When Colleen Hoover self-published her first young adult novel, “Slammed,” in early 2012, she was living in a single-wide trailer with her husband and three sons. She made $30 in royalties and was thrilled: It was enough to pay the water bill. Hoover didn’t have a publisher, an agent or a sweeping media tour. She didn’t have rave reviews from book critics at The New York Times or The Atlantic (and she still doesn’t). But less than a year later, “Slammed” made it to the New York Times bestseller list. Since then, Hoover has published 26 novels, outselling James Patterson and John Grisham combined.
Hoover has published 26 novels, outselling James Patterson and John Grisham combined.
Hoover’s success is partially due to a literary industry now dominated by women — women readers, women publishers and women authors. According to a 2023 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, women publish more than half of all novels today, and they sell more books than the average male author. This is a relatively new phenomenon, of course. In conjunction with access to the birth control pill, safe abortion and higher education, women’s book publishing exploded in the 1970s.
The rest of Hoover’s success is due to passionately loyal fans who evangelize for her on book-centric corners of the internet, including BookTok and Bookstagram. In 2022, well over a million viewers watched TikTok user Eloise Hampson’s tearful time-lapsed videos chronicling her emotional reactions to reading “It Ends With Us” — clutching the purple-and-white cover of the novel. Posts on CoHo, Hoover’s internet nickname and corresponding hashtag, will often involve tears. CoHo continually holds a spot as BookTok’s top read. It’s a chicken-and-egg question: BookTokers know CoHo content will generate likes, views and maybe even a viral payday. Whether or not they actually like her books comes secondary.
“It Ends With Us,” Hoover’s top-selling and most literary novel, centers on a florist named Lily Bloom who finds herself at the center of a complicated love triangle between her protective first love and her abusive husband. It starts like a classic romance novel — chance encounter, slow-burn flirtation, passionate sex scene — and shifts to a serious look at abuse. “It Ends With Us” grapples with domestic violence with an intimate partner, generational cycles of abuse, identity, family and love. But many people reading this will know that already.
The movie adaption, starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, premiered in early August and quickly exposed a dilemma. As massive as Hoover’s online cult following has become, BookTok culture and fandom did not translate well to a mainstream audience. The book’s Hollywood treatment began with side-eye from Hoover’s BookTok legion for casting choices — particularly for Lively. The media tour was marred by controversy: Questions swirled over a possible cast dispute between Lively and Baldoni, and Lively was lambasted for the way she answered media questions regarding the sensitive topics the movie addresses, namely domestic violence. One particularly damning TikTok on the movie’s promotional page shows Lively, in full glam makeup and wearing a Dauphinette skirt set and chainmail top, cheerfully advising fans to “grab your friends, wear your florals and head out to see it.” Hoover is perched beside Lively in a purple floral Tommy Hilfiger dress appearing to endorse Lively’s tone-deaf messaging.
Other choices have irked Hoover’s fan base. Last year, in the lead-up to the film, Hoover announced the release of a coloring book based on the character of Lily Bloom. After immense backlash, Hoover, and her publisher, Atria Books, canceled the publication.
The book’s Hollywood treatment began with side-eye from Hoover’s BookTok legion for casting choices — particularly for Lively.
The movie drove new potential readers, who aren’t swayed by the powers of BookTok, to pick up their own copy of “It Ends With Us.” The result was an onslaught of fresh criticism for the novel. Readers slammed it as anti-feminist, misogynistic and glamorizing domestic violence. Particularly detrimental is the way the novel romanticizes the cliché dangerous-but-charismatic leading man and its blatant disregard of red flags that, off the page, often mean the difference between life and death for people in abusive relationships.
Hoover’s books, for all of their wide-reaching success, are largely critically panned. Hoover’s writing style is juvenile and unpolished, and her dialogue is neither realistic nor particularly creative. But what Hoover does masterfully deliver again and again is emotional intensity, satisfying climactic moments — and lots of sex.
Hoover’s writing reads like fan fiction. Although the genre existed well before the advent of the internet, its popularity exploded on chatrooms, message boards and literary subculture websites in the early aughts. Fanfic, a genre unto itself, is generally defined as amateur writers exploring different stories from the original source material (see: every iteration of “Harry Potter” romance imaginable on reading platform Wattpad), but now, fanfic as an adjective is synonymous with easy to read, hyperemotional, shallow and crass.
There is a long history of disregarding literature written by women for women as vapid and inherently nonliterary. Last season on the “Velshi Banned Book Club” podcast, I wrote and produced an episode dedicated to defending so-called chick lit. If a woman enjoys a book, that is justification enough. “It Ends With Us” certainly exists in that space, and the literary merit of the book comes well below the book’s cultural relevancy.
Hoover’s books aren’t popular because the writing is so good or the characters are so interesting or the dialogue is so engaging; they’re popular because of internet inertia. The rise of women readership, the normalization of fanfic and the command of BookTok has made for the perfect wet and dark environment for CoHo to thrive. Culturally, for a certain, growing demographic of women, Hoover has become a touchstone, a shared part of society, that is all but required for internet fluency and in-the-know conversation. Hoover proves, with her books and soon-to-be fleet of movie adaptions, that virality, buzz and internet adoration doesn’t equal quality (or taste). Hoover’s problematic writing and behavior still bear a cultural impact.
Will this ultimately negatively affect Hoover’s overall success or following? When it comes to BookTok, online lit culture and book sales, definitely not.
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