I were talking to a friend. It was, ‘Oh my God, you’ve got to read this and I’ll tell you why.’” That was 2012. TikTok didn’t exist. Black had been reviewing since 2009, while running a pet supplies business. “I was only reading traditionally published books when I first started,” she says. Mostly paranormal fantasy fiction, “and it was starting to seem a little formulaic. With fan fiction, these authors weren’t trying to get the books published, they were just writing from the heart.”

After Black’s reviews, the speed of Hoover’s ascent was remarkable. By August 2012, Slammed and Point of Retreat were eighth and 18th on the New York Times bestseller list, and her third novel, Hopeless, was the first self-published book ever to get to No 1, in January 2013. She had quit her job as a social worker to concentrate on writing, and was producing three novels a year. Simon & Schuster picked her up based on sales, which, Griffiths says, is “not an unusual journey; the last 20 years are full of people who self-published on Kindle and then a publisher noticed and brought them across”.

Then TikTok got involved; or BookTok, the video-sharing platform’s most wholesome story that also happens to be true. A recent survey found that 59% of 16 to 25-year-olds said BookTok helped them discover a passion for reading. Anyone with a teenager will recognise what Griffiths says: “When my daughter, who is allergic to books, came down and said, ‘Can you buy this book’, I thought, ‘What on earth is happening?’”

The BookTok format is short and sweet: a user will appear and speak from the heart about a book they love or hate, for 15 seconds, a minute, three minutes or 10 minutes. “Content on TikTok tends to be more authentic,” says Edel Flood, head of lifestyle and education for TikTok UK. “You don’t need any video editing experience or a big following. It’s more like getting a book recommendation from a friend.” Authenticity is a huge preoccupation on the platform – a constant dialogue between readers about who is most authentically reflecting their experience, and interrogation of the authors, how authentic they were when they started out, and whether they’ve retained their authenticity in the teeth of their own success.

BookTok tore a hole through what publishers knew about surefire success. “What’s new and current, the books you ‘should’ read, aren’t always the titles that do well,” says Flood. The recent success of Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles is the classic example (it came out in 2011 – BookTok has only really taken off in the past 18 months). “Publishers were waking up going, ‘Why is this out of stock in the warehouse? Jesus Christ, it’s a BookTok phenomenon,’” Griffiths says. “It’s sold 50,000 and that is pure profit, because you’ve covered all the costs years before. Weird little imprints had these zombie books coming back to life. No one could control it.”

The Bookseller recently released its UK figures for the first half of 2023, and fiction is still winning big from BookTok, earning £215m, its best results in 15 years. It is astonishing to consider that Hoover accounts for £6.2m of that. “Post-pandemic, there are certain themes and types of genre that have really excelled,” says Sophie Lambert, managing director at the literary agency C&W. “Romance, sci-fi, fantasy.” A portmanteau, romantasy, is huge. “People want escape and hope and wonder and love.” Hoover is perhaps the ultimate experiment in giving the people exactly what they want. It’s pointless, in a way, to ask whether she’s any good. The crowd has already decided.