Adult fiction titles are booming, thanks to BookTok
It Ends With Us is the latest big screen adaptation to make millions at the box office
This weekend was a big win for one Hollywood power couple, as Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool & Wolverine surpassed $1 billion at the global box office, and Blake Lively’s big screen adaptation of romance-drama novel It Ends With Us achieved a $50 million debut. Perhaps the only person with more to celebrate than the Reynolds-Lively household, though, is the author of the book that inspired the latter movie: Colleen Hoover.
While the 44-year-old Texan first self-published back in 2012, her books have exploded in popularity since 2020. According to Circana BookScan via Vox, Hoover’s titles have now sold almost 30 million in-print copies; in 2022, she held 6 of the top 10 spots in the NYT paperback fiction list, outselling the Bible that year; and It Ends With Us has been a NYT bestseller for over 132 weeks, currently standing at No.1 for combined print & e-book fiction despite being published 8 years ago.
Page-turning
Indeed, Hoover’s meteoric rise has coincided with the ‘BookTok’ boom. During the pandemic, a global community of readers and authors converged on video sharing app TikTok to discuss their favorite titles, offer recommendations, and post reactions to viral novels, giving rise to major author success stories like Hoover, Sarah J Maas, and Taylor Jenkins Reid, among others.
Cut to present, and the #BookTok hashtag has garnered over 35.6 million posts, and counted more than 200 billion total views on the app at the end of last year. Zoom out, and you can even see a broader jump in the popularity of young adult fiction (+50%) and adult fiction (+42%) titles — BookTok’s bread and butter — relative to pre-pandemic 2018, per Circana research on the US book industry; meanwhile, nonfiction titles have seen a slight slump over the same period.
