“I’ve seen plenty of books become smash hits,” she said. Fredman has been busy packing kits of temporary tattoos and murals for the midnight pajama parties scheduled to take place at bookstores across the US for the 18 October release. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Ariele Fredman, deputy director of publicity and marketing at Atria Books, the publisher of It Starts With Us, the forthcoming follow-up to It Ends With Us. As far as current sales go, Hoover is without rival. And yet that’s only a piece of the equation. The mid-career success story of Colleen Hoover, a fortysomething Texas mother of three who has written more than 20 novels across multiple genres, is partly a testament to the power of social media. A synthetic female voice narrates “hehe I seriously couldn’t breathe lol” while she has her literary meltdown in her bedroom. The TikToker uses the sleeves of her sweatshirt for the same purposes in her CoHo sob session. In the time-lapse video that posted of herself reading Ugly Love in one day, she can be seen burying her face in the pages to absorb the tears. #CoHo videos on TikTok are often viscerally performative, starring readers so overcome with emotion that they are gasping and screaming. This subset of TikTok, where enthusiastic readers share book recommendations, is credited with making many of today’s bestsellers, from Madeline Miller’s Circe to the suddenly trendy work of Agatha Christie. Originally published in 2016, It Ends With Us became a bona fide phenomenon over the pandemic via BookTok. Her Twitter bio reads: “I don’t get it either.” The literary establishment has long counted on movie tie-ins or celebrity platforms to set a blockbuster in motion, but neither factor is at play in Hoover’s case. (She is especially big in the Philippines and Brazil.) These would be big numbers in any industry, but are especially stunning in one where bestsellers are often counted in the tens of thousands. Four million copies of It Ends With Us have sold in the US to date, and 20m Hoover books have sold globally.

Never never release date colleen hoover