The top-read romance book of 2022 was “Reminders of Him” by Colleen Hoover. “It Ends With Us” continues to be on the top ten highest-rated romance book lists based on Goodreads reviews. Searched with over 14,900,000 hits, Colleen Hoover is well known for her contemporary romance novels, often containing explicit content and interesting plots.
However, I’ve found myself disliking not only her books, style and plots; but also her impact on books online. Many authors have begun to copy her style and her genre, and though I do understand that contemporary romance has always been a popular genre, Colleen started a larger trend within the genre. This trend led to the rise in popularity of reading books similar to hers, which in turn launched new authors who simply wrote carbon copies of Colleen Hoover.
I mean authors who’ve only recently come to the scene copying Colleen Hoover’s style, plots and even the amount of explicit content. These are just some of those authors: Emily Henry (debuted “Beach Read” 2020), Ali Hazelwood (debuted “The Love Hypothesis” 2021) and Carley Fortune (debuted “Every Summer After” 2023).
All of these authors have had great success with their books and many are able to publish books rather quickly due to their rather simple plots. Which in turn makes new readers crave more of the books. So it’s just an endless cycle of a new reader seeing advertisements for Colleen Hoover, reading her book, finding it easy to read and entertaining, buying another, reading all her books quickly, finding similar books, finding new releases and still needing more. Not to mention the addiction many people have to reading explicit content which goes unchecked and is oftentimes even taken jokingly.
I found Colleen Hoover’s books to leave a feeling of something missing, most likely due to the shallowness of most of her characters and plots. I realize that the feeling must’ve plagued many other readers since they continue to read her books in search of the deeper meaning of them, even though there isn’t one. Though anyone is welcome to look.
Colleen Hoover’s quick book releases have also impacted how eager readers are for new books from any author. Though I don’t blame this on Hoover, it should still be addressed that the quality of books has decreased with publishing companies pushing due dates on authors. Anticipated releases such as “A Curse for True Love” by Stephanie Garber and “Iron Flame” by Rebecca Yarros, have been rushed by both editing and publishing companies horribly. This in turn caused the books to have printing issues, grammatical errors and even gaping plot holes.
Rise in popularity brought Colleen Hoover’s books to social media where they were advertised solely on tropes, spice levels and stars. Apps like TikTok and Instagram were filled with book recommendations based on those exact criteria, which rarely had a word about the plot. I do understand that many readers prefer being surprised by the plot of book recommendations, but with these selling points, they were bound to be disappointed.
There has been a significant rise in sexual scenes, otherwise referred to as smut, in books. I don’t blame Colleen Hoover for this, but she did contribute unknowingly by restarting the popularity of smut in books. I mean that even though they’ve always been published readers are becoming far more open about reading these books online which in turn brought those sales up. So really it’s circumstance.
Many readers do not want to be caught reading books with this type of explicit content, so then came the idea of those adorable-looking cartoon covers. The biggest issue with these covers is that it markets the book as a sweet romance or an innocent story.
Since cartoons have such a childlike connotation, excluding anime and manga of course, this causes an issue with many schools having these adult-rated romance novels available for young teens and pre-teens. Many do not think this to be such a big issue because they find that written sexual scenes are not as damaging as sexual videos. Which is utterly wrong since written sexual content is still explicit sexual content and gives whoever reads it the same “high” as sexual videos and still has many people hooked.
All in all, Colleen Hoover and the new trends with romance books have changed so much within the reading community in a way that is not favorable to most readers. She may not be to blame for all that has happened within the reading community recently, but she has made her own impact.