The house
How these books are made.
Everything a reader might reasonably want to know before spending money here, including the parts that are easier not to mention.
The narration is a digital voice
The audiobooks are read by a synthetic voice, not a human narrator. That is stated here, on every volume page, and on every retailer listing, because it changes what you are buying and you should know before you pay. Each is unabridged and runs about ten and a half hours; the runtimes on this site are measured from the finished masters rather than estimated from the word count.
Every number here is measured
Page counts are read out of the print files, word counts out of the manuscripts, and audiobook runtimes out of the audio masters. Nothing on this site is rounded up to sound better. Where a figure is a proposal rather than a measurement — the print prices and the postage, which have no quote behind them yet — the page says so in the same place it shows the number.
The books are written to a fixed contract
Each volume is a complete romance with its own couple and an ending that does not require the next book. Each carries one named instrument and never reuses the last one's. The series never fades to black, never eroticises a refused no, and never puts anyone under eighteen in a sexual situation. Those are rules, not preferences.
British English, and a pen name
A. M. Vespertine is a pen name. The books are set in British English and spelled that way on purpose, including in the American editions.
Buying direct
A retailer takes between thirty and sixty-five per cent of the cover price. Selling direct is why the ebook is a plain EPUB with no DRM, why the audiobook is a folder of MP3s you keep rather than a licence you rent, and why the paperback can be priced on a ladder instead of a single list price.
The record
Every volume, its ISBNs, its measured extent and its measured runtime, in one machine-readable file: catalog.json. The same facts in prose, for anything summarising the series rather than browsing it: llms.txt.
| No. | Volume | EPUB ISBN | MP3 ISBN | Paperback ISBN |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I | The Tithe | 979-8-90623-931-0 | 979-8-90623-932-7 | not yet registered |
| II | The Hunt | 979-8-90623-933-4 | 979-8-90623-934-1 | not yet registered |
| III | The Last Light | 979-8-90623-935-8 | 979-8-90623-936-5 | not yet registered |
| IV | The Sleep | 979-8-90623-937-2 | 979-8-90623-938-9 | not yet registered |
| V | The Long Dawn | 979-8-90623-939-6 | 979-8-90623-940-2 | not yet registered |