Colleen Hoover

Colleen Hoover (born 1979) is an American novelist of romance, young adult fiction and thrillers whose self-published beginnings and success on TikTok made her one of the best-selling authors of the early 2020s.

She was born Margaret Colleen Fennell on 11 December 1979 in Sulphur Springs, Texas. She took a social work degree at Texas A&M University-Commerce and worked in social work and teaching before writing full time.

Hoover self-published her debut, Slammed, in January 2012; after it reached the New York Times list, Atria Books reissued it that August. Hopeless, also self-published in 2012, became the first self-published novel to reach number one on that list. It Ends with Us, published by Atria on 2 August 2016, draws on her parents' relationship and deals with domestic violence; it had sold over a million copies by 2019 and was the best-selling novel of 2023. A film version starring Blake Lively was released in August 2024. Verity was self-published in December 2018 before Grand Central Publishing reissued it in 2021. The sequel It Starts with Us came from Atria in October 2022. By that month she had sold more than 20 million books, helped by the BookTok community from 2021.

For collectors. Her early titles began as self-published editions before trade publishers reissued them, so the self-published printings of Slammed, Hopeless and Verity precede the better-known commercial editions. It Ends with Us and It Starts with Us were published first in the United States by Atria Books.