The Best Things in Life are Free

wiki

Two words: Colleen Hoover. You’ve probably noticed that she has six books on the bestseller list. I’ve been meaning to take a look into the phenomenon because I’m nothing if not an old man with drool on my chin at OTB trying to game the races. Today, the NYT put her on the front page and ran a long article about how she was making $9 an hour as a social worker and living in a trailer when a fairy godmother called Amazon dropped in and she self-published her first book, SLAMMED, a YA about a misfit poetry girl who does slam. According to the article, her books (now 20 of them) have sold over 20M copies. My favorite part of the story is that she put her work out there and according to the article, first six, then sixty people bought it. Does the word mushroom mean anything to you? She now has more that 2.4 billion views (plus one more because I just checked out her TikTok). She didn’t have an agent or a publisher (those came later). She had readers who loved her book. Unlike most novelists who stick to a genre, she’s all over it with thriller, domestic drama, romance, etc. What I love about her is her fatalism, (“Still in my head I’m like this is going to end tomorrow,”) which is why she is always welcome here at the Lerner Sanatorium for Writers and Convalescents.