WHAT’S INSIDE THIS PACKAGE
⭐️ Story Premise — high-concept pitch, elevator pitch, and Market-Matched™ validation with dual-category positioning and competitive analysis
⭐️ Complete Codex — full story bible with main characters, supporting cast of 5, Salt Hollow coastal manor setting, the boathouse, eight-week assessment timeline, dual first-person voice system with distinct verbal patterns for Thea (structural metaphors, clipped when guarded) and Caspian (short and declarative, goes still when withholding), relationship progression, moderate-heat intimacy guidance, and series seeds for 2 future books
⭐️ Chapter-by-Chapter Outline — 27 chapters + epilogue with emotional beats, word count targets, scene breakdowns, and the renovation-driven discovery structure
⭐️ AI-Ready Chapter Prompts — detailed writing instructions for every chapter with tone, pacing, heat-level progression, and distinct voice guidance for alternating POV
⭐️ Marketing Copy — Amazon listing with categories and keywords, back cover copy, social media posts, newsletter announcement, reader magnet concepts, and series launch strategy
⭐️ Market-Matched™ Brief — standalone keyword strategy, launch positioning, pricing strategy, and cover direction based on live category data
⭐️ Full Implementation Guide — step-by-step instructions from first draft to publication including pricing strategy, cover direction, and series readthrough strategy
One buyer. Exclusively yours.
THE WEIGHT OF WATER
Thea Winterbourne restores historic houses for a living — she can read a building’s entire structural history in its water stains and settling cracks. It’s precise, controlled work, and she’s built an entire career, and an entire life, around never letting anything get past her attention to detail.
Then the assessment contract lands on her desk for a crumbling coastal estate called Salt Hollow — the same house her younger sister vanished from eleven years ago.
Before she can finish the job and leave, there’s the caretaker who’s kept the estate standing for a decade and clearly doesn’t want her anywhere near the west wing, late nights reviewing property records where the conversation gets easier than either of them expected, a wall that measures wrong against every blueprint in town records, a ledger in her sister’s handwriting dated days after she was declared missing, and a kiss in a boathouse that tastes like relief right up until he tells her he was in the house that night — and no one ever knew.
She’s spent eleven years turning her grief into structural precision because feeling it directly was never survivable. He’s spent a decade equating silence with loyalty, certain that protecting the only family he’s ever had meant never being fully known by anyone, including her. A house that’s been standing on borrowed time is about to force them both to choose between the safety of what they’ve always done and the truth neither of them can keep holding up.
A gothic romantic suspense about the difference between protecting someone and simply going quiet. The kind of book where the truth turns out to be more bearable than the silence that buried it.
WHY THIS WILL SELL
→ Romance > Gothic sits at 8.8 sales-to-comp (Hot Mainstream) with 100.5 estimated daily sales per top 20 title — strong demand against a comparatively small competition pool
→ Dual-category stacking with Romance > Romantic Suspense (439.6 daily sales per top 20 title) captures the genre’s highest-volume shelf for discovery traffic
→ Secret-keeper hero framed through loyalty, not danger — underserved against the stalker/obsession-heavy current Romantic Suspense shelf, widening appeal to suspense-adverse gothic readers
→ Renovation-as-investigation structure is a fresh mechanism largely absent from current Gothic bestsellers, most of which lean supernatural or purely atmospheric
→ Three-book Salt Hollow series framework with built-in cross-book reveals supports Kindle Unlimited read-through and also-bought placement from Book 1 forward
TROPES:
• Forced Proximity
• Secret-Keeper Hero
• Buried-Past Mystery
• Slow Burn
• One That Got Away
• Grief-to-Healing Arc
• Found Family Reckoning
• The House Remembers Everything
• His Silence Isn’t a Lie, It’s a Wound
• Interrupted First Kiss
• Evidence Instead of Declarations
• Small-Town Long Memory
HEAT LEVEL: Moderate
*includes Dial the Heat™ guide to adjust heat level
Perfect for fans of: Rachel Hawkins, Lucy Foley, Simone St. James, and Riley Sager