A new baby gets a mountain of presents. The new grandparents usually get a photo on their phone. Give them a novel where they are the hero and the baby is the happy ending.
Becoming a grandparent for the first time is a quiet kind of milestone. The parents are exhausted, the baby is the center of attention, and the grandparents are busy cooking, driving and holding. A gift that is just for them says the moment matters to them too.
With Novellum you tell us about the new grandparent: where they grew up, what they did for a living, the family stories they are always retelling, and the baby's name if you want it in the book. Pick up to two genres (a gentle historical mystery works well; so does a comedy about a grandfather who has read every parenting book from 1978) and we write a novel with them as the hero.
It costs from $2.99 and arrives by email on the day you choose, with your message. It suits a baby shower, the first visit home or the first Grandparents Day. Add the narrated audiobook if they would rather listen.
This is how one of our books begins. The brief: Ruth Delaney, a retired music teacher in Portland, Maine, becomes a grandmother for the first time and, clearing her late mother's attic for a crib, finds a christening gown, a 1943 ration book and a photograph of a baby nobody can name (historical and mystery). The hero is invented.
Ruth Delaney smelled attic light and old paper the way other people smelled rain. She climbed the narrow stairs with a flashlight in one hand and a box of baby clothes in the other, each step creaking with the slow, exact complaints of a house that had seen more years than anyone left to tend it. Downstairs, the city of Portland carried on with its brine and gulls and early morning fishermen, but in her mother's attic time folded in on itself like a music score that had been refolded wrong and forgotten. Ruth set the box on a trunk and shone the beam across rafters lined with trunks and hatboxes, the beam cutting through dust motes and catching on something pale spread over a chair.
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.
The new parents, as a thank-you, or an aunt, uncle or friend of the family. It also works from one grandparent to the other.
Yes. Give us the baby's first name and we can end the book with them. First names only for children is a good rule.
Yes. Tick "This is a gift", choose the date and add your message. Cards go out at 13:00 UTC, morning in the US.
The PDF opens on any phone, tablet or computer and prints well. The narrated audiobook plays in a browser, with nothing to install.
Yes. When the book is delivered you can ask for the next one in the series, with the same hero, and the baby can be older.
Yes. It is written by AI for one reader, and the last page says so.
Questions? Write to us. Novellum books are written by AI, for one reader only.