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 …
