Every bookstore gift has the same risk: they already own it, or they already read it. Here is the one book they cannot have read, because it does not exist until you order it.
Buying books for a real reader is harder than it looks. They have a list, they have opinions, and the bestseller you picked up at the register is probably on their nightstand already. Gift cards solve the problem by giving up on it.
A Novellum book is a different kind of present. You choose up to two genres they love, name them as the hero, and describe the story in a few lines: the Christmas they still talk about, the town they grew up in, the mystery they would secretly love to solve. We write a whole novel around it and nobody else ever reads it. For a reader, a book written only for them is a new category of gift, not another spine on the shelf.
Schedule it for Christmas Day and it arrives that day with your message. There is no shipping, so there is no shipping deadline, and a gift ordered on Christmas Eve still lands on Christmas.
This is how one of our books begins. The brief: Ruth Ellery, a retired librarian in Vermont, finds a letter from 1926 inside a donated book on Christmas Eve (mystery and historical). The hero is invented.
Ruth Ellery had never liked snow that came down in a hurry. Quick flakes blurred sightlines, hid the slick places, and folded the town into a single muffled hush that made old voices seem stranger. She turned the library door latch and stepped out into that hush with a stack of returned books balanced against her hip. The hand bell above the desk chimed a small, solitary note behind her. It sounded like an apology.
The book that changed the night was a battered copy of a railway timetable bound with advertisements for tonic and corsets. Someone had left it in the donation box under the vestibule lamp; Ruth had assumed it belonged to the historical collection until the corner of a folded paper slid out as she lifted it. The corner was browned and brittle. The ink inside was finer than modern script. It was dated 1926 and addressed to a name that had not been spoken aloud in Harrowford for more than half a century.
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.
It arrives on the day you choose. The card goes out at 13:00 UTC, which is 8 a.m. on the US East Coast and 5 a.m. on the West Coast, so it is waiting when they wake up.
Every book comes as an EPUB, which Kindle apps and most e-readers open (Amazon's Send to Kindle accepts EPUB), and as a PDF for everything else.
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.
You write the brief, not the book: a few lines to a few paragraphs on what should happen, who is in it and where it is set. The more detail you give, the more the book is theirs.
We say it plainly on every page of this site and on the book's final page, so there is no surprise. Read page one free first and judge the writing yourself.
Yes, for the Short novel: $7.99 for the book and its narrated audiobook, read in one of four synthetic voices you pick.
Questions? Write to us. Novellum books are written by AI, for one reader only.