There are always new and exciting ways to tell stories: Not only does she like to collaborate with other artists, Colleen likes to keep on top of what’s going on in the book world. And it kind of enhances the book a little bit, beyond just a romance novel.” She says, “pulling in other artistic elements is more something for me because I just find it so cool to collaborate with musicians and artists. Not just for readers, but so that she can have some more fun with the writing process, too. When she can, Colleen says she loves incorporating new and exciting elements like these into her books. She said it was really cool having the readers “really excited and see something that they were a part of come to life.” Cool, right? But the best part? They are illustrations of real paintings Colleen commissioned based on real anonymous confessions sent in by readers.

If you flip to the middle of the book you can see full-colour illustrations of the paintings made by Owen alongside the confessions that inspired them. Owen looks through them and turns some of them into beautiful works of art. Owen owns an art studio called Confess, where people drop off anonymous confessions. Confess is the story of an artist, Owen, and a woman named Auburn. Because I saw that reaction from S lammed where people were actually enjoying that aspect of it, liked being able to do something beyond just reading the book.”Ĭolleen does something like this with the book Confess, too. So that’s actually why I got the idea to do that with Maybe Someday and have its own soundtrack and write the music the characters actually write in the book. “I would see comments every now and then from readers that were like, ‘Oh, as soon as I finished the book I went and downloaded their music.’ I liked that. This started a bit of a trend for her, she says:

Throughout the book, Colleen features lyrics from her favourite band, The Avett Brothers.

When I told her it seemed like she didn’t do anything conventionally, she laughed and said, “I don’t think that’s on purpose.” She has since pumped out bestseller after bestseller, and they’re not typical either. She began self-published and was then picked up by a traditional publisher. She says, “they sent them to to kind of look over and make any changes.” They were “very receptive” to any of Colleen’s feedback which she said was “really cool.”Ĭolleen’s career hasn’t been exactly typical. She says the filmmakers “pretty much made all the decisions but then ran everything by afterward.” It was the director, Elissa Down, who wrote the scripts, but again, they ran everything by Colleen. She didn’t think she would be as involved as she was. According to Colleen, Confesswas kind of a combo.

Confess colleen hoover series