My gothic novel is now available on Kindle

And in a hardcover collector's edition.

Last week, I sent the final chapter of my gothic novel Obscurity to my newsletter subscribers. I still can’t believe my book is finally complete and out in the world!

I have been sending chapters to my paid newsletter subscribers every Friday since September of 2021, with free readers reading four weeks behind. Almost a year later, all 40 chapters—plus the prologue and epilogue bien sûr—have been published.

Many of you have been with me since the beginning, so I won’t repeat my whole process here. But for those of you newly introduced to my newsletter: here’s the article in which I researched how I wanted to publish my novel, here’s the article in which I decided to serialize my book via my newsletter, and here’s the article in which I launched the whole thing.

Now that it’s complete, I’m so excited to announce that it is available for purchase on Kindle.

Obscurity is available on Kindle

I have to admit, it was a lot of work publishing the book as a serial—but I loved it. In serializing my book, I got to meet readers directly as well as develop relationships with other Substack fiction writers (there are so many now—go to substack.com and click on the “fiction” category to read so many amazing others).

Most of all, I got to write the book I most wanted to read. An homage to the gothic novels that have consumed me for years—The Count of Monte Cristo, Dracula, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, The Phantom of the Opera—but with a lush Americana setting and a strong female lead. And I got to publish it the same way those classics were: as a serialized classic.

Now it is a completed tome.

Writing this book has been a dream of mine for so many years and I can’t believe it is finally published. If you can, in any way, be enticed to be haunted by this book, and have not been so inclined during it’s serialization, it is now available for pre-order on Kindle and will be published August 1st, 2022. 

(You’re welcome to leave a review there too if you’d like—I hear that helps authors quite a bit on Amazon.)

Obscurity is available in a hardcover collector’s edition

Obscurity is also available in a (very) first edition that I am extremely excited about. Designed by Amanda Nogales and printed by Edition One, the collector’s edition is bound in black silk-touch linen and embossed in copper gold leaf—just like the gothic novels that came before me.

I will print 50 copies of the (very) first edition for subscribers at my Novelle Collector tier and will sign each copy by hand. If I receive requests above that amount, I will issue second and third printings, with those noted in the beginning of the book.

My Novelle Collector tier is $200 and includes this book as well as the annual print magazine of my newsletter (sneak peek of what that looks like at the end of this TikTok video) as well as several gothic goodies I will be including in each package. I am assembling those as we speak!

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Substack for providing a platform where I can share my work and my paid subscribers for supporting me in publishing my novel and writing my newsletter.

I especially want to thank my Novelle Collectors who purchased the hardcover copy and made my dreams of a little black book possible: Brooke & Jim Fredericks, Karen & Chris Griffin, Brittany & Nathan Parks, Krissy Perryman, Katie O'Connell, Becky Cortino, Matt Rasband, Tommy Collison, Austin Tindle, Shannen Leigh Naegel, and Heather Rampolla thank you so much for supporting my work!

And thank you to each and every one of you for subscribing to my newsletter. It means the world to me that you’re here and I am so grateful to be counted among such incredible company!

If you want to clink glasses with me from afar, talk about the book, ask questions, chat about serialization or publishing on Substack, or really anything that strikes your fancy, I’d love to chat with you in the comments! Join me:

Thank you for being here,

Elle

P.S. I recently hit a really busy time between work, freelance work, serializing my novel, and working on the print edition that left me with very little time for my newsletter. Now, things have sufficiently calmed down, comments are back open to all my subscribers, literary salons are once again running smoothly, and I’m so excited to get back in the mix with you all.

I apologize for being momentarily absent in the comments section and my literary salons, and thank you so much for your patience as I figured out how to publish a book and write a newsletter sustainably. It has been a learning process—a very fun one!!!—and I am so grateful to get to write here with you all!