THREE KEY FACTS
Journalist Jake Kerridge writes about culture for the Telegraph.
OPINION
Accidental TikTok sensation Colleen Hoover has sold more than 30 million books and has a hit film to her name. But is she good for literature?
The best-selling fiction title on Amazon this week is a book that was first published eight years ago: Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us. This romance novel cum harrowing tale of domestic abuse was a smash hit when it was published in 2016, and within three years had sold a million copies. Naturally, its sales figures went down year on year – that is, until 2022 when it rocketed back to the top of the charts, selling better than ever.
In the US it was the best-selling novel of 2022 and again in 2023. It is now reckoned to have sold more than seven million copies. If, as Logan Pearsall Smith said, “a best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent”, then It Ends With Us is a Taj Mahal.
In the view of some critics It Ends With Us is the equivalent of Japanese knotweed, or Michael Myers: just when you think it’s safely dead, it bobs back to life again. Its return to the top of the charts this week is partly explained by the hype around the newly released film adaptation starring Blake Lively; but really the book owes its extended lifespan to social media – specifically, Generation Z’s favoured platform, TikTok.
Traditionally, publishers have been responsible for determining which books become bestsellers, splurging their marketing budgets on the volumes they think are most likely to be a success, or putting their heft behind newly published books that are doing well through word of mouth. But now, publishers can be caught on the hop by the sudden success of a book that may be several years old, if it happens to have taken the fancy of “BookTokkers”. Although the number of books that become BookTok hits is tiny, the anointed ones are guaranteed phenomenal sales.
BookTok has proved astonishingly influential on the reading habits of young people: a survey in 2022 found that 59% of 16- to 25-year-olds said it had helped them discover a passion for reading. And Colleen Hoover’s romance-heavy novels – mostly aimed at a “New Adult” readership who are older than Young Adult readers but not yet mentally ready for Middlemarch – chime perfectly with the requirements of BookTok users.
The BookTok format has readers posting short videos in which they react in over-the-top ways – screaming, crying, gurning – to their favourite books, and Colleen Hoover’s weepy plots fit the bill. One typically melodramatic video sees a BookTokker declare: “I want Colleen Hoover to punch me in the face. That would hurt less than these books.”
Hoover – referred to by her fans as “CoHo” – inspires the same sort of frenzied adulation in her fans that Taylor Swift does in hers: where Swift’s acolytes are “Swifties”, Hoover’s are “CoHorts”. Ask most Americans under 30 – certainly women – who comes to mind if you say the name “Hoover”, and Colleen will leave Herbert and J. Edgar nowhere. Total sales of the two dozen or so books she has published in the past 12 years are said to be north of 30 million.
Authenticity and relatability are the keys to success on TikTok, which constantly stresses its credentials as an organic, user-led platform, and Hoover has always been keen to emphasise her status as an ordinary person who became successful by accident, almost despite herself. Her Twitter bio is a masterclass in modesty – it reads in its entirety: “I don’t get it either.”
Born in 1979, Hoover was a 31-year-old social worker, living in a trailer with her truck-driver husband and three children in unglamorous East Texas, when she published her first book in 2012: this was Slammed, about a lonely teenage girl who empowers herself by becoming a slam poet. She claims she wrote it for her mother, and self-published it on Amazon so that her mother could read it on her Kindle: “I just wanted to finish [it] before Christmas because I was very poor and it was something I could give my mother for free that she would love,” she recalled in 2015. “Little did I know what it would turn into!”
The book was championed by the influential blogger Maryse Black among others, and became a bestseller in the e-book charts. Accidental novelist she may have been, but from the first Hoover seems to have been very canny in building up a following on social media – originally on Facebook and YouTube.
After self-publishing Point of Retreat, a sequel to Slammed that also did very well, Hoover signed a deal with Atria, an imprint of the US publishing behemoth Simon & Schuster. She has always set her own terms with her publishing deals, however, and insists on continuing to be allowed to self-publish some of her books. Like many authors she has expressed some dissatisfaction with the traditional companies that have published her – “I feel like [in their view] the successes are theirs, but the failures are mine” – but unlike most authors, she had enough marketing nous early in her career to build up a readership for her self-published works.
Hoover’s novels range from straightforward romance such as Ugly Love (2014) – in which Tate Collins’ friends-with-benefits relationship with airline pilot Miles Archer goes awry when feelings start to develop – to more thrillerish books such as Verity (2018), in which a young writer finds out dark secrets about the veteran novelist whose latest book she has been commissioned to ghost-write. There is usually plenty of sex – or, in TikTok language, “spice”. (Seemingly these days we measure a book’s quality using the Scoville scale.)
In 2016, Hoover published what she described as her most personal novel, It Ends With Us, in which florist Lily Bloom (no, really) falls for sexy neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (no doubt called Thalamus Cerebrum in the first draft), only for him to turn out to be a domestic abuser. The novel was inspired by the abusive relationship between Hoover’s parents and was praised as heartfelt and sensitive, although some critics have judged that it verges on “trauma porn”. Some readers in the post-#MeToo era have also complained that the abusive Ryle is presented too sympathetically. But none of these objections now prevent Hoover from annually outselling the Bible (7.3 million copies versus the Good Book’s 5 million, in 2022).
How to account for Hoover’s success? The critic Laura Miller suggested in Slate that her books are so popular because they are so undistinctive: “The blandness of Hoover’s characters makes them easy for anyone to identify with, and the smooth, featureless quality of her prose makes her novels easy to breeze through in a day or two.”
“A lot of writers are writing to impress – maybe publishers, maybe other writers – so they may go out of their way to use a large vocabulary and craft a substantial piece of literature. That’s not how I write,” Hoover has said. “I want people to devour my books in one sitting because the storyline and dialogue are too gripping to put down.” Her plots grip because they follow a simple pattern of frequent reversals of fortune. Her prose, with its cracker-barrel, Instagram-ready sententiousness (“There is no such thing as bad people. We’re all just people who sometimes do bad things”; “Just because someone hurts you doesn’t mean you can simply stop loving them”) appeals to non-literary-minded readers.
Just as important as what goes on between the covers, however, is the brand that Hoover has cultivated. Unlike glamorous bonkbuster queens of the past such as Jackie Collins and Judith Krantz, she projects a homely vibe in the videos she posts on social media, emphasising her ordinariness, still conveying giddy excitement at the fact that she has somehow obtained the privilege of being a published author. She self-deprecatingly admits to her own mistakes – for example, mocking her own doziness in putting the character of Ryle in his mid-20s, having been unaware of the number of years of training required to practise as a neurosurgeon.
She was in a perfect position to benefit from the BookTok boom that began during the pandemic when TikTokkers, like the rest of us, found themselves spending more time with their bookshelves. The spontaneous growth of a platform celebrating books and encouraging young people to read is something to cheer, especially as the emphasis is on physical books rather than e-books. Indeed, many bookshops now have BookTok tables dedicated to volumes recommended on the site.
That in itself, however, is a reflection of the fact that the number of books that cut through on BookTok is very small. A video enthusing about a certain book starts to chime with users; the more popular it becomes, the more the TikTok algorithms promote it to other users; soon that book is hogging all the attention as other users post their thoughts on it. “Everyone seems to be talking about the same 10 books. You have to make a conscious effort to find content about smaller books, more diverse authors,” as the successful BookTokker Anex Wilson put it to me a couple of years ago.
Indeed, it is possible to see BookTok as anti-literary. One apostate from this world, the former “BookTuber” Barry Pierce, expressed in an article in GQ his scepticism about some of the BookTokkers he had come across: “the dude who says that one of his tips for learning to read more is to ‘romanticise reading’ by finding a cute outfit to read in. Or the person who has made miniature versions of every book they read in 2022 and displays them in a frame ... With all of this effort being put into being seen as a reader, one wonders how any of them have the time to read.”
Of course, publishers desperate to find the next Hoover-esque golden goose now spend a lot of time and money cultivating BookTokkers (some successful BookTokkers are now paid to promote books, although they are obliged to make it clear in their videos if any money has changed hands). Publishers always have a magpie-like fascination for any glittering new toy in the literary scene, but in my view they should save their money and accept that they have no control over which books TikTok will send into the sales stratosphere. Some publishers’ TikTok pages – such as that devoted to Biteback, the political publishing imprint founded by Lord Ashcroft – are positively poignant as exemplars of wishful thinking.
The worst-case scenario is that the traditional publishers will engineer BookTok’s collapse. If users sense that the platform is no longer an organic space for ordinary readers to share their genuine enthusiasms, they will abandon it.
Still, I expect even then Colleen Hoover will find a way to flourish. She is not the only author to have benefited from the BookTok effect – others include Madeline Miller, whose 2011 novel The Song of Achilles, a distinguished book by any standard, was embraced by the BookTok generation a decade after it was first published – but Hoover is the one who has seized the opportunity and engaged with her fans in order to propel herself to the No 1 position on the podium.
Now you can not only watch a video of a BookTokker’s reactions as they read one of Hoover’s novels, but also watch a video of Hoover reacting to the reactions alongside it: not something I can imagine Madeline Miller doing.
There is a sense now that Hoover, conscious of how much she owes to her fans, is letting them dictate aspects of her career. When they clamoured for a more upbeat sequel to It Ends With Us, she obliged in 2022 with the considerably jollier It Starts With Us. Conversely, her recent plan to bring out an It Ends With Us tie-in colouring book was dropped after fans objected that this was making light of a dark story. Of course, Hoover can’t lose when throwing out an idea like that: if the fans go for it, all well and good; if they don’t, she can flatter them by saying she is abandoning it at their behest.
The film of It Ends With Us is expected to do unusually well for a movie pitched at a female audience with no megastars in the cast – despite its being, in the words of our reviewer Tim Robey, “a queasy, self-regarding sham”. For those who think that description applies to Hoover’s work as well, too bad: her dominance shows no sign of abating. In a decade’s time BookTok and even the cinema may be spent forces, but whatever medium will be driving book sales, I’ll bet Colleen Hoover finds a way to make it work for her.
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