Texas Woman Self-Publishes, Hits Best-Seller Lists

By JAMIE STENGLE | Associated Press – Tue, Apr 16, 2013 SULPHUR SPRINGS, Texas (AP) — After a feverish month of inspiration, Colleen Hoover had finally fulfilled her dream of writing a book. With family and friends asking to read the emotional tale of first love, the married mother of three young boys living in rural East Texas and working 11-hour days as a social worker decided to digitally self-publish on Amazon, where they could download it for free for a week. "I had no intentions of ever getting the book published. I was just writing it for fun," said Hoover, who uploaded "Slammed" a year ago in January. Soon after self-publishing, people she didn't know were downloading the book — even after it was only available for a fee. Readers began posting reviews and buzz built on blogs. Missing her characters, she self-published the sequel, "Point of Retreat," a month later. By June, both books hit Amazon's Kindle top 100 best-seller list. By July, both were on The New York Times best-seller list for e-books. Soon after, they were picked up by Atria Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint. By fall, she had sold the movie rights. "I wasn't expecting any of this at all. And I'm not saying I don't like it, but it's taken a lot of getting used to," said the 33-year-old Hoover, who quit her job last summer to focus on her career as an author. Hoover is both a story of self-published success in the digital age and of the popularity of so-called "New Adult" books, stories featuring characters in their late teens and early 20s. Others in the genre include Jamie McGuire's "Beautiful Disaster" and J. Lynn's "Wait for You." The novels, which often have explicit material, are seen by publishers as a bridge between young adult novels and romance novels. "In a nutshell, they're stories of characters in their formative year, when everything is new and fresh," said Amy Pierpont, editorial director of the Hachette Book Group's "Forever" imprint, where "New Adult" best sellers include Jessica Sorensen and J.A. Redmerski. When Hoover finished her third book, "Hopeless," in December, she initially turned down an offer from Atria and decided to digitally self-publish again. By January, that book too was a New York Times best-seller and she signed that month with Atria to publish the print version, but kept control of the electronic version. The paperback is set to come out in May. In February, Atria bought the digital and paperback rights to two upcoming books from Hoover: "This Girl," the third installment in the "Slammed" series, set for release digitally later this month, and "Losing Hope," a companion novel to "Hopeless" to be published digitally in July. Just last week, Hoover announced on her blog a new deal with Atria for two books to be released next year. Johanna Castillo, vice president and senior editor at Atria, said she learned about Hoover while perusing book blogs. Checking out Hoover's blog that details not only her burgeoning writing career but also her day-to-day life, Castillo became enchanted. Around the same time, Hoover's agent, Jane Dystel, sent Hoover's books to Castillo. "I read them and I liked them and we moved forward very quickly," said Castillo, who adds, "The voice that she has to connect with readers is very special." In a June post Hoover poignantly writes about being able to move from a single-wide mobile home to "a REAL house. A house with doors that work and an air conditioner that cools and electricity that doesn't shut off if you run two electronics at the same time." "Seven months ago, we were struggling to make ends meet," she writes in the blog post. "Now, things are finally coming together and it's all because of you guys. Every single person that spent a few bucks to buy a book that I wrote deserves a big THANK YOU from my whole family." Hoover says a confluence of events led to her writing "Slammed," which tells the story of an 18-year-old girl who moves to a new state with her mother and brother after the sudden death of her father, falls for their 21-year-old neighbor who has a love for slam poetry and soon makes a discovery that means they cannot be together. Inspiration for the book came from several directions. Hoover had recently gone to a concert of her favorite band, The Avett Brothers, and a line from one of their songs — "Decide what to be and go be it" — kept replaying in her head. Then one of her sons got a part in a community theater production that left her tinkering on her laptop during rehearsals, which included looking up videos of people performing slam poetry. That in turn led to her trying to find a book with a main character who was a slam poet. When she couldn't find such a book, it occurred to her that she could write one herself. "When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph I was like 'Oh, I can go with this,'" Hoover said. "I didn't do an outline. I didn't do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going." Even after being able to quit her job and signing with Atria, Hoover said it wasn't until a book signing she organized with other indie authors at a Chicago hotel in the fall that her popularity began to sink in. "I remember coming down the stairs and there was this huge line with hundreds of people and someone goes, 'There's Colleen Hoover,' and they all start freaking out," she said. "That was I think the first moment that it hit me that this was way bigger than I thought." Hoover grew up in rural East Texas, was married with a baby by the age of 20 and got a degree in social work from Texas A&M-Commerce. She worked as an investigator with Child Protective Services before returning to school to get her qualifications to teach special education, which she did for a year before returning to school again to get a minor in infant nutrition and going to work for the federal Women, Infants and Children program, known as WIC. Maryse Black, a book blogger who has mostly read and reviewed indie books in the last few years, was among Hoover's early fans. Black reviewed "Slammed" a couple months after Hoover uploaded it, asking readers if they were in the mood for "a book that will hook you from the first few lines, make you smile, make you laugh, make you ABSOLUTELY fall in love, and then sigh and sigh and sigh again." "She's 100 percent real in her writing," Black said in a recent phone interview. "I feel like I can relate to her characters. I can relate to their situations and I can relate to their reactions. I can see it actually happening as I'm reading the book it plays out in my head like a seamless movie." On a recent blog post Hoover shared with her readers what she called "a really depressing blast from the past" — a MySpace post from 2006 she recently came across in which she writes that although she's certain she "was born to write a book," she believes that she never will. She writes that she's researched whether it would be worth it to even try and decided that with the low odds of ever getting a publisher or being able to support herself writing, she shouldn't even try. She writes on her blog, "Good thing I didn't listen to myself. It also says a helluva a lot about how much the publishing industry has changed." ___ Online: Colleen Hoover's blog, www.colleenhoover.com

POETS FROM DISTANT SHORES AND THE POET NEXT DOOR Tell a friend New! Monday, May 6, 2013 7:00 PM The Phoenix 1302 E 6th Street, Southeast Corner of Peoria and Sixth, Tulsa, OK(map) We meet in The Library Room at the back of the cafe. Choose a poem from another culture and bring to share. Also, bring a work of your own to have read by your neighbor. We will practice our presentation skills and hear our words spoken by a fellow poet. Come join us to share, contemplate, create, and learn!

Chile Exhumes Nobel Poet’s Body to Investigate Claim of Poisoning

Musicians played music during the exhumation of the remains of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda on Monday. By PASCALE BONNEFOY Published: April 8, 2013 SANTIAGO, Chile — The remains of Chile’s Nobel Prize-winning poet, Pablo Neruda, were exhumed Monday so that they could be examined for signs of whether he might have died of poisoning instead of cancer, the widely believed cause for almost 40 years. The court-ordered exhumation seeks to establish what caused Mr. Neruda’s death in a private clinic in Santiago on Sept. 23, 1973, less than two weeks after a military coup toppled the nation’s socialist president, Salvador Allende, a close friend of the poet. Mr. Neruda, a prominent member of the Communist Party and a former senator, had prostate cancer and was being treated in Paris, where he was an ambassador appointed by President Allende. He returned to Chile in November 1972. Best known for his romantic poetry, Mr. Neruda won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. Shortly after the coup, as the new military rulers persecuted supporters of Mr. Allende, troops looted and destroyed Mr. Neruda’s house in the capital and twice raided his home in Isla Negra, where he lived with his third wife, Matilde Urrutia. The Mexican government had offered to fly the couple out of the country, and days before he was scheduled to travel, Mr. Neruda was admitted to the Santa María clinic in the capital. In 2011, Mr. Neruda’s driver at the time, Manuel Araya, publicly claimed that Mr. Neruda had not been in critical condition beforehand and that a day before his death Mr. Neruda, 69, told him that a doctor had given him an injection in the stomach that made him “burn inside.” His health quickly deteriorated. Mr. Araya contends that the poet was poisoned by doctors in the clinic, although there are no material witnesses to confirm the accusation. Few of Mr. Neruda’s relatives and friends believe Mr. Araya’s version, nor does the Pablo Neruda Foundation, which manages his estate. But there are contradictory accounts regarding his health conditions and how advanced the cancer was, and it is not clear why Mr. Araya kept silent all these years. Mr. Araya said that he had tried to tell Communist Party leaders at the time, but that no one would listen. Almost four decades later, he again approached the party to relay his suspicions about Mr. Neruda’s death. This time, the party filed a criminal lawsuit to have the courts establish the truth. “Once there is a doubt, I believe it is extremely important to clear it up and use the technological means at our disposal to determine the poet’s cause of death,” said Judge Mario Carroza, who is in charge of the investigation. “We will not spare any possibility.” Mr. Neruda and Ms. Urrutia were buried together in a grave facing the Pacific Ocean at his seaside home in Isla Negra, about 70 miles west of Santiago. His remains were transported Monday to the morgue in the capital, where Chilean and international forensics experts will examine them. Results of the analysis could take several months.