Colleen Hoover, CoHo if you’re a stan, is God’s gift to the publishing industry. The novelist and BookTok phenomenon — a seasoned writer behind more than 20 novels and novellas over the past decade — sold a record-breaking 800,000 copies of her new book, It Starts With Us, in the first day alone, according to a press release. These are numbers that keep whole businesses afloat, and these are numbers that will place the successful romance novel — a sequel to her No. 1 best-seller It Ends With Us — in a sales category far above anything else released this year.
With an astonishing first print run of 2.5 million copies, Hoover’s achievements didn’t begin with the book’s first-day sales numbers. It Starts With Us was the most preordered novel in publisher Simon & Schuster’s history. These wild stats aren’t a surprise if you ventured onto BookTok or Goodreads: Hoover has a vocal (and fiercely devoted) following with CoHorts forcing her books to occupy seven of the ten top spots in this week’s New York Times Paperback Trade Fiction best-seller list.
The first-day sales figures place CoHo in some pretty extraordinary company: Barack Obama’s ginormous post-presidency tome A Promised Land sold 887,000 in its first day, while the former First Lady Michelle’s own memoir, Becoming, made out with 725,000 copies. Though the 24-hour figures tend to favor political memoirs and Trump-era info-dumps (Mary Trump’s tell-all sold 950,000 books and Bob Woodward’s Fear did 750,000), some of the biggest novels of recent memory recorded similar sales figures. Stephanie Myer’s Twilight finale and thought experiment Breaking Dawn sold 1.3 million copies in its first day, while the Fifty Shades spinoff Grey moved 1.1 million copies in its first four days.
“Not even going to try to wrap my head around this. 🤯,†Hoover wrote on Instagram following the book’s release. “Thanks to my coworkers, to @atriabooks and to everyone who messaged and sent flowers and shared posts. Gonna go sit in the dark and sob now.â€
