If there’s anything romance novelist Colleen Hoover has learned from working in Hollywood for the past few years, it’s that movie production moves far slower than publishing. The 46-year-old author released an astonishing 24 novels in the first decade of her career, becoming the best-selling author in the world in 2022 with titles like It Ends with Us and Heart Bones. But she has spent much of the last four years cowriting and producing an adaptation of one of them, Reminders Of Him, for big screen release this weekend.

During that time, Hoover’s novels have become a force at the box office. The movie adaptation of It Ends With Us raked in $350 million worldwide in 2024—despite months of nasty legal battling between stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni—and Regretting You scored a respectable $90 million in late 2025. This October’s Verity, starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, will mark her fourth adaptation in just over two years.

Those projects, plus her hands-on work on Reminders Of Him, left Hoover with no time to write any new books over the past three years. While her book royalties continued to roll in—Forbes estimates she earned some $4 million from book sales in 2025—she likely could have doubled or even tripled that total with a new novel.

“As much focus as I've put into the movie business, it cost me money,” Hoover tells Forbes. “Being on set for five months, that is actually taking away from how I make money, which is writing books. And so I'm truly doing it out of an eagerness to have a new creative outlet and learn and see the characters come to life. I know how much these books mean to readers and I just want to be involved in a way that hopefully I can help make it a movie that sticks more to the book than most........

© Forbes