Losing Hope

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses suicide, sexual abuse of children and minors, and domestic abuse.

In 2011, Colleen Hoover was a social worker living in a trailer with her husband and son, writing a story about a slam poet during her son’s theatre rehearsals. She shared her book with her family, then self-published it on Amazon for the primary purpose of providing her grandmother an opportunity to read the book on her Kindle. Readers somehow found the book, entitled Slammed, and Hoover began to take self-promotion more seriously. BookTubers (a subcommunity on YouTube) and Bookstagram (a subcommunity on Instagram) influencers took notice and began reviewing the novel. It became a New York Times bestseller a few months later. Ten years after that first book, six of the bestselling books of 2022 were Hoover titles.

Hoover is not without her critics, however. Some readers and reviewers have decried her books as glorifying toxic masculinity and trauma experienced by women, including sexual assault and domestic violence. Some describe her narratives as “trauma plots” or “misery lit,” as her characters tend to experience extreme trauma (Swain, Marianka. “BookTok superstar Colleen Hoover has sold 20 million novels ­– but does she glamourise trauma?” The Telegraph, 2022). Nevertheless, TikTok videos with hashtags relating to her or her work have almost 2 billion views, making her a household name among those on the platform. Hoover’s success is comparable to E.L. James’s when Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) shot to notoriety, having begun as writing on FanFiction.net, since Hoover’s personal journey shows that self-published authors without connections in the book world can achieve success.

Social media, including BookTok and her Facebook group—named Colleen Hoover’s “CoHorts”—has played a significant role in Hoover’s success. In general, BookTok, as of 2022, had received over 42 billion views on its hashtag. Though any book can make it big on TikTok with the right algorithm and pitch, most popular books among this younger crowd of followers tends to steer toward Young Adult and contemporary romance and fantasy titles. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (2017), another book targeted at women under 35, is another BookTok darling which spent over a year on the New York Times Bestseller list.

BookTube launched John Green’s novel, The Fault In Our Stars (2014), one of the first Young Adult romance books to go viral. Since then, social media’s impact on book sales has only increased. The use of the “Bookstagram” hashtag increased by 31% during Covid, further solidifying its influence on publishing (Talbot, Dean. “Impact of Social Media on Book Publishing Industry.” WordsRated, 2023).

Hoover’s relationship with social media and huge fanbase has made “CoHo,” her nickname from fans, a topic of mainstream media, too. Upon release of a new title, her books aren’t just covered by Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, as is typical for an upcoming book, but covered in all the major news outlets like the New York Times and The Washington Post, increasing sales and exposure even further.

Hoover’s social media persona across all her various platforms tends—like her main characters—to be relatable, funny and approachable. This makes her even more popular with her fanbase. With 24 million books sold, and more on the way, she remains one of the most read novelists of the 21st century.