A BIG Announcement 🎉
- Allora Dannon
- Aug 5
- 2 min read
I started writing when I was ten years old, and I thought it was illegal.
Let me explain. I began with fanfiction (although I didn't know that's what it was at the time) for an obscure obsession with the 1982 TV Series: The Blue and the Gray and, later, The Lord of the Rings when Fellowship came out just after my eleventh birthday. I thought I was breaking the law as I borrowed worlds and characters from my favorite stories to build my own. I’d hide my notebooks behind my headboard, under my mattress, or in a box in our attic. I’d climb trees to secretly write and furiously scribble away. And with every successive story, I kept dreaming—like Anne Shirley or Jo March—of seeing my stories published someday.
It is absolutely wild now, that nearly twenty-five years later, I get to announce that my very first book is getting published. WHO IS SHE? A LATE BLOOMER’S SURVIVAL GUIDE is a memoir/self-help hybrid that’s being published by Carpe Vitam Press, and it’s is coming out this fall on October 7th, 2025.
This book was an incredible labor of love (written during my first breakup), telling the story of “coming out” as a romantic late bloomer, shedding my shame around that fact, and entering the dating world for the first time in my thirties. It is, unequivocally, my story, and it contains hard-won lessons of what I wished I knew when I thought I was the only person like me.
It is a story of self-discovery, love, sex, and heartbreak—but it is also about embracing your most authentic self, while also shedding fear, embarrassment, and shame. It is a story about overcoming, evolution, and just “doing it scared.”
Who Gave Me the Audacity?
I have two audacious goals for this book—and that’s where you come in. If I’d heard about someone like me as a younger person, it would have completely changed my life. Your help making that dream a reality means everything to me.
To that end, I have some big, gnarly goals!
GOAL #1: Carpe Vitam is a small, independently owned press. If we sell 2500 copies of WHO IS SHE, they will be able to fund an audiobook version of it (which I would narrate)! 🎉
GOAL #2: If, by October 12th, I somehow manage to sell 5000 copies, I’ll be eligible for the USA Today’s Bestseller’s List. Most debut books sell around 1000 copies (at best), so these are crazy big dreams.
Either way, if you’d like to be a part of this journey, I’d be honored!
Right now it's only available for Paperback Preorder in the US through Barnes & Noble.
For International orders, the ebook is available now and the paperback will be available internationally starting October 7th.
None of this would have been possible without you.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you.
-Allora
love it !