Grand Central Publishing, an imprint at Hachette, has announced a deal for a new psychological thriller by bestselling author Colleen Hoover. It is also taking over publication of Hoover’s self-published novel Verity, which was originally published in 2018 and has sold almost 900,000 copies in ebook and paperback format combined. (Verity is also in development at Amazon Studios.) Hoover was represented by Jane Dystel of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret.
While sometimes seen as a self-publishing author, Hoover has worked with traditional publishers for years now. Simon & Schuster’s Atria has published a range of Colleen Hoover’s novels; Hoover also works with Amazon’s romance imprint, Montlake, and has a novel forthcoming from them in 2022.
In 2016, in a blog post that’s no longer available at her site except via the Wayback Machine, Hoover said she was selling far fewer books than usual as a self-published author. She wrote, “I have a much larger audience now than I did in 2013. I probably had about 20,000 followers on Facebook back then. Now I have over 300,000. My signings in 2013 saw about 20–30 people in attendance. Now I sometimes draw crowds of hundreds, and even upwards in the thousands. Yet, I sell maybe 1/10th of the books I used to sell.”
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
