The Colleen Hoover phenomenon: how to sell 20 million books without leaving your town

Colleen Hoover, in a promotional image.Chad Griffith

The best-selling book bore the signature of Colleen Hoover.

The second, too.

And, going down the list of

, the author appeared again in positions six, seven and, again, in 15. Any writer would have framed a week like this -it happened on the fourth of September- as the best of his career.

Except Hoover.

Because, then, she would end up underlining the entire calendar.

His books have been devastating for years and, at least since last August, there has not been a single week where he did not have two works among the 10 most successful in the US. And that when things go wrong: the usual thing is that he strains three or four.

The New York Times

estimates that the author has sold more than 20 million copies since her debut in 2012;

the Spanish translation of her best-known novel,

(Planeta), totals more than 100,000 copies.

And the long-awaited sequel to it,

, will be released in Spanish in a couple of months.

But Hoover's triumph goes even beyond her unprecedented market numbers.

She doesn't even need the traditional building blocks of a bestseller.

On the contrary, the author only needs one formula: herself.

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He left the deep US and is still there, living on the same land where his family's farm and cows stood;

he changes his literary genre, as he pleases;

he publishes with various labels or even allows himself to reject his proposals and self-publish;

he barely participates in promotion and interviews - one with this newspaper declined -.

"We could almost say that it is a unique phenomenon," puts in María Guitart, responsible for the writer's publication in Planeta.

It is difficult to explain in any other way that books published in 2014 remain on the best-seller list in 2022. Or that the content related to her name on the Tik Tok social network reaches 3,400 million views.

There you can see thousands of young readers crying or screaming at some dramatic turn in one of his works.

The most famous of these,

, centers on a woman trapped in an abusive relationship and is inspired by what her own mother suffered at the hands of her husband.

But Hoover also talks about youthful romances, in

, conflicts between mothers and daughters, as in

or a writer dealing with a sinister assignment in

.

Among his more than 20 novels, romantic ones dominate, but there are also

, ghosts or erotic works.

And topics such as gender violence, abuse, homelessness or drug addiction are touched on.

“I have been publishing it since 2015 and it does something that I have rarely seen.

It offers very real stories, in familiar environments where you always find a character with whom you can identify.

And her works are never frivolous, ”insists Guitart.

“I write the books I want to read.

Some of my favorite works are romantic comedies, because they offer a nice escape.

I keep trying to create one, but I always end up putting my characters in unpleasant situations.

It is not that I seek to bring up complex issues on purpose, it is simply that I go where my readers take me, since I write their stories, ”said Hoover in a talk he had with Planeta.

Guitart estimates that her audience is predominantly female and in their 20s and 30s.

Or that, she clarifies, was before.

Because just as the coronavirus changed the lives of many forever, it also revolutionized Hoover's.

The editor of Planeta acknowledges that, until 2020, she was a "consolidated author, who sold well", but the same as hundreds of writers.

When the label won the auction for the rights in Spain, there was satisfaction, but they hardly imagined what would come next.

Because a pandemic cannot be foreseen, of course.

Nor that Hoover, in the midst of global confinement, decided to offer the electronic version of five of her books for free.

The readers became legion.

Or rather cohorts, as her followers called themselves with a play on words in English: CoHorts.

And, after enjoying the free works, they began to buy the rest.

Since then, they have not stopped.

“I fully credit BookTok [the discussion about books on Tik Tok],” says the author about the triumph of

, whose rights have been acquired for a movie.

Although she, of course, also contributed.

She started writing at the age of seven, almost by chance, during breaks in the rehearsals of a play.

However, she studied social work and was doing it in January 2012, when she released her

debut feature,

.

recalls that the author then lived in a trailer with her husband, a trucker, and her three children.

And that she dedicated the first thirty dollars of income to pay the monthly water bills.

In just seven months, the profit dollars were in the thousands;

readers, too.

Publishing offers began to rain.

And Hoover decided to devote himself full time to writing.

Little by little, the daughter of a humble family, whom she helped on the farm while she studied, became a star of literature;

so much so that her books allowed her to demolish the old ranch and build her new home right there;

She even went so far as to sign her former boss to run the business that her writing has now become.

And she confessed to

that she, from time to time, asks EL James, author of

, for advice on managing fame.

Because, while everything around her spins at a devilish pace, she barely moves from her town.

Same place, same supermarket, same customs.

She adores the film

, by Shannon Murphy, and the novels by Tiffanie DeBartolo, as she replied to Planet.

She claims that she has the "worst of impostor syndromes" and that she often reads books that seem much better than her own.

In that, the few critics of her -another peculiarity, for someone so famous- will agree: the main attacks on Hoover question her literary quality or the too unconditional delivery of her followers.

But time passes and her success only grows.

This week she again had four books in the top 10 best sellers.

No surprise.

The normal.

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