You’d think being a perennial New York Times bestselling author (It Ends with Us, Confess, and Without Merit) who’s about to set off on a 16-city tour for her new novel, All Your Perfects (Atria, July), wouldn’t leave Colleen Hoover time for anything else, but you would be wrong. She makes the time to oversee a subscription box program and specialty bookstore that together have raised more than a million dollars for charity.
It began in 2015 with the Bookworm Box, a monthly subscription box containing one or two donated books autographed by the authors. “We made up 400 boxes,” Hoover remembers, “announced it on Facebook, and sold out in four minutes.” She suddenly found herself “running a charity out of our living room. Subscriptions were multiplying, and we were packing around 1,000 boxes a month.” It wasn’t long before she began searching for warehouse space in her hometown of Sulphur Springs, Tex. What she found instead was a vacant building on the quaint downtown square. “It was in a great location and had room in the back to house supplies, but there was a storefront that needed filling. So I decided, in that moment, to make it an extension of the subscription boxes and turn it into a specialty bookstore.” Every book in the 3,000-square-foot store, also called the Bookworm Box, is autographed by one of the several hundred authors represented on the shelves. Most of the stock is romance, and the store has become a destination for romance readers who travel from as far away as Australia and England. Profits from both the subscription program and the store go to a variety of charities.
One book certain to be on the shelves is All Your Perfects, which chronicles a troubled marriage. “It’s the first book I’ve written that deals with a couple who’ve been married for years,” Hoover says. “I started dating my husband at 16, married at 20, and have been with him for 22 years. Our marriage is great, but there are moments and days when it’s not. How we deal with the not-so-easy days was a huge resource for me, and writing this book, in a way, was therapeutic, because it made me take a step back and evaluate everything from a character standpoint. When I finished writing it, I loved my husband even more than when I started.”
