Amazon Calls Her Its YA ‘Secret Sauce.’ She Reveals How the Machine Works

Growing up in Seville, Spain, Mercedes Ron forensically analyzed Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels. She was 14, and the story of Bella and Edward’s forbidden love was the push she needed to start writing. Two decades later, the author of Culpa Mía and 10 other romance novels spends her days poring over Prime Video’s adaptations of her work. If a first kiss isn’t filmed just right, she’ll give notes.

That moment, Ron tells me, is “so important. Sometimes, if something’s a little bit odd or awkward, I’m like, ‘I don’t think it’s working.’”

These days, the execs tend to listen. Ron’s name may not register yet with much of Hollywood — but her numbers do. Her books have sold more than 6 million copies worldwide and been translated into 26 languages, and her Culpables trilogy has racked up more than 80 million reads on self-publishing platform Wattpad. Ron — whose sultry romances and action-packed storylines about street racing and family implosions lend themselves easily to the screen — is a power player in young-adult drama, a genre that has become foundational to Prime’s originals strategy.

The 2023 adaptation of her first book, Culpa Mía (My Fault), which follows an illicit romance between stepsiblings Noah and Nick, was the biggest non-English-language original launch in Prime Video’s history, reaching No. 1 worldwide during its first weekend. (The company hasn’t shared viewership numbers.) The three Spanish-language Culpables films have since drawn more than 100 million viewers worldwide, with over 90 percent of that audience outside Spain. The success spurred execs to greenlight an English-language remake, My Fault: London, before the Spanish-language films had even wrapped — and by this June, adaptations of Ron’s books occupied five of Prime Video’s 10 most-watched Prime Original movie slots worldwide.

In June, the Argentina-born writer struck a first-look deal with Amazon MGM Studios. She receives executive producer credit on all current and future adaptations — and can bring the works of other authors to the studio for adaptation, also as an EP.  

The 33-year-old, who’s building a quasi-studio within Prime Video known as House of Ron, is what international originals boss Nicole Clemens recently labeled the “secret sauce” behind the streamer’s YA hot streak — which also includes non-Ron titles such as The Summer I Turned Pretty, Off Campus, We Were Liars, German original Maxton Hall and new Canadian entry Sterling Point.

But Ron has a problem.

With 11 adaptations of her books in various stages at Prime Video, she barely has time to write anymore. “It’s been nonstop,” says Ron, who is gearing up for a press tour around her latest project, Drawn Together, the first part of her Enfrentados duology, which launches on Prime Video in September.

“I want to try and stop and write, because I want to have new projects coming out next year, and I have to be calm,” she says.

Ron is a long way from her early years sending messages to random readers on Wattpad, imploring them to read Culpa Mía, which she posted chapter by chapter in 2015. The strategy paid off, and word-of-mouth success led to a book deal with Penguin Random House’s Spanish imprint Montena.

Since the adaptations began, she’s published just one more book: Culpa Vuestra, the fourth in the Culpables story, out in Spanish earlier this year (the English translation is due in 2027). The past three years have been a boot camp instead — learning the entertainment industry from the inside, and what it takes to be the author of a voracious YA machine.

One lesson: Despite the massive international success of YA titles, the genre — particularly international originals — is still underfunded compared with others. “It’s a long way to get where it should be,” she says. “For romance, 90 percent of the audience is female, and we know that what women like is always underestimated. It makes me so angry.”

The real budgets are in Hollywood, which is why her novel 30 Sunsets to Fall in Love, set in Bali, is skipping a Spanish-language adaptation altogether and going straight to the Amazon MGM Studios U.S. team, where Ron hopes to land A-list casting.

“I really wanted to get into Hollywood. It’s a dream,” she says. “And this story needs a bigger budget than we can get in the Spanish world.”

While she oversees 30 Sunsets, Ron will also be scouting new writing talent to bring into her House of Ron. There are “a lot of things” she’d do differently if she were starting out today, she says, including negotiating harder on compensation. 

“You’re used to working just on your own, and suddenly people you don’t know are trying to make changes. They’re like, ‘No, we need to do this, we need to do that,’ and you’re scared,” she says. “I know there are so many writers that don’t have a good experience adapting their novels. If I can help with that, I will.”

In our wide-ranging conversation, I go deeper with Ron about:

• What EP credit actually gets her when a script comes back — and what she still can’t veto
• Why Prime Video won’t show her performance data on her own adaptations
• Why the fourth Culpables book is the one adaptation that hasn’t been greenlit
• What makes her novels easy to adapt — and what makes most romance novels hard
• How a producer’s teenage daughter got Culpa Mía made
• And the genre she’s been rewriting since she was 14 and still can’t crack