New routes to self- publishing rewrite rules of the book world
First- time author gets publishing, film deals after putting novels online
I read them and I liked them and we moved forward very quickly. The voice that she has to connect with readers is very special.
JOHANNA CASTILLO VICE- PRESIDENT AND SENIOR EDITOR, ATRIA BOOKS
SULPHUR SPRINGS, Texas — After a feverish month of inspiration, Colleen Hoover had finally fulfilled her dream of writing a book.
With family and friends asking to read the emotional tale of first love, the married mother of three young boys living in rural East Texas and working 11- hour days as a social worker decided to digitally self- publish on Amazon, where they could download it for free for a week.
“I had no intentions of ever getting the book published. I was just writing it for fun,” said Hoover, who uploaded Slammed a year ago in January.
Soon after self- publishing, people she didn’t know were downloading the book — even after it was only available for a fee. Readers began posting reviews and buzz built on blogs. Missing her characters, she self- published the sequel, Point of Retreat, a month later.
By June, both books hit Amazon’s Kindle top 100 bestseller list. By July, both were on The New York Times bestseller list for ebooks. Soon after, they were picked up by Atria Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint. By fall, she had sold the movie rights.
“I wasn’t expecting any of this at all. And I’m not saying I don’t like it, but it’s taken a lot of getting used to,” said the 33- year- old Hoover, who quit her job last summer to focus on her career as an author.
Hoover is both a story of self- published success in the digital age and of the popularity of so- called New Adult books, stories featuring characters in their late teens and early 20s.
Others in the genre include Jamie McGuire’s Beautiful Disaster and J. Lynn’s Wait for You. The novels, which often have explicit material, are seen by publishers as a bridge between young adult novels and romance novels.
“In a nutshell, they’re stories of characters in their formative year, when everything is new and fresh,” said Amy Pierpont, editorial director of the Hachette Book Group’s Forever imprint, where New Adult bestsellers include Jessica Sorensen and J. A. Redmerski.
When Hoover finished her third book, Hopeless, in December, she initially turned down an offer from Atria and decided to digitally self- publish again. By January, that book, too, was a New York Times bestseller and she signed that month with Atria to publish the print version, but kept control of the electronic version. The paperback is set to come out in May.
In February, Atria bought the digital and paperback rights to two upcoming books from Hoover: This Girl, the third instalment in the Slammed series, set for release digitally later this month, and Losing Hope, a companion novel to Hopeless to be published digitally in July.
Just last week, Hoover announced on her blog a new deal with Atria for two books to be released next year.
Johanna Castillo, vice- president and senior editor at Atria, said she learned about Hoover while perusing book blogs. Checking out Hoover’s blog that details not only her burgeoning writing career but also her day- to- day life, Castillo became enchanted.
Around the same time, Hoover’s agent, Jane Dystel, sent Hoover’s books to Castillo.
“I read them and I liked them and we moved forward very quickly,” said Castillo, who adds, “The voice that she has to connect with readers is very special.”
Hoover says a confluence of events led to her writing Slammed, which tells the story of an 18- year- old girl who moves to a new state with her mother and brother after the sudden death of her father, falls for their 21- year- old neighbour who has a love for slam poetry and soon makes a discovery that means they cannot be together.
Inspiration for the book came from several directions. Hoover had recently gone to a concert of her favourite band, The Avett Brothers, and a line from one of their songs — “Decide what to be and go be it” — kept replaying in her head.
Then one of her sons got a part in a community theatre production that left her tinkering on her laptop during rehearsals, which included looking up videos of people performing slam poetry. That in turn led to her trying to find a book with a main character who was a slam poet. When she couldn’t find such a book, it occurred to her that she could write one herself.
“When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph I was like ‘ Oh, I can go with this,’ ” Hoover said.
Even after being able to quit her job and signing with Atria, Hoover said it wasn’t until a book signing she organized with other indie authors at a Chicago hotel in the fall that her popularity began to sink in.
“I remember coming down the stairs and there was this huge line with hundreds of people and someone goes, ‘ There’s Colleen Hoover,’ and they all start freaking out,” she said. “That was, I think, the first moment that it hit me that this was way bigger than I thought.”