About the Cozy Letter Club
What is the Cozy Letter Club?
The Cozy Letter Club is the subscription side of things here — a way to receive a story in installments, through letters delivered right to your mailbox. Not your email inbox. Your actual mailbox, the one at the end of the driveway or where ever yours might be.
Each subscription is a complete cozy told through letters. You open an envelope, you hold a letter, you read the next piece of the story — and then you wait for the next one to arrive.
What comes inside each letter?
Each letter is the story itself — written in the voice of the narrator, just as she’d write to a close friend. Annily’s Letters and Goldie’s Chronicles are fully illustrated. The Brigton letters lean more toward clues and ephemera — things that feel like they belong in an evidence file as much as an envelope. Goldie’s Chronicles also includes recipes, games, and other activities.
Are the letters illustrated?
Most. I illustrate them myself — ink and watercolor, a style I developed specifically for these stories. It’s different from my other artwork (I also do abstract mixed media painting). Annily’s Letters and Goldie’s Chronicles are fully illustrated. The Brigton letters focus on clues, documents, and items that fit the mystery, rather than scenes from the story.
How often do letters arrive?
The first letter is sent within 1-2 business days after you order unless you choose a different start date, the rest of the letters are sent on the first and third Tuesdays every month. Readers tell me they re-read the previous letter before opening the new one, and that makes me very happy.
How many letters are in each subscription?
- Annily’s Letters — 12 letters (two per month for about six months)
- Enigmatic Evening (Brigton series) — 12 letters (two per month for about six months)
- Operation Kitten Rescue — 6 letters (two per month for about three months)
The Stories
What is Annily’s Letters?
Annily is an artist who is traveling through the UK and finds an adventure she didn’t expect. She writes letters to her friend back home (you!) and those letters are what you receive each month.
The story is a cozy mystery with some unusual elements. Annily encounters things that don’t have easy explanations, and she writes about them the way any curious, grounded person would: with a mixture of wonder, skepticism, and dry humor. The letters are her first-person account of everything as it happened.
If you read the letters and want the full picture, more than the letters reveal, that’s what the companion novel The Cursed Ring is for.
What is the Brigton series?
Brigton is a small town in Texas with a long memory and a complicated history. Emma Parker moved there to open a bookshop and get away from a stressful corporate career. She didn’t expect the town to be quite so eventful.
She writes letters to a dear friend (you!), telling her about the mysteries that keep landing on her doorstep — and the odd sense that some of them are more connected than they appear.
Brigton is a full ongoing series. Enigmatic Evening is the first twelve-letter story in that world.
How is Brigton different from Annily’s Letters?
Annily’l Letters is an adventure — she travels, she sketches, things happen to her in picturesque places. Brigton is smaller, quieter, and more rooted. Emma has a shop, a routine, neighbors she cares about. The mysteries in Brigton tend to be closer to home, and the stakes feel personal in a different way.
Annily’s letters have full illustrations and reports from other actors in the story. The Brigton letters lean toward clues, documents, and the kind of details a former business analyst would notice and save.
What is Operation Kitten Rescue?
Operation Kitten Rescue is Goldie’s telling of the story of how the animals in the neighborhood rescue a kitten — a fully illustrated letter series separate from both Annily and Brigton. It has lots of bonus activities, games, and recipes for more fun out of every letter.
Ordering & Gifting
Can I give a subscription as a gift?
Yes, and it makes a wonderful one. When you purchase a gift subscription, you can give me the “ship to” information. If you want to purchase multiple gifts, you’ll fill out a form with the story and the recipient’s name and mailing address, and the letters will go straight to them each month. You can include a personal note.
Do you ship internationally?
Yes, we are able to ship internationally. If that option is not available or visible to you, please check with us via the Contact page and we’ll check into it for you.
The Novel
What is The Cursed Ring?
The Cursed Ring is the novel I wrote before Annily’s Letters existed — and in a way, it’s the reason the letters exist at all.
It’s an adventure that started 500 years ago and involves a curse that Annily and David need to solve before it’s too late. It looks behind the curtain to the forces for good and evil at work in the story.
The letters are Annily’s story. The novel is the fuller picture, including the things she didn’t know she was part of. You can read either one first; they illuminate each other. Or, read them together, there are notes in the novel letting you know which letter to read when.
About AA Briggs
How did the idea for letter subscriptions come about?
Honestly, it came from the story, not the other way around.
I’d written a novel, and a friend who read it kept asking why my character did certain things — why she talked to strangers on trains, why she went where she went. As I thought about it, I found myself wondering: how would Annily explain all of this to a friend back home?
The answer was letters. That’s how she’d tell it — in letters, one at a time, writing things down as they happened. Once I started writing the letters, they took on a life of their own, and they were the first thing I published. The novel came out later.
Who is AA Briggs?
I’m Alice (AA) Briggs. I write fiction under AA Briggs, as I have multiple nonfiction titles under other variations of my name. I also illustrate all of my own letter series. I live in Amarillo, Texas with four cats (Miss Marple, Hastings, Miss Lemon, and Mittens, in case you were wondering). I grew up partly in Michigan and partly in New Mexico, which means I’m equally comfortable with both snow and desert — though the cold gets to me more than it used to. Ha!
I make furniture in my shop, grow things in the garden when the Texas weather cooperates, and send a newsletter most weeks that includes whatever I’m building, baking, knitting, or thinking about — along with updates on the stories.
Do you do the illustrations too?
Yes, I do. I have a background in fine art — I also make abstract mixed media paintings under my full name — but the illustrations for the letter series are a completely different style. Ink and watercolor, more realistic, developed specifically for this work.
What kind of stories do you write?
Cozy stories with some unusual elements. Some mysterious and some adventurous.
The supernatural is present in Annily’s story, but it’s part of the fabric of the world. Angels, watchers, guardians — forces working in the background. The faith element is there if you’re looking for it, but it’s never heavy-handed.
Brigton is a typical small town cozy mystery with warm characters, genuine community, and real food. Set not far from where I live in the panhandle of Texas.
Goldie’s Chronicles is a fun animal based adventure series. I used to live in a small town and had chickens and ducks. I would often see them gathered with a neighborhood cat or two at the back fence, as if in conference. These stories are my answer to the “What are they plotting?” question.
Do you have a newsletter?
I do, and it’s one of my favorite things. I write about whatever is happening: the bookcase I’m building, the quilt in progress, how my knitting is going, what the cats are up to, a recipe I made this week. Story updates come in naturally alongside all of that. It’s a bit of a peek into my worlds both real and fictional.
You can sign up at the bottom of any page if you missed the pop-up.