Correspondent in Rome
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It is a surprising literary phenomenon in Italy, becoming a case study. A young writer has dominated the bestseller rankings since last summer. She signs under the pseudonym Erin Doom because she wants to maintain her privacy. Only his parents and close friends know his identity. Her name is Matilde, she is less than 30 years old, she has had a law degree for a few months and lives with her parents in the Emilia Romagna region.
has sold more than 250,000 copies of his only two books. First, ‘Manufacturer of tears’ (‘Fabricante de lágrimas’), It has been at the top of the best sellers for months; and the second, ‘Nel modo in cui cade la neve’ (‘In the way the snow falls’), published in January, it also appears at the top of the list of the most requested.
A success achieved, thanks to word of mouth and the TikTok social network, conquering young people above all, without any newspaper having published a review of his work.
Only recently, seeing that Erin Doom did not disappear from the top spot in the lists of best-selling authors, all media have been interested in the mysterious pseudonym, to discover the surprising rules that lead a book to become a publishing phenomenon. Erin Doom is undoubtedly a kind of new Elena Ferrante, a mysterious and famous name, author of the tetralogy ‘The Great Friend’, which has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, with translations in fifty countries.
Initially, ‘Fabbricante di lacrime’ was published on Wattpad, the free online writing and reading platform on which they have been published. millions of novels, poems, stories, articles and other literary genres in more than 50 languages. Erin Doom’s book surpassed six million readers. In the Italian Wattpad community there are 1.5 million subscribers and around 14 million stories. In this sea full of ‘fish’, an algorithm highlights the most read stories, allowing publishers or literary explorers to see who is most successful.
Matilde-Erin’s next step was to self-publish the book on Amazon in December 2020. It was immediately bought en masse by his followers on social media, gaining great visibility. A few days later, the publishing house Maggazini Salani called her, which launched a new and careful edition. It was Erin Doom’s literary explosion in bookstores (erindoom_libri, on Instagram).
In her first telephone interview, Matilde-Erin explained to ‘La Repubblica’ why she felt the need to follow the traditional path for publishing the book after its success on the web: «Being able to have the real book in your hands, and not only online, it is still very important. Y it is also beautiful that young people want to go to the bookstore and have the book in their hands, perhaps to underline it».
The protagonists of the two Erin Doom books, Nica and Ivy, are orphans. «I wanted to highlight the importance of having a family, underlining the lack of it: it is a strong theme for my protagonists, more than a love story”, explains the young writer. Her case is extraordinary and fortunate. She follows in the footsteps, although she did not inspire her, of the American writer Anna Todd, also discovered on Wattpad, author of ‘After’, a novel published in 2013 that has sold 11 million copies worldwide. Matilde-Erin is still far away. Selling a few tens of thousands of copies of a book is undoubtedly a success. She is already in six-figure numbers. For now, he will continue to hide his name: «Behind anonymity -he explains- there is a need for privacy. I’m not saying that in the future I won’t sign copies of my books.”
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