The hyper-selling authors who hardly appear in the media

“You have sold five million books.

Only from one of your sagas did you sell a million, which is the same amount that Fernando Aramburu from

sold .

But I didn't know you.

I had never heard of you ”, Jordi Évole confessed to the writer Megan Maxwell when she decided to dedicate a primetime monographic program to this best-selling author of romantic novels with erotic overtones.

It cannot be said that Maxwell was surprised by what Évole told him or that he now calls her EL PAÍS.

“I am very amused when journalists tell me that.

It is you who give the coverage.

I didn't need the media to become a phenomenon, I had social networks, which helped me carry out the project.

Now I am one of the best-selling writers in Spain, but don't think they pay much attention to me either”, Maxwell resigns.

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Her case and that of other best-selling Spanish authors such as Alice Kellen, also from Valencia, who was the Spanish author who sold the most fiction books in 2021;

Joanna Marcús, psychology student,

and author of best-selling books such as the

, or Elísabet Benavent, who has sold 3.7 million copies of her 23 novels, confirm that there are publishing phenomena that are cooked entirely outside the traditional media and authors, and especially women authors, for whom sales do not guarantee a place at the (hypothetical) table of the elders.

The reasons can be diverse.

That there is still a hierarchy and categorization in the world of books that has already been pulverized during this century in music and cinema —today no one hesitates to make complex and multi-vector analyzes of superhero movies and the times in which a web A musical reference like Pitchfork did not publish reviews of Taylor Swift's albums seem far, far away—, but there are also those who point to a double question of gender, of who writes and what they write.

“Why wasn't there a single commercial romance author in Frankfurt?

It was something much talked about in the crowds”, asks Lola Gulías, fiction editor at Planeta, in reference to the last book fair in which Spain was the guest country and to which authors of all generations and literary schools attended. but none of these best-selling female authors writing

-adjacent genres

.

Gulías knows well what a

is made of : she was the first person to read

, by María Dueñas, when she was working as an editorial agent in Antonia Kerrigan's office, and it didn't take her long to realize that she had a potential success on her hands.

She is now the editor of Alice Kellen and also the one who has accompanied the writer and screenwriter Cristina Campos, the finalist for this year's Planet Award, who sold hundreds of thousands of copies of her novel

The writer Joana Marcús with the printed edition of her novel 'Cities of smoke'.Crossbooks

“I would say that there is a triple step.

The books that sell a lot, the literary books and the commercial books written by women.

Due to the fact that they sell a lot, they generate prejudices about their quality.

The one who sells a lot already generates suspicions and if it is a woman, worse.

Very sales authors like Javier Sierra or Santiago Posteguillo have another deal.

The day I see a review of a romantic novel author in a cultural supplement, I will hallucinate”, says Gulías.

From the competition, the editor Gonzalo Albert, from Suma de Letras and Plaza & Janés, who is behind the Elísabet Benavent phenomenon, sees it in a similar way: “We have built this outside of the media, because it is very difficult for them to be echo something that has to do with trade literature.

They are authors who are not in the supplements or in the Culture sections, not even to say: 'Hey, this woman has sold three million books.'

And they should collect that, because it is also very good news.

Although Albert points out that the media "have not paid much attention" to an author like Javier Castillo, "who has sold four million books in two years," he concedes that authors who write commercial novels designed for women suffer a double burden.

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Megan Maxwell Video Booth

The writer Megan Maxwell, at her home in Boadilla del Monte (2019).Photo: Carlos Rosillo |

Video: EPV

Neither they nor their publishers are comfortable with the "romance novel" label.

Alice Kellen prefers to speak of "feelings novel".

Albert says that Elísabet Benavent writes “contemporary novel”.

Ignored by the mainstream media, all of them have found a way to broaden their audience through the genre's own channels, very robust, and through social networks.

Megan Maxwell, who continues to act as her own

, managing her networks herself, built her outreach from her website.

“When I published

, my first erotic novel, I received 300,000 visits in one day on my website.

I thought it was a mistake, but I immediately saw that it was not, ”she confesses.

In its beginnings, a decade ago, specialized romantic forums worked well for him.

Now, the

who work in this segment, in which physical encounters are important.

Elísabet Benavent and Alice Kellen have also seen their followers grow in networks as they sold books by the thousands and audiovisual adaptations arrived.

Benavent now has four projects underway with Netflix.

The Planeta Prize, which does continue to receive enormous media attention and has gone through different stages (rewarding highly established brand authors and literary prestige, adopting media names), has also served in recent years to bring to the forefront of the media those authors who sold a lot, but were not known names in themselves, thus endorsing publishing phenomena that were already underway.

"When we prepare the tour, we already notify the authors that from that moment on they will even know their butcher," explains Gulías.

The current winner, Luz Gabás, now immersed in that promotional

that her editor is talking about, already had one of those

with her novel

that she published while far away from the editorial circuits, when she was mayor of Benasque for the PP, but she does not believe that she has felt worse treated by the media for writing a historical novel or for having a great commercial success.

“When I published the novel, I did not know how the publishing world worked nor did I know the route that the novel would take.

I remember the excitement of reading long articles about her in major national newspapers."

Gabás also highlights the role of the many encounters in the historical novel, another genre that has its own broadcast channels outside of the general media.

Javier Aparicio Maydeu, a critic and professor who knows the sector from almost every angle (he was an agent with Carmen Balcells and directs the Master's Degree in Publishing at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona), also does not believe in the theory of the parallel highway, in which the literary and the commercial never meet.

“In many cases, true quality literature and mass sales are not contradictory at all.

There are authors of excellent literature and great sales, authors of reference, but of a more exclusive market and also the author-brand, kidnapped almost always by his own style and

”.

Domingo Ródenas de Moya, critic at

and historian of literature, goes further: if literary phenomena do not appear in the supplements, it is because they should not appear.

“They would be failing in their guiding mission.

If someone finds a novel by Elísabet Benavent there, they might think that it is literature and in my opinion, it is not.

These books must be treated in the pages of the newspapers as what they are, phenomena of cultural sociology”.

The critic distinguishes what he calls "

” of two other categories that would enter the literary field: ambitious fiction and the more formulaic or genre, which includes authors such as María Dueñas, Ildefonso Falcones and Arturo Pérez Reverte.

The matter is complex, but everything indicates that the parallel paths through which the book world circulates will continue without crossing.