Admittedly, it was a long shot, but I was hoping to snag an interview with author Colleen Hoover late last year. The hotly anticipated follow-up to her top-selling It Ends With Us was about to come out, and I figured that she, like every other author in the world, would be out there promoting it. But then the email arrived: ‘It looks like Colleen has pulled out of all publicity, including her US tour.’
For an author about to release a book, this would be a career-crippling move.
For Colleen Hoover, it’s barely a blip. Because let’s be real here: she doesn’t need the publicity. At this very moment, 9 of the top 15 trade paperbacks on The New York Times best-seller list are hers. On the Combined Print and E-book Fiction list, she holds a third of the top 15 slots, nestled comfortably among new releases from well-established names like James Patterson, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, Lee Child and Stephen King. And yet some of her top-ranking titles have been out in the world since 2014. It’s unheard of.
‘She’s defying the laws of how the market works,’ says publishing industry analyst Peter Hildick-Smith.
Most breakout authors’ careers are launched by (a) a traditional publishing house and (b) a specific series: Twilight, or Harry Potter. But Colleen doesn’t even stick to a specific genre: she’s written romances, a supernatural story about a ghost, a
