Connor Franta Books in Order

Connor Franta was born on September 12, 1992, in Wisconsin and grew up in La Crescent, Minnesota, a small town near the Mississippi River. He was the third of four children in a close family, and the routines of Midwestern childhood, school, family events, and the awkwardness of growing up later gave his memoirs much of their starting material.

He began experimenting with online video while still in high school. In the summer of 2010, he posted his first YouTube video, initially talking to a small audience about daily life and whatever was on his mind. He had discovered other vloggers as a teenager and saw that the form could hold stories that were funny, mundane, personal, or all three.

The camera turned out to be more than a hobby.

As his following grew, Franta joined the collaborative channel Our2ndLife from 2012 to 2014, and his own channel became a place for conversational videos about friendships, identity, interests, and the strange parts of becoming visible online. He was part of the first wave of creators who made a career from personal videos, long before that path felt routine.

In December 2014, Franta publicly came out as gay in a video. It was an important personal step, and his openness about sexuality, self-image, and belonging became a thread in the writing that followed.

His first book, A Work in Progress, arrived in 2015. It looks back at a small-town childhood and his leap into online work, but it doesn't present that leap as a tidy success story. Franta writes about body image, depression, friendships, identity, and the decision to take creative ambitions seriously. The book also includes family material, childhood clippings, and his photographs. It became a New York Times bestseller and won the 2015 Goodreads Choice Award for memoir and autobiography.

Two years later, Note to Self moved closer to the present tense. Built from short essays, poetry, letters, illustrations, and photography, it deals with clinical depression, social anxiety, love, loss, and the sometimes difficult work of self-acceptance. Rather than offering neat answers, it follows Franta as he tries to stay grounded and authentic in a life shaped by public attention and the pressure of likes and shares.

House Fires, published in 2021, takes up the uncertainty of adulthood. Its mix of prose, poetry, and film photography makes room for loneliness, romance, grief, identity, faith, death, and purpose. It is less about a single life chapter than the unsettled feeling of looking back, looking ahead, and trying to make sense of both.

He's kept working across several mediums.

Beyond books and video, Franta has built projects around coffee, music, and creative culture through Common Culture, and he co-founded the music company Heard Well in 2015. He has also used his platform to support LGBTQ+ visibility and clean-water fundraising. His career has changed shape more than once, but the through line is clear: personal storytelling, visual work, and an interest in talking honestly about the complicated parts of growing up.