You have years of in-jokes, one legendary road trip and a taco truck you still talk about. Put all of it in a book where your best friend is the hero.
Best friends are the hardest people to buy for, because the bar is high. A candle says you were in a hurry. A gift card says you were in more of a hurry. What a best friend actually wants is proof that you remember: the dorm room, the terrible haircut, the night the car broke down and you sang the whole way home.
A Novellum book is built from that proof. You write the brief in your own words: their name, the city, the shared history, the running joke. Pick up to two genres. Comedy and adventure make a road-trip caper; mystery turns your friend group into a detective agency; romance works if you have been hearing about the new person for months. We write a whole novel around them, and nobody else ever gets it.
It costs from $2.99, arrives by email on their birthday with your message, and you can read page one before you pay to make sure the tone is right.
This is how one of our books begins. The brief: Jess Moreno turns 33 in Austin, Texas, and her best friend has planned a road trip to find the taco truck from their sophomore year (comedy and adventure). The hero is invented.
Jess Moreno woke up on her thirty third birthday to the sound of someone trying to play "Happy Birthday" on a kazoo. The kazoo was off-key and enthusiastic and someone had left the blinds open so sunlight striped the bedspread like a prison bus stole her dreams. For a second she thought she was in a dream where she was late for her own surprise party. For a longer second she remembered that at thirty three you did not always get surprised with cake. You got charged for a second time at your favorite coffee shop and you had to buy new batteries for your toothbrush once every other week.
"You awake, Jess?" Lou asked from the doorway, hair in a towel and a grin that looked guilty enough to be illegal. She was holding a paper map and a folding chair and the kazoo. Lou had been Jess's friend since the first shaky week of sophomore year when they both cried over a failed organic chemistry lab and bonded over the taco truck parked by the dorms. The taco truck did not deserve the reverence their group accorded it but it had saved them from many a midnight existential crisis and eaten the sting out of several bad haircuts.
A real opening Novellum wrote for an example brief, quoted unedited. Your book starts from your brief, and you read its page one free before you pay.
| Short novel, about 30,000 words | $2.99 |
| Short novel with its narrated audiobook | $7.99 |
| Medium novel, about 60,000 words | $4.99 |
| Full novel, about 95,000 words | $6.99 |
| Bundle: three Medium books, one now and two codes to give later | $13.99 |
Prices in US dollars, the same everywhere. You pay only after you have read page one.
Yes. Most people do. Write yourself in as the sidekick, the getaway driver or the one who got them lost.
Yes. Tick "This is a gift", pick the date, and it arrives that day with your message. Cards go out at 13:00 UTC, which is morning across the US.
Order now without a date. The book is usually written in about two hours and you can forward it, or pick today as the gift date.
The Short novel is about 30,000 words, an evening or two of reading. The Medium is about 60,000 and the Full about 95,000, the length of a typical paperback.
From $2.99 for a Short novel, or $7.99 with a narrated audiobook. You pay only after you have read page one.
Yes. It is written by AI for one reader and says so on its final page.
Questions? Write to us. Novellum books are written by AI, for one reader only.