OUT OF HER DEPTH

Imogen Carr has spent a decade learning exactly how things work in London publishing — the contracts, the rights, the specific social language of people who express affection through book recommendations and never raise their voices. She is very good at her job. She knows what things mean.

Then the secondment offer comes: six months in the New York office of her company’s American parent. It’s a line on her CV, a professional box to tick, a fixed timeline she intends to honor. She makes a spreadsheet. She has a plan.

She does not have a plan for the Slack channel that uses the eggplant emoji to announce acquisitions — this is now policy, apparently — or for the particular velocity of New York warmth that assumes familiarity before she’s ready for it, or for Leith Mossman, who is assigned as her onboarding buddy and who explains the Slack channel and the hot sauce and why the chair in Conference Room B is better than it looks and then texts her the address of a West Village bookshop that smells exactly like the one she’s been missing from Bloomsbury.

Before she can update the spreadsheet and get on her flight home, there’s a rights negotiation that proves to everyone — including herself — that she doesn’t just belong there temporarily; there are after-work explorations of the city that started as educational and have become, she’s aware, something she looks forward to in a way that isn’t entirely about the city; there are the texts Leith sends with things she mentioned once, in passing, weeks ago, as though he’s been filing everything she says; there’s the evening on the roof terrace when they stay long past the point where the heating unit is adequate because neither of them goes downstairs; and there’s the morning in November when she opens the spreadsheet and realizes she hasn’t updated it in ten days.

She’s been counting down since September. She has apparently stopped.

He knew before she did. He’s known since September the third — which is, if you’re counting, the first day. The Slack channel explanation. The good chair.

Out of Her Depth is a slow-burn workplace romance about a woman who planned everything except the part where New York started to feel like somewhere, and the man who’d been keeping very careful track of the moment she noticed.

The kind of book you recommend to the person you’d most want to be reading it at the same time as you.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Romance > Workplace Romance sits at 6.4 sales-to-comp (Hot Mainstream) with 95–160 estimated daily sales per top 20 title — the workplace slow burn is a perennial top performer, and this package delivers the trope’s cleanest version: a fixed timeline creating structural pressure, two genuinely competent professionals, and a pining hero whose feelings are visible to readers long before he admits them

→ Triple-category positioning across Contemporary Romance (5.8 sales-to-comp), Workplace Romance (6.4), and Romantic Comedy (7.1) — all three have legitimate claim from a single book, tripling the organic discoverability surface without requiring different marketing per category

→ The “Englishwoman in New York” lane is commercially underexplored relative to reader demand — “American in England” is well-trodden; this package runs the cultural-clash comedy in a fresher direction that no current bestseller owns

→ The spreadsheet is a BookTok-native marketing hook — the “she’s leaving in X weeks” countdown is one of the most-shared romance formats in reading content; the spreadsheet as a literal artifact gives this book a concrete, repeatable social copy angle most slow burns can’t offer

→ The publishing world setting creates insider resonance with the Romance readership, which skews highly literate and book-adjacent — readers recognize and love the specific details (eggplant emoji policy, galley copies on every surface, the exact social register of a literary office) in a way that makes the setting feel like a gift

→ Series read-through is structurally embedded — Priya Santos’s long-distance tension is visible and unresolved by the final chapter; Daniel Ashford has been on the other end of Imogen’s phone the whole book; readers are already invested in Books 2 and 3 before they’re announced

TROPES

• Fish out of water
• Workplace slow burn
• Cultural clash as comedy
• Friends to more
• Pining hero
• City as character
• Temporary situation, permanent feelings
• The moment she stops planning to leave
• Competent heroine
• Dual POV

HEAT LEVEL: Moderate / Warm 

Perfect for fans of: Beth O’Leary, Emily Henry, Sally Thorne, and Josie Silver