After months in the works, I’m so excited to share my latest collaboration to bring the Chronicles of Avilésor to life off the page!
I love teaming up with small businesses and talented artisans, especially when they’re local. I’ve been wanting to do this project for a while, but I had been struggling to find the right business partner to make it happen. Now, it’s finally a reality! Step into the Ghost Realm with custom tea blends inspired by the series.
Meet Apothica
Apothica takes great pride in being a “steampunk sanctuary” and safe space for anyone who loves tea, games, and a relaxing experience. Their high tea room has an elegant ambience for those who want formal teatime, but the other half of the shop has a casual air with plenty of board games and comfy chairs for visitors to hang out.
Apothica Teas is a Victorian Steampunk-inspired tea room with a full menu and available event spaces. In addition, Apothica offers off-site catering and pop-ups at local outdoor events.
Located on Main Street in Niles, Michigan, Apothica is a place to practice deliberate stillness and civilised mindfulness in a busy world. Occasional craziness is embraced as well.
Offering products and works from local artisans and artists, Apothica Teas takes pride in serving the community we call home.
I had several reasons for choosing Apothica as my preferred tea collaboration partner:
- It’s a local small business less than an hour away from my home.
- A trusted vendor friend recommended Apothica and mentioned that they sometimes set up a booth within my network, so we occasionally cross paths on the event circuit. (My assistant and I later learned that we had bought bubble tea from them in the past at a Renaissance Faire and hadn’t realized!)
- Although the Chronicles of Avilésor is a sci-fi fantasy rather than a steampunk series, the genres have crossover vibes that complement each other well.
- Apothica has uniquely curated loose-leaf tea blends with a ton of high-quality ingredients, providing plenty of customization options to really capture the desired essence we were going for.
- The tea flights are packaged in unique vials, which work well with both the fantasy aspect of my series as well as the government laboratory scenes in the books.
- I had complete control over designing the labels and coming up with the names for the teas, although I wanted to keep Apothica’s logo prominent to give them credit in the partnership.
- Apothica’s logo and branding have a similar vibe to Old Soul Artisan, which created the Ghost Realm candle for an earlier collab I did several years ago, so I was excited about the cohesive cross-marketing opportunity.
The Collaboration Process
So… how did I go about collaborating on these custom teas?
It started with ordering samples from Apothica’s website to test the quality of the products before approaching the business with an official pitch. I’m glad that I did this, because I’d actually tested a California-based tea company before Apothica, and I was a bit disappointed with that first experience. I knew that other company wasn’t going to be the best fit for my series… and that’s when a friend recommended that I check out Apothica.
Right off the bat, my assistant and I were impressed by Apothica’s product and packaging! We met up for a home tea party and tested all five of the teas I’d ordered. (We were a bit jittery by the end!)
We contacted Apothica with an email pitch about the collaboration and waited (impatiently) to hear back. By a stroke of fate, a couple of longtime fans visited my booth at ArtBeat in South Bend, IN and mentioned that not only were they regulars at Apothica, but they were planning to go there after they left the festival. They’re big fans of the books, so we told them about our hopes for the collaboration, and they said they’d vouch for us and put in a good word during their visit. As we were packing up the booth at the end of the day, we received an email that said our “ambassadors had been successful” and someone would be in touch with us!
**This is a prime example of how much fans can help authors. I wear many, many hats as a solonpreneur managing my business while trying to earn a living and write/publish the next book in the series. I don’t have much spare time for outreach, and when I do, I actually don’t have as much clout as people assume. Whether I’m trying to get my novels on a bookstore shelf or team up with a business for a collaboration, it is SO much more impactful to have members of the community reach out rather than doing it by myself. When I contact a bookstore, for example, they see me as just an author trying to sell my books. When a local reader asks, that sends a completely different message and shows the bookstore owner that there’s genuine demand for my books!
Over the next few months, we made a few trips over the state line to visit the shop and talk with one of the owners about our ideas, plans, and expectations. Then, in October, we came in to test blends and nail down the final combinations.
We sampled SO MUCH tea as we tried some of Apothica’s existing blends and played around with adding and subtracting ingredients to curate our own combos.
Two of the blends came fairly easily, but the third gave us some trouble. It was so close, but something was missing, and no matter how we adjusted the ratios, we couldn’t get it to balance correctly. The owner ended up calling in her blending expert, who sampled the latest iteration and determined the missing ingredient was… rosemary.
From there, I just had to wait for Apothica to send over the final list of ingredients so I could create the custom labels for the teas.
At Journeyman’s Artisan Market in Valparaiso, IN at the end of November, I was finally able to debut the new product in my booth! They were so well received that I sold more than half of the flights and had to scramble to order more!!
Witch’s Elixir Tea Blends
The teas are called “witch’s elixirs,” which are canonical in the book series and appear in the glossary that will be published in Book IV. Each one is based on a different region of the Ghost Realm, resulting in a blend for the tropical Arstenya Forest, semi-arid Haeminall Desert, and misty, deciduous Denbrook Forest.
(The Ghost Realm candle captures the essence of the mountainous Cataline Forest.)
I created fantasy counterparts to the real-world ingredients, further expanding the worldbuilding lore of Avilésor. Patreon subscribers recently unlocked an exclusive deep dive into my naming process for these ingredients.
The azulean elixir (pictured) is a sweet, fruity, floral combination that brews into a deep purple with a sparkly shimmer.
The solarid elixir (my personal favorite) is a slightly sweet, nutty, creamy-tasting tea that brews into a lovely reddish-pink color.
The tenebryst elixir, which complements the Ghost Realm candle very well, has more of a spiced earthy taste with a hint of smoke. It looks like forest mulch in autumn and brews into a rich orange-brown color.
Each tea has a very different look, color, and taste for a completely unique experience. They’re just as pretty in the vial and bag as they are brewed in the cup!
Ready to try some tea? At this time, the blends are not on Apothica’s website, but you can shop for them in my booth or on my website. If you visit Apothica, you should be able to order the tea in person if you ask for it!
I'm an award-winning fantasy author, artist, and photographer from La Porte, Indiana. My poetry, short fiction, and memoir works have been featured in various anthologies and journals since 2005, and several of my poems are available in the Indiana Poetry Archives. The first three novels in my Chronicles of Avilésor: War of the Realms series have received awards from Literary Titan.
After some time working as a freelance writer, I was shocked by how many website articles are actually written by paid "ghost writers" but published under the byline of a different author. It was a jolt seeing my articles presented as if they were written by a high-profile CEO or an industry expert with decades of experience. I'll be honest; it felt slimy and dishonest. I had none of the credentials readers assumed the author of the article actually had. Ghost writing is a perfectly legal, astonishingly common practice, and now, AI has entered the playing field to further muddy the waters. It's hard to trust who (or what) actually wrote the content you'll read online these days.
That's not the case here at On The Cobblestone Road. I do not and never will pay a ghost writer, then slap my name on their work as if I'd written it. This website is 100% authentic. No outsourcing. No ghost writing. No AI-generated content. It's just me... as it should be.
If you would like to support my work, check out the Support The Creator page for more information. Thank you for finding my website! 🖤