During the corona pandemic, writer Colleen Hoover (1979) grew into a popular hashtag on the well-known app TikTok. That gave her a worldwide bestseller with It Ends With Us (2016), a book whose bright pink cover gives the impression of a candy wrapper.
By October 2022, Hoover had sold 20 million books worldwide. With her romantic young adult fiction (YA), she is currently the best-selling American author. That success has not come entirely out of the blue. Hoover books have been on the bestseller list for 120 weeks in the past ten years The New York Times. But since the arrival of TikTok, the writer is also famous worldwide. The hashtag #ColleenHoover now has 441 million views on TikTok, where she has a large fan base, the so-called ‘CoHorts’.
Her fame is mainly based on It Ends With Us, which is about florist Lily who falls in love with neurosurgeon Ryle. The story describes a relationship full of sexual tension, in which violent outbursts also occur with increasing frequency. Hoover took inspiration for the book from her own life: in the afterword she says that her father beat her mother. And Hoover also dealt with victims of domestic violence several times in her previous work, before her career as a writer took off so high she was a social worker.
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Farm
Hoover, 43, grew up in the tiny Texas town of Saltillo. At the age of two, her parents divorced, after which her mother started a new relationship. The family went to live in the same village on a small farm where money was scarce. There she remained until she was twenty – until she married her high school lover. At 26 she already had three sons.
In 2011 she started writing her first YA novel Slammed, about a teenager who has to deal with the death of her father. At the time, Hoover was earning nine dollars an hour as a social worker and living in a trailer with her husband and three sons. At first she self-published her work via Amazon, so that she could give her first book as a gift to her mother, who could read the book on her e-reader. Much to Hoover’s surprise Slammed picked up by readers – people even paid money for it. She made a sequel and it soon turned out to sell just as well. She quit her job in 2013 and focused entirely on writing. Two years later she had earned enough to convert her childhood home into a large farmhouse.
Hoover has been very active on social media all these years. She did a lot of promoting her novels through video channels for book lovers, under the banner of BookTube and Bookstagram, equivalents of BookTok on YouTube and Instagram. After her third novel, she joined Atria publishing house. When she and her editor saw something stirring in the book world on TikTok, she immediately created an account on that platform as well. Books that have sometimes been published years ago can gain fame again through the attention of TikTok vloggers. So was Hoover’s work: It Ends With Us became a real bestseller only four years after publication. And so Hoover, whose success was exceptional, came to be known as the “Queen of TikTok.”
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Hoover is still an avid TikToker. The writer posts promotional videos, but also videos in which she plays pranks on her sons. In addition, she responds enthusiastically to her fans who leave comments. And she listens to them: the ‘CoHorts’ had after the breakthrough of It Ends With Us the great wish that there would be a sequel. Hoover responded with the follow-up novel It Starts With Us, which appeared last October.
Sober look
Her enormous popularity apparently does not fit with her personality: the writer describes herself as an introvert. She still lives in the village where she grew up, where she knows everyone and probably never leaves. Hidden in Saltillo, Hoover can still reach the whole world through social media. She rarely gives interviews.
In one of those rare interviews of The New York Times she also mused about the transience of her fame: “This ends tomorrow, I think every day. So I’ll just enjoy it while I can.” Fans praise her down-to-earth look and say in the comments below her videos that they find Hoover very ‘authentic’. ‘I don’t get it either‘, is a winged statement from Hoover.
Isn’t it really hard to understand why her books are so popular? There is something more to say about that. Hoover’s main characters are usually women between the ages of 18 and 26. That fits in pretty well with the age of the average TikTokker: between 16 and 24 years old. She also writes in various genres, something for everyone: from the thriller Verity (2018) to the erotic story Reminders of Him (2022), which consists of about 70 percent sex scenes.
Easily distracted
Hoover doesn’t waste words on local color; there is never any question of an atmospheric impression of space or time. This brevity fits in seamlessly with TikTok’s short videos. In an interview with magazine Elle said Hoover: “I am easily distracted. If I have to develop characters extensively or discuss the environment, I prefer to skip that. I’m going to dialogue. I write what I want to read.” Her experience as a social worker seems to have contributed to her dialogue writing skills.
Hoover’s books often end with a violent denouement; characters unexpectedly die, a relationship is broken or there is violence. That arouses a lot of emotions in the readers. The TikTok generation doesn’t try to hide those emotions. Swollen eyes, mascara over the cheeks or wet sleeves of snot; they can be seen frequently in the TikTok videos of readers. Every internet user can witness teenagers filming themselves reading the end of Hoover’s books, often with a depressing music mounted under the video.
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The rise of TikTok paralleled the global lockdowns. Seen in this way, it might make sense that BookTok evolved into a haven for sharing emotions. For some readers, it turned out to be attractive to feel strong emotions that could compensate for the empty lockdown periods. ‘Books that made me cry‘ is a common recommendation video on BookTok. It Ends With Us gave many readers something to feel in empty days.
But there has also been criticism of Hoover’s many damaged characters. Some BookTokkers refer to the books as ‘trauma porn’. According to magazine critic Laura Miller slate Hoover never elaborates on the complexity of the traumas: the trauma is handed to you on a silver platter. According to Miller, that’s an easy way to create shock. Her books are part of a trend to completely reduce one’s personality to psychological suffering and emotional damage. Critic Parul Segal came to similar conclusions in an essay in The New Yorkers about ‘trauma fiction’ that went viral this year.
Hoover attributes the dark theme of her books to her gloomy personality: “I must be feeling something.” Follow-up book It Starts With Us did get the Disney-esque end-all-well ending that readers of the earlier part were hoping for. You could also see a sign of the times in this: after the corona years, readers were ready for a moment of revival. Whether Colleen Hoover is just a temporary product of the lockdowns remains to be seen. If it is up to her, at least not: new books by her have already been announced for 2024 and 2026.
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