Wallachia

About

Wallachia is an ongoing serial vampire novel written by David Ely. New chapters come out every few weeks as both text and audiobook via an iOS app.

The app is free to download and read. At the end of each chapter there are buttons that allow the reader to support its writing by leaving an optional tip.

Inside the app, you’ll get:

Flowers of Transylvania, is also available separately for Kindle and Apple Books.

The Story

Set decades before Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, Wallachia tells the story of a small village in the Principality of Wallachia, just south of Transylvania, in 1816. The main character, Marley, has just returned home with an injury after attending a dance academy in Transylvania. The town and its people have their own problems and secrets but are unaware of what’s coming down the road, as Count Dracula arrives to pay their local lord a visit.

The Setting

Wallachia (wool-ay-kee-uh) was a principality in Eastern Europe that combined with Moldavia in 1859 to form the modern nation of Romania. Transylvania joined along with several other countries in 1916. The historical figure Vlad III Dracula was Voivode of Wallachia in the 15th century. (More about the connections between the literary character and the historical figure here.)

More than an eBook

Wallachia is intended to feel like a familiar ebook reader, but it includes features that weren’t possible to achieve using regular EPUB files.

About David Ely

Last name: “ee-Lee.”

David Ely was born in Charlottesville, VA. He Graduated from the College of William and Mary with a double major in Philosophy and Literary & Cultural Studies: Film Studies. He lives with his wife and two children in Annandale, VA.

Learn more about David’s journey developing the app here.

Trailer

Direct YouTube link: https://youtu.be/UHF4o-0clUo

Icon and Screenshots

wallachia app icon

iPhone cover

iPhone page 1

iPad page 1

David Ely headhsot black and white

David Ely headshot

(Right-click to download full-sized images.)

Design Features

The Wallachia app aims to be the best-looking ebook reader available. Most ebooks simply take the book’s text and present it without any particular formatting. A great deal of care has been put into Wallachia’s text layout system to enhance the reading experience in subtle ways.

drop cap

Chapters open with a beautiful drop cap. When space allows, it tucks itself into the surrounding lines, its baseline matching that of the surrounding text, with its cap height aligning to the median of the first line of text.

margins

If a paragraph starts with punctuation, the quotations marks hang slightly to the left of the letter so that it aligns with other paragraphs. On narrower screens, the width of the left margin exactly matches the indentation and line height. On larger screens, the text block never grows so wide that the eye would have to scan too far.

The typeface, Baskerville, was chosen both because it looks good on iOS’s high resolution displays and because it’s historically accurate to the era. First cut in the 1750s, it feels right at home in Wallachia’s 1816 setting.

Wallachia’s cover was painted by Samantha Lane Fiddy. Learn more about how the app icon was created from the cover.

Availability

The app is on the App Store now and is available worldwide.

Download on the App StoreDownload on the App Store

The prelude story, Flowers of Transylvania, is also available for Kindle and Apple Books.

Download from Amazon

Download from Amazon

Apple Books link

Contact

Please reach out on Twitter @wallachiaNet or email for any media or review inquiries.