She holds six of the top 10 spots on The New York Times’s paperback fiction best-seller list

A wonderful American story.  From How Colleen Hoover Rose to Rule the Best-Seller List by Alexandra Alter.  The subheading is With legions of devoted fans and a knack for high-voltage emotional drama, Hoover has sold more than 20 million books. And she’s done it her way.

A woman from rural Texas starts writing romantic novels (and other such genres) a decade ago and begins by self-publishing her first book as well as several later ones.  The basic story is in the opening paragraphs.

When she self-published her first young adult novel, “Slammed,” in January of 2012, Hoover was making $9 an hour as a social worker, living in a single-wide trailer with her husband, a long-distance truck driver, and their three sons. She was elated when she made $30 in royalties. It was enough to pay the water bill.

Hoover, 42, didn’t have a publisher, an agent or any of the usual marketing machinery that goes into engineering a best seller: the six-figure marketing campaigns, the talk-show and podcast tours, the speaking gigs and literary awards, the glowing reviews from mainstream book critics.

But seven months later, “Slammed” hit the New York Times best-seller list. By May, Hoover had made $50,000 in royalties, money she used to pay back her stepfather for the trailer. By the summer, with two books on the best-seller list — “Slammed” and a sequel, “Point of Retreat,” — she quit her job to write full time.

Her success has happened largely on her terms, led by readers who act as her evangelists, driving sales through ecstatic online reviews and viral reaction videos.

Some of her accomplishments from the article.

Colleen Hoover has sold more books this year than Dr. Seuss. She’s sold more books than James Patterson and John Grisham — combined.

She holds six of the top 10 spots on The New York Times’s paperback fiction best-seller list, a stunning number of simultaneous best sellers from a single author. 

She has sold 8.6 million print books this year alone — more copies than the Bible, according to NPD BookScan.

So far in 2022, five of the top 10 best-selling print books of any genre are Hoover’s, according to NPD BookScan, and many of her current best-sellers came out years ago, a phenomenon that’s almost unheard-of in publishing.

Most blockbuster authors break out because of a popular series, like “Twilight” or “Harry Potter,” or build a brand by writing in a recognizable genre. Hoover is eclectic. She’s written romances, a steamy psychological thriller, a ghost story, harrowing novels about domestic violence, drug abuse, homelessness and poverty.

Hoover’s books are now dominating the best seller lists years after they were first released. Her top-selling book, “It Ends With Us,” a drama about a florist who falls for a brooding, abusive neurosurgeon, came out six years ago, but reappeared on the best-seller list in 2021 and has remained a fixture there: It’s currently No. 1 on The New York Times paperback list, and has sold four million copies. 

A wonderful story and well worth reading.

I did like this point.

“She’s defying the laws of how the market works,” said the publishing industry analyst Peter Hildick-Smith.

I am not wishing to be snide to Hildick-Smith but my instantaneous response was to rewrite it: She’s defying the laws of how we think the market works.  She is apparently a refreshing example of the enduring truism that we never fully understand the nature, demand and character of markets.  The more free they are, the more examples of unexpected outcomes there are.