Colleen Hoover, the self-published outsider Hollywood keeps adapting

Colleen Hoover

Photo: EsoJleahpaR / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 11, 1979 Sulphur Springs
Occupation	Writer
Awards	Goodreads Choice Award for Best Romance

Few novelists ever live through a week like the one Colleen Hoover is having. A thriller she put out herself, with no agent and no publisher behind it, is about to reach American cinemas with Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson on the poster. Verity is the fourth of her books to become a film in a little over two years, and it arrives while the argument about her has not moved an inch. Readers made her the dominant name in American popular fiction; much of the literary world still treats her success as a phenomenon to be explained rather than a body of work to be read. Hoover has never seemed interested in winning that argument; she keeps writing, and the audience keeps following.

The path started a long way from New York. Hoover, born Margaret Colleen Fennell in Sulphur Springs, in northeast Texas, grew up in nearby Saltillo, a small town where she finished high school. Home was not always safe: the domestic violence her mother endured would later become the raw material of her best-known novel. She studied social work at Texas A&M University–Commerce, married Heath Hoover, raised three sons and worked in social work and teaching, writing only around the edges.

In November 2011 she began a novel with no plan to publish it, borrowing a line from an Avett Brothers song, “decide what to be, and go be it,” as its compass. That book, Slammed, went up on Amazon in January 2012 for a reason she has repeated often: her mother had just been given a Kindle and wanted to read it. A five-star review from the book blogger Maryse Black changed the arithmetic. By August, Slammed sat at number eight on the New York Times best-seller list, Atria Books had picked up the series, and Hoover had left social work for good.

What followed was a decade of speed. Hopeless, self-published in December 2012, became the first self-published novel to reach number one on the Times list. Ugly Love and Maybe Someday, which shipped with a companion soundtrack by the musician Griffin Peterson, built a readership that treated each release as an event. Confess, in which a young painter turns strangers’ anonymous confessions into canvases, won the Goodreads Choice Award for best romance in 2015 and became a mini-series two years later.

Then came the book that defines her. It Ends with Us, published in 2016, follows Lily, a young woman who watched her father abuse her mother and finds herself in a violent relationship as an adult. Hoover has called it the hardest book she ever wrote, and she has been plain about its origins in her own childhood home. It won the Goodreads Choice Award for best romance and had sold over a million copies by 2019. In 2018 she changed register with Verity, a psychological thriller about a struggling writer hired to finish the series of an injured novelist, which she again released on her own before Grand Central Publishing brought it out. The same year brought All Your Perfects, a portrait of a marriage worn down by infertility.

The second wave was stranger than the first. In 2021, BookTok readers on TikTok began filming themselves sobbing over her novels, and the backlist caught fire years after publication. In January 2022 It Ends with Us reached number one on the Times list, more than five years after its release. That year she held six of the top ten spots on the paperback fiction list. Her sequel, It Starts with Us, became the most preordered book in the history of Simon & Schuster when it arrived in October 2022. By then she had sold more than twenty million books, and in 2023 Time put her on its list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

The scale brought scrutiny, and some of it landed. In January 2023 a planned coloring book tied to It Ends with Us was cancelled after readers asked, reasonably, why a novel about domestic abuse needed one. Critics have long argued that her fiction blurs the line between depicting toxic relationships and making them alluring, and that the prose rarely rises above the plot. Her defenders answer that she writes about abuse from inside the experience and reaches readers no literary novelist reaches. Both sides have a point, and her 2026 novel suggested she had heard every word. Woman Down, published in January by Amazon’s Montlake imprint, follows an author retreating to a lakeside cabin after viral backlash against a film adaptation of one of her books. Writing in Slate, Rebecca Onion noted that the parallels with Hoover’s own life were hard to miss, whatever the author’s disclaimers.

Hollywood, meanwhile, has stopped asking whether her books work on screen. The adaptation of It Ends with Us, starring Blake Lively, grossed about $351 million worldwide in 2024 on a $25 million budget. Regretting You, directed by Josh Boone, followed in October 2025 and passed $90 million. Reminders of Him, which Hoover adapted herself with her producing partner Lauren Levine, opened in March 2026 with Maika Monroe and Lauren Graham and took in about $89 million for Universal. Verity, directed by Michael Showalter for Amazon MGM Studios with Josh Hartnett alongside Hathaway and Johnson, premiered in London on September 24 to mixed early reviews and opens in American theaters on October 2.

Away from the screen, Hoover turned her readership into a fundraising engine for her corner of Texas. In 2015 she and her family founded The Bookworm Box, a nonprofit built around selling signed, donated books, with the profits going to charity.

Whether Verity becomes another hit or her first misfire, the shape of her career is already clear. Colleen Hoover proved that a self-published novelist from a town most readers could not find on a map could set the agenda for an entire industry, and the books keep selling while the debate about them goes on.

Tags: novelists, Blake Lively, Colleen Hoover, Verity, It Ends with Us, romance novels

Colleen Hoover, the self-published outsider Hollywood keeps adapting

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