Author Colleen Hoover went from tending cows to writing bestsellers
The top-selling author in the country right now is a 42-year-old mom and former social worker who lives in the same small Texas town where she's spent practically her entire life.
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Colleen Hoover's romance-heavy reads are regular fixtures on bestseller lists. She's outsold the Bible by more than 3 million copies so far this year. And her latest novel out this past week, It Starts With Us, published by the Simon & Schuster division Atria Books, set a company record for first day fiction sales.
According to the company, the novel sold a total of more than 800,000 copies on the day it was released (Oct. 18). It also had more pre-orders than any novel in Simon & Schuster's 98-year-old history.
Hoover's popularity also stems from the wide variety of tropes and genres she draws on in her writing. In an essay published this past August in Slate, columnist Laura Miller called Hoover's books "the everything bagels of popular fiction" because of the author's catch-all approach.
"If you want a super dreamy romance, you can get that. If you want it to be pretty erotic, you can get that. And you can also get a big tear jerker," Miller said in an interview with NPR for this story. "Her skill in promoting herself on social media and the sort of weird evangelical quality of her books that make people want to recommend them to other people — all of that combined sort of reaches a mass audience."
Humble Beginnings:
It was in 2011, while living in a trailer and working for child protection services, that Hoover started writing her debut novel, Slammed. She self-published the young adult romance set in the world of slam poetry on Amazon.
"She called me and she said, 'Six people I don't even know bought my book.' And I'm, like, 'You are kidding!'" said Hoover's mom, Vannoy Fite, recalling the fantastical quality of the weeks following Slammed's release. "And then a couple weeks later, she said, '60 people bought my book. I think I can pay my light bill.' I'm, like, 'Oh my God, Colleen, that's crazy!' And then it just blew up from there. Just blew up."
I've never read any of her books (yet) but she's the biggest thing in novels right now.