Colleen Hoover is a 40-something mother of three, and a resident of the small town of Sulphur Springs (population 15,000) in Texas. She used to be a social worker with an unremarkable lifestyle. About 10 years ago, she started writing fiction, as a hobby. Since she didn’t own a computer at the time, she borrowed her mother’s computer to type out her stories. She ended up self-publishing her first three novels. She was later picked up by small ‘indy’ imprints and then by bigger publishers.
Her books currently occupy six of the top ten slots on the NYT Best Sellers list. She has sold at least 20 million books in the last three years. Her third novel, ‘Hopeless’, was the first self-published work to make it to No. 1 on the NYT list.
Nobody — not JK Rowling, not Stephen King, not Lee Childs — has racked up a similar “strike rate”. Each of the 24 books Hoover is known to have published (yes, she is very prolific) has gone mega. Fans dig enthusiastically through her backlist and read them all, after they find one of her books.
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Hoover has achieved this mind-boggling level of popularity, without much recourse to the conventional tools of book marketing. She didn’t do book tours. She wasn’t associated with big publishers with large marketing budgets until Simon & Schuster signed her up. She wasn’t riding on the back of movie, TV or OTT franchise (those have now happened, of course). She continues to live a non-controversial, apolitical, vanilla life.
Mainstream publishers and book critics have been dissecting her success to see if there is something replicable about her business model, or something specific about the themes she picks. It cannot really be described as a “model” in that she didn’t innovate in marketing. Her Twitter bio says, “I don’t get it either”, which is presumably a reference to being bemused by her own popularity.
Hoover writes bland, competent English, with a seasoning of pop culture references. She specialises in complicated love stories with interesting plots, and difficult family relationships. She also writes Young Adult (YA) fiction. There are some fantasy elements to some of her stories but mostly the settings are real. Some of her books are part of series, involving the same characters. Others are standalone novels. The YA books are just as popular as the adult romances.
While Hoover is not afraid to tackle themes like domestic violence, but she offers no earth-shaking insights about social issues. She has sidestepped LGBT and inter-racial relationship themes, because she claims to be afraid of making false steps as a straight, white woman. She features LGBT side-characters and people of colour. She’s not particularly “steamy” in her depictions. She’s good at conceptualising plots and situations with relatable characters. She maintains narrative pace.
Obviously, she has hit a sweet spot somewhere. There has been speculation that the pandemic led to a resurgence in reading as a pastime. But other authors have not seen this sort of surge. The self-publishing channels and indy publishers have existed for decades. Other writers have used these platforms with varying success.
Self-publishing and Amazon make it easy enough to digitally publish and sell work, assuming readers finds it and wish to buy it. The key is getting noticed, and building a brand as an author, in that vast ocean of online fiction.
Hoover’s books really took off due to organic amplification on social media. She has a reasonably big Facebook presence and traction on Instagram with 1.9 million followers. Her Twitter account has 180,000 followers (Rowling has 14 million). Hoover has also been popular on Goodreads, hitting #1 on the book recommendations website many times.
The platform that really enabled her breakout popularity was BookTok. That’s the sub community of Tik-Tok users focussed on books. BookTok has been a boon when it comes to generating visibility for authors like Hoover outside the marketing mainstream.
Sadly, access is not easily available in India due to a ban on Tik-Tok. However, it appears a large number of Indians bypass the Tik-Tok ban, going by the popularity of Hoover and other BookTok recommended authors on Amazon.in.
BookTok creators make videos with commentary on the books they like. It’s become the biggest global platform for the popularisation of genre fiction (though Goodreads would dispute this). BookTok posters reflect popular tastes; they tend to low-brow/mid-brow.
One quality that may have differentiated Hoover is persistence. She continued to write. She checked all the boxes in creating her social media presence, and she makes an effort to engage with readers on all these platforms. Her success shows that social media users do read in sustained fashion, and it suggests publisher everywhere have failed to leverage this optimally in their marketing plans.
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