Joana Marcús: "I need them to take 300 pages to have their first kiss and then do whatever they want"

BarcelonaThe queues for Sant Jordi once again served as a good thermometer to realize that the success of young adult literature is not only a reality but a growing phenomenon. Generation Z is rejuvenating the reading public. The figures from the Publishers' Guild confirm this year after year: 75% of young people between 14 and 24 years old read in their free time. And one of the most prominent names in Spanish romantic novels is that of Joana Marcús from Mallorca, who has just published Els ecos de la Jude (Montena), her first unpublished novel.

An avid reader of Laura Gallego's books and the The Hunger Games and Twilight

sagas, Joana Marcús (Fornalutx, 2000) began publishing on the Wattpad platform when she was 13 years old. In a decade – and thanks to the boost from the pandemic – she has posted 24 titles in Spanish and has a community of 1.3 million followers, many of whom are in Latin America. Her first major success online was Abans de desembre, which gave her a reader base that catapulted her into the publishing industry. Since 2021, she has published ten books and sold 2 million copies. She has dedicated herself exclusively to writing and promoting her work for three years, whether at events, live, or among her 792,000 Instagram followers.

Until now, you have published first online and from there your novels have come out in print. Why are you cutting ties with Wattpad?

— It's not that I wanted to disassociate myself, it's just that I was excited to try writing a story just for myself. And I knew that if I wanted to publish it on Wattpad, I wouldn't be able to keep writing it entirely without constant reader feedback, which was my only way of working. I wanted to challenge myself; to see if I was capable of writing a story without opinions.

How does Wattpad influence writing?

— Above all, regarding structure. I used to write a chapter a week and, therefore, it had to be a long chapter, which had to keep people hooked for the next one. On the other hand, The Echoes of Jude is a story meant to be read in its entirety, the chapters are not all the same, they don't necessarily have a cliffhanger at the end. The main change is not depending on people reacting at a specific moment.

But you keep writing, winking at the reader. "Hey, you don't know what you're getting into" or "I'm feeding you information." Why do you keep it up?

— I think it's the special touch. I like writers you can recognize without looking at the cover. It's the hardest thing you can do as an artist. On Wattpad, I always used an italicized voice, and it was a way to communicate with people, to make jokes, to break up tense moments. In the novel "Sempitern", I did it through a cat, and here the narrator is omniscient and is talking to you directly. It's to keep the Wattpad spirit: I hope they notice an evolution as a writer, but, at the same time, I'm still that girl who used to publish here.

At the end of last year you reached two million books sold...

— Yes, my God. I'm from a village of 400 people. How many books would each of these 400 people have to buy to reach two million? When I look at it like this, it overwhelms me, it intimidates me, and it gives me a degree of responsibility that I don't know if I'm ready to take on.

Platforms have allowed us to not depend on the traditional publishing world, but the book format still has value, prestige, and is where the money is.

— Yes, it's important: until I published them in the traditional way, I didn't make money with my books. But more than that, I think people buy the book because it's more yours than when you read it on the internet, you feel more part of the process. And that won't stop being the case, no matter how much technology advances and we read on our mobile phones.

In the new novel, there is a withdrawn protagonist with a conflicted family, Jude, who will find in a high school classmate, the sensitive and attractive Isaac, the strength to rediscover her potential. The idea that drives the book is that origin does not determine destiny?

— Yes. It is a character who carries a label from the moment they are born, they are not given the opportunity to introduce themselves to the world and discover who they are, because people have already assumed who they were before meeting them. The book is a constant struggle for Jude to forge her own path and distance herself from all these conceptions that have been made of her and that she herself ends up adopting, even though she knows that deep down it is not so. You cannot expect someone to tell you who you are, for someone to see you or to give you an opportunity, even if there is a love story: you have to do it yourself. Find your own way and forget what they think of you because they do not know you. The only one who knows your story is you.

External validation. As an internet author with a community on social media, does this happen to you?

— The truth is I hadn't thought about it, but I think that, constantly, in our day-to-day life we depend on external validation. It's not just the internet, which is a very powerful loudspeaker: when you're in class you want to be the most popular person, you want to be the favorite of the teachers, you want to be the one who gets the best grades, it's constantly showing people that your value is real, that you're not making it up and that they have to give it to you.

The novel uses the clichés and archetypes of the American high school romance novel. Are you looking for recognizable frameworks for readers?

— I really like that there isn't a specific space, that any person can imagine their own city. It could be Mexico, Spain or the United States. The objective is that you can imagine your home, what happens to you, what could be your street.

One of the dangers of some young adult novels is that they romanticize toxic relationships. How do you deal with the need to have powerful and dramatic plots while avoiding these dangers?

— I can imagine how I would have liked to be told that at the time. I don't like being told "you have to think like this", "this is fine". We all have the capacity, from the age of 12-13, to differentiate that bullying is wrong, that a toxic partner should be identified immediately, that jealousy within a couple is not positive... These basic things don't need to be repeated so many times; this makes young people get defensive. What they need are stories that talk about the things that really concern them: a toxic relationship that isn't so obvious, a relationship where the power dynamic is unbalanced, that's much more subtle.

The goal is that it is not paternalistic or has obvious happy endings?

— Try to make them realistic relationships, not perfect ones, because I think a perfect healthy relationship doesn't exist. Otherwise, I feel like you set expectations that are also not good.

Because they are aimed at young people, are the authors of young adult novels asked to take more responsibility than any other author of fiction?

— Maybe yes, but I agree. We don't have the responsibility to educate anyone, but we do have to assume that we have very young and impressionable readers, and that we have a role in their growth and in how you tell them the world works. Maybe they are facing for the first time one of the themes you are dealing with in your books... That's why I don't like to talk about a very delicate topic if I can't delve into it in depth and give it the weight it deserves.

The pandemic and social networks have propelled writing and reading among Generation Z, and this has rejuvenated the reading pyramid. What has been the key?

— The key is to turn it into a community. To enter a place where everyone is reading the same books as you, where you are talking about your favorite characters, where you are no longer the odd one out in class for reading, but rather you are one of the readers. To remove the stigma from reading a book and be able to enjoy it and wait week after week for a chapter to be part of the book's experience: all of this was the key to Wattpad. And it's what sustains us right now.

Romantic novels and young adult novels are two categories that are subject to prejudice, is the internet the third?

— Yes, I have it all! All writers, and artists in general, have to face some kind of prejudice. Art is very subjective. But if you're dedicated to a young audience, you're young yourself, you come from the internet, and it's no longer the publishers who choose you but the reading world itself that's prioritizing you so that editors see you... it's breaking too many things at once. This doesn't mean they look down on you, but they do approach with a bit of reservation because the whole system is changing.

Could you be a writer without social media?

— I don't think it's impossible, but right now I'd say it's a bit complicated. But just as there's been this Wattpad trend, maybe there will be another one later on that has nothing to do with social networks. I take it as entertainment; I like to do dynamics on social networks with readers.

Now that audiovisual platforms are looking for so many successful stories, and adaptations of young adult novels are succeeding, why haven't we seen any of yours?

— I haven't received any offer that I really liked. I felt it wasn't the right time. With books, I've always worked on impulse; I didn't publish at the first opportunity, and I think I did well. I rely a lot on that, which might be a mistake. If I don't feel very excited about it and can't be at peace, I'm lucky that I don't need to. I have the privilege of being able to choose.

One of the common criticisms is that the literary quality of the young adult genre is very poor. Simple language, short chapters, a great emphasis on plot and twists, and more audiovisual than literary resources. What do you think?

— I find it a very simplistic argument. You can't expect everything to be written the same, that your opinion of what is high art is the same for everyone. Not all readers are the same. We have to write for everyone, we have to have a broad vision to create readers, readers who stay, and in this way you will never achieve it. You can't expect everyone to adapt to you, you also have to adapt to people and you have to write in a language that you feel comfortable with. My generation has become accustomed to audiovisual language, you like to imagine situations. The language is not the same as twenty years ago, but it is what I use, it is what my generation uses and why shouldn't I also use it in my narration?

Of course, the criticism for the loss of linguistic richness also extends to the street...

— Which generation doesn't speak ill of the next generation? It's always the same story. You have to understand that each generation wants to read about its fears, tastes, concerns, and insecurities, and perhaps you won't achieve it with a book of high literary quality, said with many quotation marks, but with a book that talks about their problems from someone who has the same generational problems. It's not that young people don't read, it's that they read books that for a long time have not had visibility.

Do these criticisms affect you?

— A few years ago, maybe. I wasn't aware of it and I had all these prejudices deeply ingrained in my mind and I thought that what I wrote wasn't valuable enough. On all the networks I used to put "aspiring writer" and my own readers would scold me. When I realized it, I made a click. Without getting carried away, either, but I do try to have confidence to defend my ideas and that the opinion of another person who has surely not read my books nor is interested in reading young adult genre affects me because it will bring me absolutely nothing.

The young adult genre usually incorporates explicit sex... but that's not your case.

— I think it depends on what the story asks for. I put myself in the narrator's shoes and ask myself: would she explain this? She wouldn't give you details of the sexual encounter, she would explain how she felt and what she saw and what woke her up. It's just that I need to be inspired and when they go so hard, they don't inspire me! I need them to take 300 pages to have their first kiss and then do whatever they want.

Did you start writing in Spanish, have you considered writing a novel in Catalan?

— At the time, it helped me that Catalan was the language I used with my family and friends, and then having a language for work. When you write, it's something so intimate, you get so involved, that when you do it in another language it's as if you were creating a character of yourself. I could create a kind of alter ego" that could write about these things without being ashamed that someone would read them, because it's no longer me, it's me as a writer. You dissociate yourself in this way and create two separate worlds, and it helps you manage it a bit.

And now that you have your name made and have another status, are you considering it?

— Perhaps yes, I wouldn't say no, it would be fun. I like to set myself new challenges for writing, perhaps now is the time to write in Catalan, I don't know.