This Venezuelan Novelist Built Her Literary Empire Online

As a child, Ariana Godoy couldn’t stop reading. Whatever her hands could reach, her eyes would devour, including grown-up titles she’d sneak off her mother’s bookshelf — and a rather bloody Grimm’s edition of Cinderella. But as she entered adolescence, reading material became scarce. “I lived in a small town in Venezuela, so I really couldn’t afford books,” she says.

One morning, Godoy typed “free books online” into her search engine and found Wattpad, a reading and publishing platform. With the click of a link, she changed the course of her life. Less than a year later, she launched her career as a self-published storyteller who would become an internationally acclaimed Spanish-language novelist with countless translated works and film adaptations on Netflix and Prime Video. Back then, though, Godoy just wanted to read.

In 2009, sexy vampire stories reigned. And Godoy sank her teeth into every salacious entry she could find. Almost immediately, she noticed these writers were just people — ordinary users without publishing contracts, sharing their stories with readers. So she started posting her own. “I felt really safe to do so,” says Godoy. “I thought, ‘If they can do it, I can do it.’”

Her first posts were vampire stories, then she transitioned to YA romance. As she posted, she formed deep, interactive connections with her readers.

“It was so much fun,” says Godoy. “You have all these comments and all this feedback … There is this loyalty when they are part of the process that’s really cool.”

After gaining a dedicated readership all on her own, Godoy received a DM from a publisher at Grupo Planeta, one of the leading global publishing groups for Spanish-speaking writers. It had to be a scam, she thought.

“You never get a publisher in your DMs,” says Godoy. “That’s not how it goes.”

But on that particular day, that’s exactly how it went. Through Wattpad, Godoy signed with Planeta, which led to a relationship with Penguin Random House, where she has flourished as a top-selling author, releasing nearly a dozen titles through those partnerships to date.

In nearly every writer’s life comes a moment when self-disclosure bleeds onto the page. For Godoy, that moment arrived in 2016. One year after moving to Raleigh, North Carolina and six years after her father’s death, she began drafting Sigue Mi Voz (Follow My Voice). At the time, she had no idea how deeply the story of her protagonist, young Klara Rodriguez, would resonate with readers — or lead to the release of a feature-length love story at the intersection of mental illness and young adulthood.

After her father died, Godoy experienced acute, physical manifestations of anxiety in the form of panic attacks. She lived with agoraphobia, and, like Klara, struggled to step outside her house. And though her family adored her and wanted to heal her pain, they lacked a clear understanding of Godoy’s individual response to the trauma of sudden loss, and the type of care she needed throughout her recovery process. And even Godoy wasn’t sure what was happening to her.

“I had no idea,” she says. “Anxiety — what is that? … Growing up in a Latino household, there’s the culture of, ‘Oh, you’re depressed? Go and sweep something. Go and clean up. Go move. Go out and you’ll be fine.’ Depression? There was nothing like that.”

And so, she wrote Sigue Mi Voz to reach readers who might be experiencing similar responses to trauma, to give them the clarity and the clinical language she never had.

“It was more about finding those Arianas that were out there that had no idea, especially in the Latino community, what a panic attack looked like, what it felt like,” says Godoy. “You feel like you are going to die. I ended up in the emergency room so many times with no answers, with a clean bill of health. So as I was writing, I was like, ‘OK, this is the book that I would have liked to have when I was going through my process.’”

Klara’s voice moves the story. She’s an endearing narrator with a tendency to share her every thought, at times through a frenetic stream of consciousness — a character choice Godoy felt would convey both her earnest nature and her anxiety.

“She’s constantly overanalysing, overthinking,” says Godoy. “I think that’s something that happens a lot with anxiety. It still happens with me. I’ve been in therapy for over 10 years, and I still think 10 weeks ahead. For this detail, I think it’s a little more of myself in her [laughs].”

She also speaks frankly yet self-consciously about suicidal ideation, which in prevalent among young people but difficult to track and prevent. Writing so intimately — so vulnerably — through Klara, Godoy gives a powerful agency to those living with mental illness, a voice that speaks to countless young people at a time when Spanish-speaking voices are being forced silent.

And with more than 2 million online followers and 850 million reads, that voice is loud, and it is resonant. Godoy stays in contact with many early readers. Her novels are still available for free on Wattpad, and she encourages aspiring writers to explore different pathways to publication.

Her most powerful advice to them? Keep writing.

“Art is always part of the resistance,” she said. “Books and images, anything that can be an escape and represent, in this case, Latino voices like Klara’s, is inherently part of the resistance.”

• Mind, open Monday to Friday, 9am-6pm on 0300 123 3393.
• Samaritans offers a listening service which is open 24 hours a day, on 116 123 (UK and ROI – this number is FREE to call and will not appear on your phone bill).
• CALM (the Campaign Against Living Miserably) offer a helpline open 5pm-midnight, 365 days a year, on 0800 58 58 58, and a webchat service.
• The Mix is a free support service for people under 25. Call 0808 808 4994 or email help@themix.org.uk
• Rethink Mental Illness offers practical help through its advice line which can be reached on 0808 801 0525 (Monday to Friday 10am-4pm). More info can be found on rethink.org.