WHAT’S INSIDE THIS PACKAGE
⭐️ Story Premise — high-concept pitch, elevator pitch, and Market-Matched™ analysis with triple-category positioning (Christmas, Paranormal, Small Town) and competitive analysis against three comp titles
⭐️ Complete Codex — full story bible with Posy and Reid’s full profiles, supporting cast of 6 (including Odessa’s operational rules and communication system), the Larkspur Inn’s full sensory and architectural profile, Frostbury setting, compressed seven-day December timeline, dual first-person voice system with distinct verbal patterns for Posy (accumulating, “okay”-punctuated, driest internally) and Reid (reportorial em-dash voice breaking down across the week), Sweet/Closed Door intimacy guidance with Dial the Heat™ scene flags, and series seeds for 2 future books
⭐️ Chapter-by-Chapter Outline — 26 chapters + epilogue with emotional beats, word count targets, scene breakdowns, Dial the Heat™ flags at every escalation point, and the paranormal mechanics tracked across the full arc
⭐️ AI-Ready Chapter Prompts — fully self-contained writing instructions for every chapter including Odessa’s no-compulsion rule, continuity facts, and voice guidance for alternating POV; paste into a fresh chat and write
⭐️ Marketing Copy — Amazon listing with triple-category strategy and 7 keywords, back cover copy, 50-word description, Instagram and Facebook posts, newsletter announcement with three subject lines, four reader magnet concepts (including the Odessa bonus scene readers will ask for), and series launch strategy for The Larkspur Chronicles
⭐️ Market-Matched™ Brief — market snapshot table, “why this will sell” data points, competitive positioning, seven-keyword strategy with per-keyword rationale, and launch positioning including seasonal pricing strategy and cover direction
One buyer. One story. Exclusively yours.
MISTLETOE AND ASHES
Posy Caldwell inherited the Larkspur Inn six months ago and has been running it on coffee, her late great-aunt’s handwritten notes, and the cheerful conviction that everything will work out if she just keeps moving. The inn needs her. The mortgage has a clause. And every Christmas week since 1887, guests have paid to be haunted — so this year, she’s going to haunt them herself.
Then R. Ashe books the “research purposes” room for Christmas week.
He’s a travel journalist. Six years of exposés on exactly this kind of tourist-trap experience. He has a column, a methodology, and a fog-machine database in his head. Posy has a fog machine borrowed from a community theater, the remote for which she cannot find.
Before she can get through one week without losing the inn, there’s a temperature drop in the parlor she cannot account for and didn’t stage, a piano that plays a waltz from 1893 with no one at the bench, a candle at the end of the east wing corridor that lights itself every night regardless of what she does about it, a journalist who identifies three of her five mechanisms and goes very still and quiet about the other two, a frozen door that traps them in the east wing at midnight in a December storm until it decides to open on its own, and the fog machine remote appearing in her co-conspirator’s coat pocket — from the inside — at a moment when the machine is running in a different room.
Odessa Larkspur built this inn in 1887. She ran it alone for eight years. She never left.
Posy has spent her whole adult life moving fast enough that nothing gets the chance to feel uncertain — performing competence so thoroughly she’s forgotten what it feels like to stop. Reid has been filing technically correct pieces for six years and can’t bring himself to read the one he’s most proud of, and he keeps not writing about the piano, and he’s starting to understand these facts are connected.
Christmas paranormal romantic comedy, set in one snowed-in week at a Victorian inn in Frostbury, Vermont, with a ghost who has been running this particular play since 1892. The kind of book you read with the lights on because you want to, not because you need to.
WHY THIS WILL SELL
→ Romance > Holiday > Christmas sits at 7.8 sales-to-comp (Hot Mainstream) with 280–420 estimated daily sales per top 20 title — a compressed one-week timeline gives this book novella urgency at novel depth, matching holiday binge behavior
→ Romance > Paranormal > Ghosts & Haunting at 6.2 sales-to-comp (Hot Niche) with no dominant title in the warm-comic ghost tone — most ghost romance runs dark or cozy-mystery adjacent; a Hallmark-bright ghost matchmaker rom-com is a rare lane
→ Triple-category stacking with Romance > Small Town (8.1 sales-to-comp, Hot Mainstream) — the Frostbury community setting qualifies; three high-volume categories from one purchase decision
→ Skeptic/believer enemies-to-lovers is consistently one of the most-shared trope stacks on BookTok — readers tag specifically for this combination, and the travel-journalist-debunker framing gives the skeptic role professional stakes that raise the tension beyond the standard “he doesn’t believe in ghosts”
→ Christmas Romance is a perennial backlist engine — a strong October–December launch recycles as reliable seasonal income every subsequent year, with series read-through compounding across The Larkspur Chronicles
TROPES:
• Enemies to Lovers
• Skeptic vs. Believer
• Meddling Ghost Matchmaker
• Inherited Inn
• Snowed-In Forced Proximity
• Fake Haunting / Real Ghost
• Small Town Christmas
• The Grand Gesture Is Choosing to Keep Something Unexplained
• Ghost Communicates Through Margin Notes
• The Remote Goes Missing (This Is Important)
HEAT LEVEL: Sweet / Closed Door — emotional intimacy and escalating physical awareness throughout; first kiss in chapter 24; everything after closed door; heat-flexible with optional Dial the Heat™ escalation at any level without restructuring the outline
Perfect for fans of: Christina Lauren, Ashley Poston, Emily Henry, and Talia Hibbert