Colleen Hoover’s novels took the top six places on last year’s New York Times bestseller list, while in the UK she rivals Richard Osman as the biggest author in recent times. How has she done it?
I read was It Ends With Us, and when I opened it on the tube, I saw that the woman next to me was reading It Starts With Us. This is not likely to happen with many authors; but as of last year, Hoover was the bestselling novelist in the US, occupying the top six places on the New York Times bestseller list. “To even compare her to other successful authors,” wrote Alexandra Alter of that newspaper, “fails to capture the size and loyalty of her audience.
Hoover has said in the past that she defies literary genre, and her legion of fans sometimes describe her as a genre in her own right, but she is often, for brevity, called a young adult author. “There was always young adult romance, teenagers in high school, then it went to contemporary romance, stories about older twentysomethings, then indie ushered in college-age romance, what we now call ‘new adult’,” says Maryse Black, a seasoned book blogger credited with first discovering Hoover in 2012.
She self-published her debut novel because her mum had a Kindle and Hoover wanted something to show her One YA reader, 14-year-old Ash Taylor, tells me Hoover’s is “writing for people who don’t like reading”. Then they amend that: “It’s like fanfic whose inspiration is the novel itself.” Hoover writesthe novelistic form, but isn’t trying to be it. She’s deft, she’s witty, her plots propel and her characters stand up on their own; if she wanted her books to read more like regular, commercial fiction, she would have no problem writing them like that. That’s just not the effect she’s going for.
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