Concerned tweets don’t often go further than identifying her stories’ troublesome relationship dynamics or lazily labeling one of her books “the worst piece of English literature.” I read approximately 4.8 of Hoover’s novels, about 20% of her oeuvre. She does not need anyone - a business, a publisher - to advocate for her writing she has done it all on her own terms.Īmidst the headlines and TikToks, a conversation about the nature of Hoover’s work has been lost. Even after Atria, a branch of Simon & Schuster, published a few of her books, Hoover opted to self-publish another, 2013’s young adult novel This Girl (the third book in the Slammed saga). Within a few months of Slammed’s publication, she had earned $50,000 in royalties. (Many of Hoover’s novels focus on women - young or otherwise - in semi-forbidden relationships with men.) It was self-published and, though it took seven months, eventually reached #8 on the New York Times’s paperback fiction bestseller list 10 more of her books have reached the list since.

Her first novel, 2012’s Slammed, was a young adult romance book, more adult than young, about a high school senior navigating a romance with her English teacher. Hoover, a self-made author, navigated the cutthroat, tricky publishing world on her lonesome.

The woman behind them is just as much of a phenomenon as her work.

According to the New York Times, Hoover’s books have outsold John Grisham’s and James Patterson’s combined.

Slam colleen hoover