Colleen Hoover books: The author’s success is due to much more than BookTok.

Observers typically attribute Hoover's success to BookTok, the segment of TikTok dedicated to authors and readers. And Hoover-known as CoHo to her fans, who call themselves Cohorts-is indeed the queen of BookTok, an adept TikToker herself, as well as the subject of countless videos in which young women appear clutching huge stacks of candy-colored CoHo paperbacks and proceed to rank their favorites among her 24 titles. But while Hoover might just be the ideal author to preside over TikTok, the platform is only the latest online vehicle she had ridden to fame and fortune. She sometimes presents herself as surprised by her own virality, but Hoover has been a savvy self-promoter since 2012, when she distributed free copies of her first, self-published YA novel, Slammed, to influential book bloggers. She was big on BookTube (the YouTube book community) and big on "Bookstagram" well before TikTok came along. Furthermore, her story-social worker and mom transformed into blockbuster author via whatever new technology of the moment is ostensibly revolutionizing the book business (self-publishing, blogging, Instagram, TikTok)-is catnip to traditional news outlets.