What the Leaves Foretold

Paranormal Cozy Mystery · Clean / closed door · 25 chapters + epilogue · 60K novel · 1st person

Complete planning package, 130 pages: the premise, a full codex, every chapter outlined, an AI prompt for every chapter, and the whole launch kit — listing, blurb, keywords, posts, newsletter, reader magnet — already written. One buyer only. When it’s claimed, it’s gone.

For twenty years, Constance Pelletier has run The Salted Kettle Tearoom on the Maine coast — rebuilding a seasonal lunch counter into a destination: the dark-red cottage with harbor views, hand-thrown cups, and a menu that changes with the tides. She is fifty-four, practical, methodical, and possessed of a gift she has spent those same twenty years presenting as atmosphere.

Then Victor Crowell, Havenport's most powerful waterfront developer, sits down for a harvest season reading. The leaves show a crowned figure falling. A broken cup. A serpent coiled around an anchor. She tells him a time of change and watches him walk toward the bazaar.

That evening, he's dead.

Before Connie can find any reasonable explanation — there's Chief Graham Norcross across her kitchen table, quiet and precise in a way that accounts for everything she isn't saying; a reading that turned out to be more specific than what the police found at the scene; a half-finished waterfront development giving half of Havenport a reason to want Victor gone; and the thing she saw in the leaves three weeks before the bazaar that she never told anyone. The thing that had his name on it.

She's spent twenty years performing reasonable so the gift could stay safely private — saying atmosphere when she meant warning. Norcross has spent just as long building a case out of what can be proved, and he's finally in a town where that's not going to be enough.

A fair-play paranormal cozy mystery set at the edge of the Maine coast in October, where the answers are all there — planted before the final chapter, waiting for the reader paying close enough attention. The kind of book you stay up too late finishing because you need to know whether she was right about what the leaves were trying to tell her.

WHAT’S INSIDE THIS PACKAGE

⭐️ Story Premise — high-concept pitch, elevator pitch, and Market-Matched™ validation with triple-category positioning across Women Sleuths, Cozy Culinary, and Paranormal Psychics; three-title competitive analysis; and series concept with high-level premises for Books 2 and 3 of The Salted Kettle Mysteries

⭐️ Complete Codex — full story bible with Connie Pelletier (54, divorced, born Calais ME, tearoom owner since 47) and Chief Graham Norcross (former Boston homicide, deliberately skeptical), supporting cast of 8 Havenport residents, The Salted Kettle Tearoom and harbor village settings with full sensory detail, October 1–29 chapter-assigned timeline plus Late November epilogue, first-person Connie POV with her practical-sardonic register, six-rule paranormal codex governing exactly what the gift can and cannot do, fair-play clue architecture tracking all 9 planted clues and 4 tracked red herrings with resolution timing, clean/closed-door intimacy guidance, and series seeds for Books 2 and 3

⭐️ Chapter-by-Chapter Outline — 25 chapters + epilogue at full depth with emotional beats, word count targets (~60,000 words total), scene breakdowns, paranormal flags on every applicable chapter, [CLUE PLANT] and [RED HERRING] markers throughout, and the false-arrest arc across Chapters 18–22

⭐️ AI-Ready Chapter Prompts — 26 self-contained writing instructions, one per chapter and epilogue, each with full character descriptions, scene content, tone, pacing, and paranormal guidance embedded — fresh-chat tested so every prompt runs independently without requiring prior chapters as context

⭐️ Amazon Launch Kit — the listing, written: Amazon listing with dual KDP categories and 7 keywords and back cover copy

⭐️ Reader & Promo Kit — 50-word description, Instagram main feed post with 20 hashtags, Instagram story slide sequence (5 slides), Facebook post (link-in-comments format), newsletter announcement with three subject lines, four reader magnet concepts, sign-up landing page copy, and seasonal launch strategy

⭐️ Market-Matched™ Brief — the complete market case for this book: three-category market snapshot with daily sales, competition counts, and sales-to-comp ratios for Women Sleuths (170 daily sales per top 20 title), Cozy Culinary (3.6 sales-to-comp, strongest of the three categories), and Paranormal Psychics (6,312 titles in an undercompeted niche); five positioning analyses covering the midlife-protagonist gap, seasonal discoverability, fair-play architecture as reader-frustration fix, tearoom differentiation within culinary cozy, and the paranormal niche demand-supply imbalance; competitive positioning against two active comp titles with specific differentiation language ready to use; seven-keyword KDP strategy with per-keyword rationale; and full launch playbook — $4.99 pricing recommendation with KU enrollment guidance, illustrated October-palette cover direction, and 3–4 month release cadence for a three-book series culminating in a Box Set event
You write the book. The listing, the blurb, the keywords, the posts, the newsletter and the reader magnet are already written.

One buyer. One story. Exclusively yours.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Mystery > Women Sleuths sits at 2.7 sales-to-comp (Beaten Track Mainstream) with an estimated 170 daily sales per top 20 title — the highest-volume bedrock category in the cozy mystery ecosystem, with proven algorithmic support for new series entries

→ Triple-category positioning across Women Sleuths, Cozy Culinary, and Paranormal Psychics gives this book three distinct reader entry points and three separate discovery paths

→ Paranormal Psychics holds only 6,312 titles against active reader demand — "paranormal cozy mystery" is one of the highest-volume cozy-adjacent search terms, with supply significantly trailing search volume

→ Cozy > Culinary posts the strongest sales-to-comp of the three categories (3.6) and tearoom settings are nearly absent from a subcategory dominated by bakeries and baking — a clear differentiation gap

→ Fair-play architecture addresses a documented reader frustration — the gift never solves the case; every clue is planted before the reveal; this is a competitive positioning statement for readers burned by paranormal deus-ex-machina resolutions

→ October harvest setting is a built-in seasonal discoverability asset — "cozy fall mystery" search volume spikes from late September through November; this book is built to capture that traffic at launch and convert it to series readthrough

TROPES: • Amateur sleuth with an inconvenient gift • Reluctant suspect turned investigator • Slow-burn tension with the skeptical police chief • Small-town secrets with deep roots • Fair-play whodunit with every clue in plain sight • Paranormal gift that complicates, never solves • Midlife protagonist who knows how things work • Gift as jeopardy, not advantage • Autumn harvest atmosphere • Tearoom / culinary cozy setting • Coastal community under development threat • The reading she should have understood sooner

HEAT LEVEL: Clean and closed-door — emotional tension throughout; the slow burn between Connie and Norcross operates entirely in subtext, pointed questions, and the things neither of them will say out loud

Perfect for fans of: Ellery Adams, B.I. Skinner, Tara Lush, and Laura Childs

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