How Colleen Hoover became one of the most bankable names in Hollywood

Much is left unanswered in Verity , the latest film adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel. But while the story twists and turns, one thing remains clear: audiences can’t get enough of the Texan author’s tales.

Verity has topped the Australian box office since its October 1 release. The psychological thriller, starring Anne Hathaway, Josh Hartnett and Dakota Johnson, has grossed over $163 million globally against a $57.3 million production budget. In Australia, it breezed past other popular titles such as Heart of the Beast , starring both Brad Pitt and an incredibly cute dog, as well as Zach Cregger’s buzzy Resident Evil .

This isn’t the first time a pulpy Hoover adaptation has smashed the box office. Within two years, four of the author’s stories have been adapted for cinema: It Ends With Us , Regretting You, Reminders of Him and Verity , all of which enjoyed solid to significant box office success.

At first glance, this seems perplexing. Hoover began as a self-published author, writing stories on her mother’s laptop in a Texas trailer and uploading finished titles to Amazon. She admits she’s no literary genius, telling Elle last year she just wants to write “fun books that are easy reads”. And easy reads they are, with most of her titles prioritising sugary melodrama or ridiculous plot twists. Sprinkled throughout the pulp are heavier subjects, such as domestic violence and infanticide, neither of which scream “light read” or “fun girls’ night out at the cinema”. And then there are the critics’ reviews, most of which range from middling to downright scathing .

Yet, this self-published author has become one of Hollywood’s most bankable names. How?

Speaking to Variety in March , Hoover credits “ BookTok ”, the online sub-community dedicated to popular literature, with propelling her career into the stratosphere. Early in the pandemic, she made some of her work available online for free to increase accessibility during lockdowns. This, paired with her novels’ romance-heavy plots, helped them go viral on socials, where young readers discovered her work and shared doting review videos.

Associate professor Liam Burke, discipline lead for Swinburne’s cinema and screen studies, says Hoover even maintains her own TikTok account where she shares updates on publishing and film adaptations, allowing fans to develop a closer relationship with her.

“Such parasocial relationships are incredibly valuable for authors looking to stand out in our attention economy,” Burke says.

By 2022, Hoover’s titles outsold the Bible by more than 3 million copies in the US. That same year, she attained six of the top 10 spots on The New York Times bestselling paperback fiction list. She has so far sold over 35 million copies of her books worldwide, and one of her most recent novels, It Starts With Us , broke Simon & Schuster’s record for most pre-orders in the publication’s 100-year history.

“Book sales consistently show that women read much more fiction than men,” Burke says.