Correction (Jan. 17): Kat Singleton’s Pretty Rings & Broken Things is scheduled to be self-published in February 2024, and print rights have not been sold. (However, audiobook rights were sold to Podium Audio.) The article originally stated that rights had been sold to Atria, with a release in February 2024.
A disclaimer one often sees in financial documents for investments reads, “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” Does the same apply to bestselling books? Can we, by looking at past performance, discern the fate of an author’s books in 2024? Let’s try.
In a recent Publishers Weekly article discussing PW’s 2023 bestsellers—Women Ruled the 2023 Bestseller List—Colleen Hoover took the number-one and number-two spots, with It Ends with Us and It Starts with Us having moved 1.3 million and 1.25 million copies, respectively. (Hoover’s Verity was number nine, and Ugly Love was number 19.) So will Hoover’s popularity persist in 2024?
Going into the year, Hoover’s momentum has slowed somewhat from the same time last year, when she courted controversy and had to cancel an ill-conceived coloring book. And despite topping the overall charts for 2023, Hoover’s sales trailed off as the year went on. Plus her work was not cited as being among the bestselling holiday titles at the year’s end, when independent and chain booksellers pointed to the popularity of romantasy writer Rebecca Yarros, whose Fourth Wing and Iron Flame currently top the USA Today bestseller list and were number four and number six on Publishers Weekly’s list of top-selling titles for 2023.
Yarros has said there are three more books due in the series, and the rights to Yarros’s books were bought by Amazon Studios for adaptation. If they are rushed into production—and one can well expect they will be, based on the treatment received by Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry (number eight on PW’s list, with a million copies sold)—Yarros will remain a bestseller for the foreseeable future.
Yarros was published by a relative startup; her publisher, Entangled Publishing’s Red Tower imprint, was launched at the end of 2022. That’s good news for the industry, reiterating that the right book, with a boost from the right publicity push or serendipitous luck (however you want to characterize BookTok), can reach the right audience. What is the right audience? you ask. A ravenous one that is keen to be part of a larger community and can make a book into a conversation starter online.
Sarah J. Maas, too, is benefitting, with A Court of Thorns and Roses at number 11 on PW’s list and number four on the USA Today bestseller list. Barnes & Noble has been especially keen on pushing Maas, having piled her books high in their stores throughout the holidays. B&N CEO James Daunt credited Maas’s soon-to-be-released House of Flame and Shadow, the third volume in her Crescent City series, with filling in the need for titles likely to draw customers to shop in store. Daunt’s feelings about Maas are more than relevant, since (as noted in an earlier item) B&N is aggressively opening new stores.
This brings us back to Hoover. Will she continue to reign? Not likely to the same extent she has in recent years, no. But she will remain relevant, especially with the release of It Ends with Us as a movie on June 21, with Blake Lively (of Gossip Girl fame) in the lead role. The success of that adaptation will predict how much deeper producers will go into her backlist—at least as far as greenlighting the work. A seven-episode show, Confess, based on her novel of the same name, aired on Verizon’s web-only TV service and has, as people revisit it, received mixed-to-negative reviews while still maintaining an IMDB rating of 7.5.
Hoover has moved into alternative means of revenue generation, ranging from selling merchandise festooned with quotes from her books to hosting live events. One week prior to the release of It Ends with Us, Hoover will host her now-annual Book Bonanza, a charity event in Grapevine, Texas—a charming small town north of Dallas. You must apply to attend, and after you are accepted you will be asked to pay $300 for a ticket.
Book Bonanza is an extension of Hoover’s Bookworm Box program, a subscription box service that she’s run since 2015 and that offers signed books and swag. It is run as charity and has given away more than $1 million. Through her Book Bonanza platform, Hoover has leveraged her fame and popularity to promote allied authors and books. Some are major, mainstream authors, such as Rebecca Zanetti’s One Cursed Rose, coming from Kensington in June; others are self-published authors, such as Kat Singleton, J.T. Geissinger and Bella J. The practice of cross-promotion among popular authors on social media is likely to become even more widespread in 2024, since mainstream media outlets writing about books continue to shrink and those that do write about books primarily focus on literary releases—largely relegating genre works to roundups and the margins.
Bottom line: All of the aforementioned bestsellers can broadly be categorized as books finding an audience among the demographic of avid readers on the younger side (i.e., not middle aged), primarily identifying as female, and active on social media, especially TikTok and short-form video. To keep the momentum going among these readers, authors will have to either produce more books and more rapidly—lest readers move on to new series—or else find other means of engagement (e.g., Hoover’s in-person event). Social media pushes remain central to most publishers’ strategies, especially for publishers catering to the aforementioned audience. Influencer campaigns are now going far beyond free books, swag, and the occasional paycheck—as seen with the TikTok influencer cruise (see this issue’s Links of Interest).
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.
