HOT WRITER IN A HOT AIRPORT BOOKSTORE: COLLEEN HOOVER

The hot writer is who I pay attention to.

I may not read their work, but I notice their books.

Colleen Hoover was hard to miss in the airport bookstore.

How hard?

There’s something going on when a book kiosk in front of the big book store looks like this.

If it’s in front of the book store in Sky Harbor in Phoenix it’s getting eyes all day and night.

A hot writer in a hot airport seems like a good match.

I was impressed and looked for more hot writers on display.

Hotter than Hoover?

Who Is Hot Writer Colleen Hoover?

From time.com:

(In 2012) 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.

Word of mouth is the best advertising for books. Someone you know says you should read this book, so you read that book.

Then comes the phone call from the New York Times best seller list.

It’s that easy?

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.

Airport Book Store? Which Airport?

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.

How many dreamy writers see Colleen Hoover’s work and want some of what she’s got going on?

Every last one.

Their mantra: I know I could do that.

But they don’t.

It’s the same as readers on a blog like boomerpdx.

“I could do that.”

To which I answer: Why would you?

Be a hot writer like Colleen Hoover, not me.

Why would you spend countless hours working over blog posts that get read by a few scrollers on their way to someplace else?

You’d pay for hosting and domains with little of no hope of a return on your dollar?

Your engagement comes in the form of passionate spammers.

What are you, goofy?

Will the New York Times make a call telling you you’re on their best seller list?

(Inside tip: There’s no list for best seller blogs.)

In one year, the romance and young-adult author Colleen Hoover has made her name known globally. Hoover sold over 8.6 million hard copy books in 2022, three million more than the Bible.

She wrote six of the ten best selling books of 2022. 

Last Quote From Time Magazine

“I feel very disconnected from the statistics, all of the stuff that’s out there about the year or two I’ve had,” she says, dragging a sip from her Pepsi cup.

“I’m not walking around my house going, ‘I outsold the Bible, honey, you need to make my dinner tonight.’”

Who is going to the library today and making dinner?

Romance and Young Adult will be served in the reading room.

This could be just the thing to reshape my sexy work-in-progress memoir.

My new pen name: Dashing David, or David Dashing. A dash of dashing helps most everything.

Mmmm, romance.