Venezuelan Ariana Godoy used to self-publish her romance novels on the digital platform Wattpad and is now enjoying success in streaming in the United States, where Prime Video premiered her film ‘Follow My Voice’, which shows “the greater visibility” of Hispanic authors, she tells EFE.
Godoy, who now lives in North Carolina (United States), first published ‘Follow My Voice’ on Wattpad, a site where writers upload their books and where this title has accumulated almost 38,5 million reads, which motivated the publisher Simon & Schuster and Prime Video to distribute the story in English.
“The English-speaking market is a completely different beast than the Latin American and Spanish markets. So yes, it’s a little more difficult, but little by little we’re managing to gain a bit more visibility here,” the Venezuelan woman said in a virtual interview.
The streaming premiere of ‘Follow My Voice’, about a teenager with agoraphobia who falls in love with a radio announcer, comes after the success on Netflix of a trilogy of films also based on novels by Godoy: ‘Through My Window’ (2022), ‘Across the Sea’ (2023) and ‘Through Your Gaze’ (2024).
Mental health and the rise of romance
The main themes of the new film are mental health and romance, which is now leading the US publishing industry, as sales of the genre have doubled since 2021 with more than 51 million units in 2025, according to a report by Circana, a market analysis firm.
The Venezuelan writer attributes this to the fact that readers “like to escape from reality” in the face of “the chaotic world now.”
“I think we’re looking for that escape, like, ‘OK, the real world is a little crazy, I’m going to go read my romance.’ Besides, I feel that romances are a bit lighter and move faster, and maybe that also appeals to readers,” she explains.
On the other hand, Godoy indicates that the “main message” of the new film is mental health, as it shows Klara (Berta Castañé), a teenager isolated for months after an anxiety crisis who falls in love with Kang (Jae Woo Yang), announcer of the program ‘Follow My Voice’.
The author believes that these themes resonate with new generations because before “there weren’t such open conversations as there are today.”
“My only goal was also to draw a lot of the experience I had with my mental health crises because I lived through that whole process back in 2009, 2010, and at that point there were very few of us mature in terms of this, I had to be the crazy one who goes to the psychiatrist, who has a psychologist, who takes medication,” she narrates.
Hispanic writers find their niche
Godoy began writing in 2009 and, at first, found no publishers interested in her, until she triumphed on Wattpad, where she has over two million followers, more than 20 works published on the platform and has surpassed 850 million accumulated readings.
This shows that “the industry has changed a lot,” that “it used to be a little more closed, intense” and that it discovered the power of reader requests, argues the author, born in 1990 in the state of Zulia, in Venezuela.
“The process changed a bit in the sense that emerging writers, so to speak, who had this many people reading them, it was like the publishers said: ‘here’s another world, another way of finding stories to publish too’,” he says.
Even so, Godoy acknowledges that it “took a very long time to get published in English.”
“The sheer size and number of writers and books coming out here is what makes it a bit more difficult to get noticed, to have your book seen, to make it a novelty that at least lasts in bookstores for a while. I mean, I think it’s a little more complex here,” he points out.
