The Christmas holidays of Joana Marcús (Mallorca, 2000) have been very different from those of any young woman her age. While her contemporaries returned home to meet friends and family and prepared for the classic agapes, she spent the last days of December doing interviews, presentations and meetings with the press.
Despite his young age, he has already written nine novels. And those are only the ones that have been published by publishers like Nova Casa, Cross Books or Montena. In addition, we must add 24 more stories, available on the online platform Wattpad, a kind of social reading forum.
But Marcús is not only prolific, she also seems to have hit the nail on the head of what her readers, most of whom are between 14 and 25 years old, want. She has been crowned the queen of romantic -a genre that mixes fantasy and romance and triumphs among young people- by becoming the best-selling Spanish writer in Latin America. It has more than a million copies, half of them with ‘Cities of Fire’, the last book of its previous trilogy.
It’s still too early to know how the latest novel will go, Ethereal (Montena, 2024), but everything seems to indicate that his rise continues. He presented it at the consecrated FIL, the Guadalajara International Book Fair (Mexico), in one of the most massive events of the meeting and leaving hundreds of people outside. “Ugh… That was another level,” exclaims the author, in conversation with elDiario.es.
“I just don’t know how to receive this news anymore.” Marcús is one of those who blushes when told of a new achievement and, like many young women, fights against imposter syndrome. “Having my family and friends, even people at the publishing house, tell me that I have to be proud of what I do is one thing. But seeing headlines with my name saying that I am the best seller in America is incredible.”
There are not a few media that talk about it. Although authors of youth literature have never enjoyed much media attention, only on the day that Marcús gives an interview to elDiario.es, he has already met seven other journalists. She admits she is overwhelmed, but admits that she likes giving interviews. “It helps me value myself more,” he says.
“I don’t think it will ever get past me to think that I am not as much as they say, but I have to take pride and treat my works with the respect they deserve,” he says. And the genre she has chosen, the traditional teenage romance but marked with touches of fantasy or science fiction, is “reviled and underappreciated,” as she herself laments.
Youth literature is no less art because it talks about the vital problems of adolescents.
“I have the feeling of constantly having to prove that I deserve to be there, that I have to work three times as hard as my classmates to write a type of literature that is believed to be less elevated,” he explains. Marcús frames these criticisms in an adult-centric current that neither understands nor values the concerns and interests of younger people.
“Youth literature is no less art because it talks about the vital problems of adolescents,” he says. In fact, as a reader as well as a writer, she confirms the emptiness that many feel at those ages, in which literature is “filled with adults who believe they know more about you than you do yourself.”
Books aimed at young people suffer from “paternalism” and stories full of “lessons to learn, about what you have to think and feel,” he laments. And those novels, according to Marcús, do not appeal to teenagers. And they don’t read them. “But young people read a lot, what happens is that they don’t read what adults would want,” he says.
In fact, according to the last barometer of reading habits of the Ministry of Culture, Those under 18 years of age are the ones who read the most in their free time. The number of frequent readers reaches 85% among those under 14 years of age and stabilizes at 74% among adolescents. “You have to treat them with affection and validate their tastes and interests. And, of course, also its rhythms,” says the writer.
That’s why she doesn’t hesitate to talk about explicit sex, drugs or violence. But he always puts a warning at the beginning of his novels. “I try to go from less to more. I am aware that there are those who may not feel comfortable with certain topics and that is why I warn you. You are never going to encounter a violent scene out of the blue, I am going to prepare you so that you can leave it before you read something you don’t want to read,” he explains.
Two years of silence due to bullying
Joana Marcús has been writing since she was 11 years old. At that age he discovered the Wattpad platform, a kind of forum in which users can publish stories and comment on others. As a teenager, she had 300,000 followers – today there are half a million – who eagerly awaited her stories.
It is a portal frequented mainly by teenagers who delve into the fanfic, an amateur genre in which a famous character appears and for which alternative plots are imagined, often involving normal boys and girls. “The first one I wrote was about the Jonas Brothers,” he remembers today. “But it was a world upside down. There was a famous girl and the Jonas Brothers were her fans,” he says, laughing.
From then on he dazzled Wattpad’s parishioners, to such an extent that he felt indebted to his followers. “It was a responsibility to know that there were people waiting to read you,” he says. But it wasn’t all good times. Fame did not go down well with some of his classmates, who began to bully him. The harassment was so strong that Marcús hung up his keyboard for two whole years. “They made my safe place, which was writing, turn against me.”
It was a very hard stage and a teacher, the Spanish one, was the one who pulled her out of the hole. “Why do you give more power to people who don’t love you than to all those people who have been waiting for two years for you to write again?” That was what his teacher told him and, after those words, he gathered his courage and wrote again.
“That is very strong. Knowing that there are people you don’t know who are waiting for you,” he says, remembering that professor, to whom he still sends his manuscripts today for her opinion.
Writing professionally is very good and it is a dream to publish with publishers, but the Internet is where I feel freer
That advice changed his life and he continues to apply it to this day. Even in his profession. Marcús has taken a break from her psychology studies to fully dedicate herself to writing, but despite being a recognized author and winning sales, she continues writing for those Wattpad followers.
On the platform you can find some of his novels and, in addition, he publishes unpublished stories and stories. “Writing professionally is very good and it is a dream to publish with publishers, but the Internet is where I feel freer,” he says.
He acknowledges that he is burdened with revisions and endless editing before a book goes to press. On the other hand, on Wattpad she writes about what excites her, without explaining it to anyone, as it turns out. “Books have ended up becoming a product, and that’s fine, but writing is my hobby, what I like to do the most, and I didn’t want it to be just my profession,” he says.
Therefore, he continues writing for pleasure. Marcús is methodical and dedicates her workday to her books. But then, on planes, trains, waiting rooms or before going to sleep, he continues to give free rein to the stories in his head, the ones that come out without thinking. And she returns to where she started, to reconnect with a community of readers who do not appear in the rankings, but who have been the school of authors who, like her, today have earned a name for themselves in the publishing sector.
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