Colleen Hoover greeted readers during a signing session at her annual Book Bonanza romance convention on June 23 in Grapevine, Texas.

LaGuardia Airport offers no fewer than four opportunities to purchase Colleen Hoover’s books between security and the gate—this is expected. What feels almost too on the nose is when, an hour into my flight to Dallas, the woman beside me wakes up from a nap and pulls out a copy of Hoover’s best-known novel, It Ends With Us.

I shouldn’t be surprised: Hoover’s books are everywhere. The story of her rise to literary success is straight out of a movie plot, and not a particularly believable one. She was a 31-year-old social worker living in a mobile home with her husband and three boys when she got inspired to start writing a story about a teen slam poet—a way to pass the time while her son was in rehearsals for a play. Hoover’s mom and sisters read the first few chapters and wanted to know what happened next, so she kept going. When she finished, Hoover uploaded the manuscript to Amazon’s self-publishing platform so her grandmother could read it on her new Kindle, and just months later, thanks purely to word-of-mouth buzz, Hoover got the call: her book, Slammed, was a New York Times best seller.

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That was in 2012. She’s released 24 more plot-driven romance, thriller, domestic-drama, and young-adult novels and novellas since then (some self-published, some with traditional publishers, some through both). At least 17 have become Times best sellers, and many have lingered on the list at the same time, largely due to a surge of impassioned reviews on TikTok during the pandemic. Hoover, 43, is known for converting reluctant readers into fanatics. Last year, she outsold the Bible.

Colleen Hoover Talks It Ends With Us Film and Book Bonanza | Time