By seventy, they have stories nobody else can tell: the job, the travels, the person they met by accident. For their birthday, put those stories in a novel with them as the hero.
A 70th birthday is a milestone that most people would rather mark than receive presents for. They have the house, the garden and the good china. What they rarely have is their own story written down.
A Novellum book turns the family's memories into a novel with the birthday person as the hero. Gather what you can: where they grew up, the work they did, the place they lived when they were young, how they met the love of their life. Pick up to two genres (historical and romance suit many seventieth birthdays; adventure suits the ones who are not slowing down) and we write the whole book around them.
It costs from $2.99, arrives by email on the day with your message, and the narrated audiobook, read in an older voice if you like, is easy to play on a speaker at the party. Print the PDF and the family can sign the first page.
This is how one of our books begins. The brief: Margaret Hollis, turning 70, from Bath, who flew as a BOAC and later British Airways stewardess in the 1970s, remembers her first long-haul tour in 1975 and the missed connection in Hong Kong where she met the engineer she would marry, framed by her seventieth birthday party (historical and romance). The hero is invented.
The cake waited on the table like a small, frosted timepiece. Seven tall candles gleamed at attention while the guests hummed with the polite, low electricity of people who liked one another and had agreed to remember something together. Margaret Hollis sat at the head of the long dining table, palms folded on her lap, and watched the flames stitch themselves into the face she had become. Her fingers remembered the quick, efficient knots of a seatbelt rather than the slow fuss of tying silk scarves into bows. At seventy she felt the old rhythm inside her: the tidy inventory of a crew readying for a long night, the voice in her head that could calm a passenger or laugh on cue. Tonight the voice was softer.
Her niece, Katherine, had arranged the party. Katherine had put a coin from an old BOAC uniform into Margaret's champagne glass as a joke and rooted through Margaret's keepsakes for the music. Guests sipped and exchanged stories about grandchildren and careers in ways that did not require precise memory. Margaret kept returning, like a moth to a safe flame, to a more dangerous light. She was telling the same tales she had told to stewardesses in their first week of training and to damp strangers on overnight flights. Beirut, Hong Kong, New York. Cities that had been bright and noisy and not yet soft around the edges. Each name drew an arc on her tongue and, for a moment, she folded toward 1975.
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.
Send it to a family member's address and print the PDF, or play the audiobook at the party. The EPUB works on any e-reader.
Yes. The book follows your brief, so real places, jobs and dates can all go in. It is still a novel, so some scenes will be invented around them.
Yes. The audiobook has four voices; Helen and Peter are older voices, warm and unhurried.
Yes. Collect stories from everyone and one person writes them into the brief, up to 2,000 characters.
The Short is about 30,000 words. The Full, about 95,000 words, gives a long life room to breathe.
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.