Blackwater’s first book? It is sold out. I won’t get any more until next week”, laments a bookseller on Passeig de Gràcia to a shopper who is already visiting the third establishment who gives her a negative answer. “I can reserve the following deliveries for you”, he offers in return. “What if I don’t like history? Well, okay, sign me up”, she accepts, resigned, for fear that the same thing will happen to her again in two weeks, when a new book is scheduled to come out. The series by Michael McDowell (1950-1999), which was a publishing phenomenon in the eighties in the United States and which now, more than four decades later, is repeating its success in Spain with the independent Barcelona-based Blackie Books, raises a possible publishing future still in l’air: are paperback or pamphlet novels back in fashion?
It is not strange to suggest this hypothetical scenario seeing the stellar numbers achieved by this matriarchal bloodline with touches of horror set in Alabama in the first half of the 20th century, since it has sold more than 50,000 copies in six weeks and for weeks they have been in the first places of the ranking of best-selling books in Catalonia, published by the Editors’ Guild. “The most innovative thing about this release in installments, in the manner of the pamphlets of the 19th century, is that it seems to anticipate the success of today’s series”, reflects Jan Martí, publisher and co-founder of Blackie: “So we read the series of books and were amazed by it and were lucky enough to be able to contract the rights immediately”.
Darío Madrona, screenwriter of successful series such as Élite or L os protegidos, also sees points in common between the two formats, since “now there are many miniseries that are like novels. They have several chapters, but you can see them all at once on the same day, like with a book, and they tell a closed story”. What is essential for both to work? “A story and characters that hook you and that you want to know more about, plus each chapter ends with a cliffhanger, a suspenseful ending.” If all this is fulfilled, and if the literature by delivery really ends up occupying a place in bookstores again in the coming years, Madrona is convinced that it would make the job easier for screenwriters who tried to adapt them to the audiovisual “because they have an architecture similar”.
Beyond this pamphlet-esque dynamic shared with the small screen, the success of this kind of newsstand literature – which is now found in bookstores – is due to the adjusted price, which in the case of Blackwater does not reach ten euros; by word of mouth, and in face-to-face and virtual reading clubs. For the latter, the Telegram messaging platform has become popular, where you can find different groups that invite you to comment on novels, rescue classics or download specific chapters of readings. Also, of course, to comment on Blackwater in a group that far exceeds 200 users and in which the interaction soars when a new installment comes out. The colorful covers, the work of the Madrid illustrator Pedro Oyarbide, who was already in charge of the French edition, is one of the first things to analyse. Publishers signed him after learning about his international poker decks, and since diving into this project, his popularity has tripled. “Covers draw attention to any novelty table. This was one of the goals. But, beyond the aesthetics, they are full of details that readers will be able to identify and that I was able to put in because I was allowed to read the books before illustrating them. It’s not a common occurrence”, he confesses to La Vanguardia by phone.
“This edition draws attention to the eyes and, indeed, the first thing I noticed, and surely other content creators, were the covers, which make the product something eye-catching”, says Roy, who on his TikTok @ gato_de_biblioteca talks about McDowell in a video that has more than 75,600 views, and in which he admits to having been “confused” because, until he bought them, “I didn’t know what they were about. I spent a fortnight looking at these books and no one could give a synopsis. Because they are so beautiful, the publisher sends them to many influencers, but because they don’t read them, they don’t know what they are about”, he regrets.
The aesthetics, “but above all the size and the price”, is something that Heme Brazo, editor of Proyecto Estefanía, an independent label whose motto is to offer readers “high newsstand literature” also takes into account. For this reason, he has created his own collections of noir, science fiction and western. Not counting The Green Mile, Stephen King’s novel published in six volumes in the nineties – and inspired by McDowell, of whom he declared himself a great admirer -, right now his collection of Western novels is of the few options for delivered literature on the market, although he is sure that “sooner or later this will change over the course of this year and the next. I can’t predict the future, but everything points to that.”
The frenzy unleashed since Blackie Books put this proposal on the table has made more curious people interested in Brazo’s novels, each written by different authors. “It all started as a joke between friends and now we have dozens of books published. The next one will be out now, for Sant Jordi. The first ones were written by a friend, my ex-partner and me. And, so we gained notoriety and people got to know us, we invited different writers to continue, respecting the same characters. It is the same story written by different hands, each in a different volume. Each new author must continue where the previous one left off”.
Brazo has a romantic vision of literature by installments which he defends by all means and which, he asserts, is “a statement of principles. We will not sell our books on the web because the grace of all this imagery is that people interact with the bookseller or kiosk, as was done at the time when Marcial Lafuente Estefanía’s books were distributed”. Precisely, it is this author who gives the name to the project, as a tribute. “He was one of the greatest exponents of the popular Spanish novel with his comic strips from the West and his pocket books or paperbacks – some 2,600 – published by the Bruguera publishing house”.
He was not the only writer who brought literature closer to the people and who helped shape reading habits in Spain and part of Latin America, since Francisco González Ledesma also contributed under the pseudonym of Silver Kane, who published for a time an almost weekly western novel; or Corín Tellado, who in 1962 Unesco declared the most read Spanish writer after Miguel de Cervantes and who in 1994 appeared in the Guinness Book of Records for having sold more than 400,000,000 copies of her novels . Figures surpassed long ago, as many of his works continued to be reissued in digital format.
The web is where the concept of serialized stories has proliferated the most in recent years, with Wattpad being the platform par excellence for online serialized literature, as writers publish their novels in parts and it doesn’t tend to continue them if it doesn’t have interaction. The portal is one of the sources of current youth literature bestsellers, since authors such as Ariana Godoy, Álex Mírez, Joana Marcús or Eva Muñoz have appeared on it, although it is true that, when their books have become physical, as a general rule they have been of a single volume. The teacher and writer Rosa Amor del Olmo, an expert on Benito Pérez Galdós, another of the writers who cultivated the novel by installments, is also a participant in online literature. “I publish novels in parts in the digital newspaper El Obrero. I’ve already done about five and I’m about to start another very soon”, he confesses to this newspaper.
Far from what many may think, the stories published on the web, despite the immensity, do not tend to be forgotten if there is a good promotion, since “it is easy for them to reach more people”, recalls Amor, who advances that some of his plots have already made it to the screen. “I started with one called The cause will soon be made into a film. And now we are in negotiations with some Euskadi producers so that Samir, another of my books for online delivery, which has already been printed in Spanish, French and, very soon, in Arabic, will become a series”.
Amor also believes in the synergy that exists between audiovisual and literature and does not rule out that the massive emergence of series in recent times, and the ever-increasing consumption of these, especially after the pandemic, may have influenced the return of this dynamic by fascicles, which he never considered to have completely disappeared, but “transformed” after the first appearance of the radio, with the famous radio novellas, “which you also had to wait for the day or week next to know the continuation”; comics and fanzines, and, years later, the internet.
Are the brochures back in print now? “This will be decided by the authors and the publishing sector itself. What I can say is that, with Blackwater, every Wednesday that the book comes out we have 15 or 20 people who come to buy a copy, so I wouldn’t see it as strange if new proposals came up”, concludes Antonio Torrubia from the Gigamesh bookstore.
