Christmas Day, 25 December
Most personalised books are picture books for children. This is a whole novel for a grown-up: their name, their town, their running jokes and their Christmas, written after you order it and opened on Christmas Day. And if you drew a name in the office Secret Santa, it is the one gift in the pile that is actually about them.
Christmas shopping for adults gets harder every year. The people you love already have the jumper, the candle and the bottle of something nice, and the shelves are full of books they have either read or will never read. What they do not have is a story where they are the hero: Mum solving the mystery of the missing turkey, your brother finally winning the family quiz, your best friend in a festive romance in the city she has always wanted to visit.
You tell us who they are in a few lines of your own words: what they are known for, where they live, the thing the family never lets them forget. Pick up to two genres, from cosy mystery to comedy to romance, and we write the whole book around them. You read page one free before you pay, so you can see the tone and change the brief if it is not quite them.
There is nothing to wrap and nothing to post, so there is no last posting date to miss. The book arrives as an EPUB and a PDF that open on any phone, tablet, e-reader or computer, or you can print the PDF and put it under the tree yourself.
You drew a name, there is a five or ten pound limit, and you barely know what they like. A Short novel is $2.99 (prices are in US dollars), well inside a five pound limit. You need one detail, not their whole life: their job, the team's running joke, the football club they will not stop talking about. Choose something safe for work, like comedy or mystery, make them the hero and read page one first.
It can stay secret. Tick "This is a gift", add their email and choose the day of the swap. Leave the From line empty and the card says the book comes from someone who knows them well.
The Bundle is three Medium novels for $13.99, against $4.99 each bought one at a time. For three names on the list:
The two codes are for the people you give them to, not for you to schedule: each person writes their own brief, and their book is ready, usually in about two hours, after they redeem it.
This is how one of our books begins. The brief: Hattie Bramwell runs the accounts office at a biscuit factory in Leeds and has organised the office Secret Santa for nine years, until three days before Christmas every gift under the tree turns out to be addressed to her (comedy and mystery). The hero is invented.
Hattie Bramwell knew the biscuit factory by smell. On a good morning the air smelled of caramel and butter and the faint sharp tang of toasted oats. On a bad morning the smell could be oil and burnt sugar and a co-worker’s overambitious trousers at the staff canteen. Either way it was hers like a hometown. She had run the accounts office for twenty-seven years and the paperclips and petty cash and VAT returns lined up under her care the way packets of digestives lined the warehouse shelves. She liked things to be neat. She liked things to be counted. She liked the Secret Santa to be perfect.
For nine years she had organised it with the precision of a woman who had once been a drill sergeant in a marching band of pensioners. Five pound limit. Names drawn from her late mother’s biscuit tin. No swaps. No pretending to be ‘creative’ with vouchers that expired in 2010. No sneaky receipts tucked into parcels to be used as bargaining chips. Everyone received a surprise. Everyone received something useful. Hattie took pride in the tradition. It was small, but it ran true.
So when she turned the corner into the accounts office on a wet Thursday and blinked at the office tree, it took her a beat longer than it should have to process what the tree was telling her. The branches were low with parcels, each parcel tied with ribbon and stamped with a sticky label. There was no snow. There was no tinsel. There was, in the middle of the sea of squarely wrapped rectangles, a neat cluster of tags all bearing the same name.
A real opening Novellum wrote for an example brief, quoted unedited: the first three paragraphs of page one. 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 | $13.99 |
Prices in US dollars, the same everywhere. You pay only after you have read page one.
Yes. Tick "This is a gift" and choose 25 December. We can hold a gift for up to a year, so you can order today and it arrives on the day with your message. In Australia and New Zealand it lands around midnight, so choose 24 December there if you want it waiting on Christmas morning.
No. Every book is digital, an EPUB and a PDF sent by email, so nothing can be held up in the post. If you want something to unwrap, print the PDF.
No, it is a novel for an adult reader, about 30,000 words for a Short and up to about 95,000 for a Full. If a story is for a younger reader, choose fairy tale or adventure and say so in the brief, then read page one before you pay.
Yes. The Short novel is $2.99 and the Short novel with its narrated audiobook is $7.99. Choose the day of the swap as the delivery date, and leave the From line empty if the gift should stay secret.
They come in your order confirmation. Give each one to a person, in a card or a message. They go to novellumbooks.com, design their own story, read page one free and enter the code at checkout. Each code is one Medium book and works once.
Yes, on a Short novel: the Short novel with its narrated audiobook is $7.99, and it can be a gift on 25 December too. The Bundle is three written books.
Yes. Every book is written by AI for one reader and says so on its final page. Nobody else ever receives the same book.
Questions? Write to us. Novellum books are written by AI, for one reader only.