It Ends With Us is at the center of Hoover’s very polarizing body of work.
This weekend, one of the most popular books of the decade is making its way to the big screen. Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us, a romantic tearjerker about breaking the cycle of abuse that became a social media sensation after it was published in 2016, is now a movie starring Blake Lively. The moment means the mainstream coronation of Hoover herself, the former social worker from Texas turned queen of the New York Times bestseller list.
Hoover sells books the way Danielle Steel used to sell books. She sells the way Stephen King still does. She sells the way new authors usually don’t. In 2022, she held six of the top 10 spots on the Times’s paperback bestseller list at once and sold more books than the Bible. According to industry tracker Circana BookScan, Hoover has sold 28.9 million books in print, plus 7 million ebooks. It Ends With Us, probably her most popular novel, has sold 6.9 million print and ebooks combined. It has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 131 weeks, and it is currently at the top.
Hoover began as a self-published indie author, releasing her first novel, Slammed, in January 2012 when she was 42. She had already found what would become her sweet spot of melodrama combined with taboo romance: The book featured an 18-year-old grieving the death of her father and in love with her poetry teacher.
Slammed unexpectedly became a word-of-mouth hit among book bloggers. By August, the book and its sequel, published a month later, were on the New York Times bestseller list, and Hoover had a traditional publishing contract.
“Colleen Hoover superfan” and “Colleen Hoover hater” are both legible identities in a way that they are for few other authors
Since then, Hoover has published 24 books, counting her novellas, typically releasing at least one book a year, more frequently two and sometimes up to three or four. She has always sold well, but her career shifted into another gear in 2020, when the pandemic left readers in need of a good cry and BookTok emerged as a hit-maker. On BookTok, Hoover fans could film themselves weeping over her books, tossing them across the room out of pure emotional overwhelm, sighing over her heroes. Her sales figures exploded in response.
Yet Hoover hasn’t published a book since 2022. Asked why, she says she’s become very aware of how vast her audience is.
Hoover has a point: Her audience numbers in the millions. It’s also polarized. In the emotional landscape of BookTok, “Colleen Hoover superfan” and “Colleen Hoover hater” are both legible identities in a way that they are for few other authors.
If Hoover fans film themselves sobbing over her books, Hoover haters post about flipping her books around at bookstores so that the covers are backward. They create detailed video essays laying out all the things they think are wrong with Hoover’s books: her simple sentences, her melodramatic plots, her toxic love stories that they say romanticize abuse. Or they just point to a line of text she’s written and say, “What the fuck?”
There’s something about these books that seems to inspire intense reactions in their readers, ranging from sublime catharsis to visceral disgust. Here are the reasons so many of Hoover’s readers have become such ardent, adoring fans — and so many others have become such ferocious haters.
Hoover’s romantic melodramas tend to deal with intense real-life issues that some of her readers have surely experienced. All her characters are traumatized; all their children are destined for untimely deaths; all their love stories are twisted and tragic.
Ugly Love (2014) features a hero who, following the death of his newborn baby, has sworn he’ll never love again. All Your Perfects (2018) deals with a couple struggling with infertility. In November 9 (2015), a woman badly scarred by a house fire falls in love with a man still grieving the death of his mother, who died by suicide.
Part of what sets Hoover apart from other writers of melodrama (think: Nicholas Sparks) is that despite the trauma her characters must face, she writes them with a breezy romantic comedy charm. They meet cute, they banter, and they trade inside jokes as their worlds collapse around them.
The juxtaposition between Hoover’s bubbly prose style and the intensity of her subject matter creates a jarring contrast. Her books are almost magnetically readable: The sentences are easy and pleasant to read while the plots are shocking and intense. You can blaze through one in a day. You can, if you are so inclined, fall in love with her troubled alpha male heroes, her tormented and striving heroines.
They meet cute, they banter, and they trade inside jokes as their worlds collapse around them
For Hoover’s fans, this effect is something they love about her books.
