At eighty, they have heard every card message and own every ornament they will ever need. What they don't have is their own story, written down, with them as the hero.
By eighty, most people have a cupboard full of things and a head full of stories nobody has written down. The summer job, the dance where they met, the house they built, the year everything went wrong and they got through it anyway.
A Novellum book turns those stories into a novel. Collect a few memories from the family: where they grew up, what they did for work, how they met their partner, the story they tell every Christmas. Pick up to two genres (historical and romance suits a life story; a gentle mystery suits the one who always has the last word) and we write a whole novel with them as the hero.
It costs from $2.99 and arrives by email on the birthday with your message. Add the narrated audiobook, read at an easy pace, for anyone whose eyes prefer listening, and print the PDF at a local print shop so it can sit on the shelf.
This is how one of our books begins. The brief: Margaret Pendry, turning 80, who in the summer of 1966 was a purser on the ferries between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, remembers that summer: the music on the car deck, the storm crossing when she kept two hundred passengers calm, and the young engineer called Alan who asked her to the dance at Ryde Pier and became her husband of fifty years (historical and romance). The hero is invented.
She had been eighty for three months and still remembered precisely how old she had felt at twenty-four when the summer of 1966 began. That summer had a tenor of its own, like a record played at the wrong speed and yet impossibly right. It had the smell of petrol and brine and wet wool, the smoke of teas made for sailors and schoolchildren, the endless click and clack of lifebelts being buckled and unbuckled. It had music on the car deck that seemed to belong to everybody and no one at once.
Across the room was a small, battered record player. Margaret moved to it as if drawn by habit. She could have chosen any record, but she lifted the sleeve with hands that remembered. The photograph inside was of a ferry's car deck, half-shadowed by tarpaulins and the sky like a committed curtain. On the back of the photograph in her neat hand was a line she still considered the truest thing she had ever written: I never meant to fall in love on a ramp, but there it was.
From page one, its second and third paragraphs (the first is left out here). 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 email and print the PDF at a local print shop, or play the audiobook on a speaker at the party.
There are four narrator voices, including Helen, an older voice that is warm and unhurried. Listen to the samples before you choose.
It is a novel, not a biography. The book uses the names, places and moments in your brief and invents the rest, so check page one and correct the brief if anything feels wrong.
Yes. Collect them and one person writes the brief, up to 2,000 characters. Only name people who would be happy to appear in the book.
Many families do, gently, as part of the story. Say in the brief how you would like them remembered.
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.