Natalia Hernandez Followed the Oral Traditions of Her Ancestors into a Successful Author Career
Bestselling Fantasy author Natalia Hernandez writes magical Latin American-inspired novels for both YA and adult audiences. But until recently, if you wanted to hear her stories, you had to follow her on TikTok. As a third-culture kid—her mother is Peruvian, and her father is Cuban—she grew up all over the world, so it makes sense that her first audience was worldwide too.
After waking up from a strange dream about prophetic flowers in December 2020, Natalia posted a video about it online, never expecting that her followers would make it go viral. “I made a silly little TikTok skit about it, thinking people would find it funny how wild my dreams are,” she says. But her followers were hooked. They started asking what happened next, so she posted skits that expanded the story, dressing up in costumes to differentiate the characters she played. Commenters immediately asked if this story was going to be a book, but she didn’t take them seriously until some of them started saying they would write it themselves. She couldn’t let that happen.
“Absolutely not. That’s my dream, my story,” she says. “I think part of it might have been just a little bit of fear and a little bit of spite.” It was the final push she needed to move from storytelling on social media to novel writing. She released The Name-Bearer, book 1 in her debut series, The Flowers of Prophecy, in 2022.
Putting It Down on Paper
Natalia grew up hearing Peruvian folklore passed down by her mother from their Incan ancestors. The mythology her mother wove into bedtime stories evolved from a long oral tradition, and in some senses, Natalia has carried that tradition through several “creative-adjacent” career paths, including working as a makeup artist for film and television and at a successful job in product marketing with a skincare company. Although she’d written some unpublished short stories, poetry, and novellas growing up, she never considered writing a full novel. In fact, often when she had a story idea, “instead of sitting down to write it, I would just tell it out loud to someone,” she says.
When she decided to write the novel her TikTok followers asked for, she incorporated some of the mythology from her mother’s stories. “I did do a lot of research, and I came up with various different versions of typical mythology that I heard. Eventually I had to decide that whatever I was taught was just as valid as whatever someone else was taught across the country. This is my story, and I’m going to be okay with telling it the way my mother told me,” she says. Although the novel takes place in a fantasy kingdom, her followers have found its Latin roots relatable and responded enthusiastically to her representation of often marginalized cultures.
Natalia wrote much of her first novel, The Name-Bearer, in Guatemala, where she’d lived as a child. Staying with friends, she was energized by the culture and scenery around her. “Waking up and looking out the window and seeing a volcano every morning—you can’t help but be inspired by something like that,” she says.
As Natalia got further into the book, she continued to post about the story on TikTok, but “the moment that I took it seriously was the day that I stopped posting the skits. I thought, ‘Wow, I have enough of a story that it is going to be a novel. I need to not tell everyone the ending,’” she says. Her previous experience in marketing told her to hold back story details from then on, but she needed to continue to nurture the following who’d asked for the story in the first place. So instead of acting out scenes, she began sharing her experiences with writing and her plans to publish. She told followers she expected it to be a trilogy. She has since surprised herself to discover that it will be four books instead of three.
Initially, she considered traditional, small press, and independent publishing equally. She wrote around fifty query letters, receiving feedback “that there was promise, but there was too much Spanish.” Other publishers told her she “could have a Latin story or a queer story, but both was too much.”
She disagreed.
Knowing that she already had readers interested in her book, and wanting to take strategic advantage of that following, Natalia chose to publish independently. “It was not a deliberate decision, but one of the best things, I think, that could have happened,” she says. “I don’t think that I would have the cover that I have if I hadn’t decided to go independent. I don’t think people would be writing me and saying, ‘I loved the mentions of the food in the book,’ or ‘I love that you switched from English to Spanish,’ or ‘My inner child is healed by reading a Latin Fantasy story.’ I think that a lot might have been lost if I had gone any other direction. So I’m really glad that it went the way that it did.”
On Cultural Representation
Natalia had always been a fan of Fantasy, for many years not even realizing how Eurocentric the genre tends to be. “I think it’s one of those things that you don’t realize how much it matters until you actually do see yourself represented,” she says. She became so accustomed to Fantasy stories taking place with primarily white characters in vaguely medieval settings that early drafts of her own book also followed that pattern. “I didn’t even realize that I could write it through my own lens,” she says. It wasn’t until Natalia read Aiden Thomas’s Cemetery Boys that she “saw Latin American culture represented in a Fantasy novel. It just opened up my eyes to what the literary world could look like,” she says. Once she stopped trying to make her story fit into a Eurocentric framework, the story of The Flowers of Prophecy took on a life of its own.
Natalia extended the Latin American influences from the story to the cover, insisting on an indigenous woman in the design. Readers have responded enthusiastically. “I get comments saying, ‘Oh, my gosh! I’ve never seen anyone look like me on the cover of a book before!’” she says. Despite the reticence of the agents she queried, Natalia believes representation in media benefits both the readers who feel seen and those who may not have had exposure to characters who don’t look like them. “The more you are seen in media, the more accepted you are, and the less division there is in the world,” she says.
In her next book, an unconnected adult Cozy Fantasy titled Asiri and the Amaru, she incorporated more of her family’s Peruvian folklore, and the cultural details she noticed in Guatemala, from food and clothing to language. “Latin people are not a monolith, you know. There’s so many different countries, and dialects, and slang, and food. So I just took a little bit of all of it—anything that I knew well,” she says.
She started seeking out and reading other Fantasy novels based in Latin American cultures, setting up an Amazon wishlist to share her new finds with followers. When she told them what she wanted to do—learn more about fantasy and mythology of other cultures—readers purchased books from her list and sent them to her. The support was unexpected, but it confirmed the potential of her social media presence to grow her business.
Building a Sustainable Career
When it came time to purchase services like editing and cover design, Natalia had set some money aside from her marketing job, but she needed help to reach her goals. She set up a GoFundMe instead of a Kickstarter because the expectations of the tiers made her nervous. Fighting impostor syndrome and anxiety around finishing the book and publishing it herself, she decided to put it in the hands of her followers. “So I just said, if people want to support me, that would be amazing, but that will be out of the goodness of their heart. Whatever was raised would be so appreciated,” she says.
They raised over $5,000.
As a first-time, as-yet-unpublished indie author, Natalia was overwhelmed by the support. She continued to post TikToks with updates on her progress, using trending audios to share snippets of character interactions, and her followers came along for the ride. Within four months of launching her debut novel, she knew she could afford to quit her day job. Six months after releasing The Name-Bearer, she did, without ever having paid for ads.
It was a leap of faith, but she promised herself that if she couldn’t make her business sustainable in a year, she would get another job. Having another career to fall back on gave her the courage to put all her efforts into publishing and marketing her books. “But I worked very, very hard that year to make sure that I didn’t go back and get another real job,” she says, smiling.
She started by setting up a website with WooCommerce, but most of her direct sales still go through TikTok. When asked if she has advice for other new authors starting in direct sales, she laughs. It’s a moment of disbelief in her own accomplishment that belies her easy confidence. “I never expected that it would be the grand portion of my author career, or how I’m able to continue doing what I’m doing. I’m so grateful that I continue to get so many direct sales.”
Lately, she’s been spending her mornings packing and shipping fifty to two hundred orders a day. She says staying on top of inventory is probably the most important thing “because the worst thing that you can do is sell more than you have in stock, or have a video go viral and you don’t have enough boxes or shippers to send them out in. It can get very overwhelming very quickly. So organization is key.”
She’s started looking for a virtual assistant to help organize some of the business routines that have fallen to the side, like her newsletter and Patreon accounts. In the meantime, once she’s finished packing orders for the day, she spends the afternoon nurturing her TikTok followers and her evenings writing in sprints with partners like Isabelle Olmo, author of The Queen’s Red Guard series.
Natalia says, “The community is one of the best parts of this entire author journey.” Although she is an extrovert, she doesn’t get lonely working from home because she finds her online interactions with readers, writers, and BookTokers as fulfilling as if they were in person. “It feels like constant companionship,” she says.
Although her definition of success continues to evolve with her career, one thing is certain: she’s not going back. “This is what I want to do,” she says. “I’ve never felt happier or more fulfilled in my professional career than right now, and I loved all my jobs.”
Looking back on her first year as a full-time author, she sees her new business as the culmination of everything that’s come before, from her childhood stories to her work as a freelance makeup artist to her product marketing job. “It all just sort of came together to support [my author career], and I think that was really interesting. You never know what path your life is going to take you, but I don’t think anything that you’ve done before doesn’t serve a purpose,” she says.
Jenn Lessmann
