Author: Count Dracula (J K Vescount)
First published: 2026
Contains spoilers
The Blurb: Five hundred years. Zero self-doubt. One life coach you should never invite in.
For centuries, people have asked Count Dracula the secret of his success. He has never told a living soul. Until now.
Having survived plagues, wars, three revolutions, the invention of the bicycle and one extremely persistent Dutch professor, the world’s oldest life coach has finally written it all down. This is self-help with the confidence of a man who has been staked twice and still landed a publishing deal.
Inside, you’ll learn to:
Set boundaries. He physically can’t enter without an invitation. Your neighbours have no such excuse.
Glow up. How he lost 300 years in one English summer, without a single spa day.
Handle haters. He has many. One of them is Dutch and has a hammer.
Accept feedback. A pitchfork is just a question with prongs.
Bounce back. Stabbed, staked, reduced to dust, and back by Christmas.
Work from home. He hasn’t commuted since 1462.
The power of compound interest. What happens when one gold florin is left in the bank for 500 years.
Packed with case studies from his former clients (Jonathan Harker kept notes), Bite-Sized Takeaways, an hour-by-hour dusk routine and postcards from a doomed sea voyage. There’s a practical worksheet on who is draining you (and who you could be draining), and a Before-and-After photo section you have to see to believe (you can’t). And in “Ask the Count”, Dracula answers readers’ letters from Melbourne to Las Vegas, personally, after dark.
Along the way he name-drops shamelessly: inspiring Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine, coaching Roger Bannister to the four-minute mile, dropping an apple on Isaac Newton and gatecrashing Queen Victoria’s séance.
Illustrated with deadpan Victorian-style engravings, it’s the perfect gift for vampire fans, lovers of gothic humour, and anyone who needs life advice from someone who stopped living centuries ago. Ideal for Halloween, birthdays, Christmas stockings and Secret Santa.
Some of his methods may be hard to swallow. His advice? Suck it up.
The review: A satire of a self-help book as if written by Dracula, this merges the character of the novel with some of the more pop culture version – sunlight is a thing – and stirs it together with a big old heap of humour. A couple of moments that tickled me, without spoiling too much, were the declaration that he is “the world’s leading authority on boundaries” given the invitation rule, and the thought that “A pitchfork is just a question with prongs”. The chapter on detoxing is subtitled, “Cut out garlic, crucifixes and the Church of England”, which I rather liked. I don’t read the self-help genre but I recognised the style and framing the book uses immediately and that parody helps carry the joke.
This is not a huge read at some 82 pages, and the style makes it pithy, so the price tag might feel a tad high. However, I suggest this is more the sort of book you’d pick up as a gift for the vampire fan in your life (as the blurb actively suggests). With that in mind I think a strong 6.5 out of 10 balances it being a fun read, the fact that it whiled away an hour on a train and would make a fun gift against it being pricey for a short book.
In Paperback @ Amazon US
In Paperback @ Amazon UK
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