The Sunday Times May 1, 2022 2GN 9NEWS
Bestseller surfs a tide of TikTok tears
Colleen Hoover had never read a
romance novel until she wrote one. Then
she wrote another. And a further two
dozen. “I didn’t think I liked them,” she
said. “When I started writing it, I started
reading contemporary romance and just
became obsessed with it.”
Now the American author and former
social worker is dominating the sales
charts as young people become equally
obsessed with her novels, and word of
their popularity spreads on TikTok.
Hoover, 42, has cleaned up this week-
end, with five of the Top 10 positions in
Waterstones’ fiction paperback charts
and two in the Sunday Times bestseller
list.
James Daunt, the boss of Waterstones
and the American chain Barnes & Noble,
said he could not recall a previous
instance when one author had five books
in the retailer’s chart at the same time.
The author, who started writing only
ten years ago, has published more than
25 books, including It Ends With Us, Ugly
Love and Verity. Hoover said she “cannotLiam Kelly Arts CorrespondentA former social worker’s romances are dominating the book charts after celebrities and fans posted videos weeping at her prose
switched to social work after giving birth
to her first son, Levi, at the age of 20. He is
now 21 and she has two other boys — Cale,
19, and Beckham, 17 — with her high-
school sweetheart and husband, Heath.
The family live in Saltillo, Texas.
After a decade of social work, Hoover
decided to write her first book because
Heath, a lorry driver, was often away
from home for as long as four weeks a
month. She “had three little kids and I
was just trying to find an escape because
my husband was gone. I was lonely.” The
story was Slammed, about a teenage girl
who finds love after her father dies. It was
edited by her younger sister, Murphy.
Hoover self-published it on Amazon in
2012 only because her grandmother, Van-
noy, wanted to read the story after being
given a Kindle for Christmas. Hoover
later shared it with Facebook friends.
The novel became popular with book
bloggers and independent reviewers,
and became a hit with people reading
e-books. Within weeks it was a New York
Times bestseller. “When I wrote my first
book I did it for fun,” she said. “I had no
intentions of turning that into a careerbecause I felt like I was in the career I was
going to be in [social work].”
About six months after Slammed was
published, she was signed by the pub-
lisher Simon & Schuster. In less than a
year she was making more money from
the book than social work, and decided
to quit to focus on writing. Heath gave up
driving lorries to look after their sons.
“He was just a really, really wonderful
dad and husband and I have not had to do
laundry or dishes in ten years,” she said.
During the first lockdowns, Hoover
offered about five of her books as free
downloads to keep people entertained.
Then they went viral. Her publisher
noted the increase in sales and asked if
she had been promoting them. “I was
like, ‘I’m not promoting it, but y’all need
to get on TikTok because that’s where it’s
happening,’ ” she said.
Hoover does not look at what sells best
or “what people are begging me for”
because she has to be “in the mood to
write, I can only do what makes me
happy. If I try to write for any other
reasons, I give myself writer’s block.”
@IamLiamKellyColleen Hoover posts about
her books to her 800,
followers on TikTok, where
she has had a billion viewspinpoint” why they had become so popu-
lar. She admitted that she has “very bad
impostor syndrome” and feels that she
does not “deserve what is happening to
me, my books are not that good. I hate
feeling that way.”
Hoover’s biggest supporters — often
teenage girls and young women, includ-
ing the model Kylie Jenner — upload foot-
age of themselves reading Hoover’s nov-
els, crying at their endings and reviewing
the stories to their followers on TikTok,
typically using the hashtag #booktok.
Videos about Hoover and her novels
have been viewed more than one billion
times on the Chinese-owned social media
site, and she has accumulated almost
800,000 followers. She posts about her
books regularly, but her popularity is
mainly fuelled by her many fans.
It Ends With Us, which was first pub-
lished in 2016, is Hoover’s biggest hit. It
was given a second wind by TikTok and
has spent the past 34 weeks on the Sun-
day Times bestseller list. Many teenage
girls and young women appear to have
been captivated by Ryle, the moody part-
ner of the protagonist, Lily, and a TikToktrend has developed where readers burn
scraps of paper with his name written
on them.
Last year Hoover’s print print sales
were 693 per cent higher than in 2020,
The Washington Post reported, and It
Ends With Us sold 768,700 copies last
year, 18 times what it sold in 2020.
Although social media means books
can become cult hits much quicker
than before, the desire to read those titles
loved by friends and family remains
unchanged, Daunt said. This is what
Booktok does, allowing people to rave
about their favourite books and encour-
age others to read them.
“People love reading the same books.
It is a conversation piece: they connect,”
Daunt added.
Hoover wanted to be a writer from the
age of four, when her older sister, Lin,
was able to read and write. “I wasn’t in
school yet and I was so jealous,” she said.
“I just remember having all these stories
I wanted to tell, but no way to get them
out.”
She later started a writing course at
Texas A&M University-Commerce butCANAL BOATS
BECOME
LOCK STARSBunting flutters from
130 narrowboats as the
Canalway Cavalcade
festival, which has been
cancelled for the past two
years due to Covid-19,
took place in Little Venice,
west London, yesterdayBEN CAWTHRA/LNP