Finders Weepers

Paranormal Cozy Mystery · Clean / closed door · 28 chapters + epilogue · 77K novel · 1st person

Complete planning package, 146 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.

Josie Brandt has spent eight years being very good at managing things that aren’t hers — other people’s late-night disasters, other people’s suites, other people’s crises handled with the blank-faced proficiency of a hotel night manager who knows the problem is always solvable and the answer is never yours to keep. She came to Pennywhistle, Arkansas to settle her great-aunt’s estate: sign the papers, list the strange little shop on Whistler Street, be back in Memphis by the weekend.

Then a dead man’s pocket watch arrives on the shelf — stamped with his initials, tagged with the minute he lost it: 7:12 PM. The official time of death was 9 to 11 PM. His business partner says they were together until 9:45.

Before she can hand the keys to the listing agent, there’s a pearl earring that arrives sixteen minutes after the watch and points straight at the widow, a car key that belongs to a Volvo no one admits to driving that night, a church program from the road below the bluff tagged at 7:41, a bell that rings yes or no but never who, and the moment she lays five objects on the counter in order and the whole murder assembles itself into a timeline only she can read.

She has spent her adult life being efficient about everything so she never had to want something of her own. The shop is the first thing she’s ever encountered that needed her specific combination of skills — and that will wait, patiently, to find out if she’ll claim it.

A paranormal cozy mystery built on a fair-play magic mechanic: every arriving object is a planted clue, the shop’s rules are established before the murder, and the killer’s own lost moment lands on the shelf before the final chapter. The kind of book where you’re two objects ahead of the detective and reading faster to find out if you’re right.

WHAT’S INSIDE THIS PACKAGE

⭐️ Story Premise — high-concept pitch, elevator pitch, and Market-Matched™ analysis with dual-category positioning, full Suspense Architecture including the hidden timeline (what actually happened in order), fair-play audit (every planted clue, reader solve point, and misdirection map), and competitive analysis against three comp titles

⭐️ Complete Codex — full story bible with Josie Brandt and eight supporting characters including the victim, killer, widow, skeptical locksmith, town oracle, and ghost great-aunt; The Mislaid Shop and five Pennywhistle locations with full sensory detail; 28-chapter day-by-day timeline with consistent date math; single first-person voice system with four example passages in Josie’s dry hotel-management register; complete shop rules (six laws governing what counts as “lost,” tag precision, arrival timing, and what the magic can never tell you); content intensity guidelines; and series seeds for two future Mislaid Shop mysteries

⭐️ Chapter-by-Chapter Outline — 28 chapters + epilogue with action beats, emotional beats, key dialogue, chapter-specific sensory details, clue-arrival and misdirection notes per chapter, ending hooks, and word-count targets

⭐️ AI-Ready Chapter Prompts — one fully self-contained prompt for every chapter and the epilogue, each built around a standing Voice Anchor with complete character and setting context, specific clue-planting instructions, and the shop’s magic rules embedded so the mechanic stays consistent across every generation

⭐️ Amazon Launch Kit — the listing, written: Amazon listing with categories and keywords, back cover copy, 50-word short description, and two Ideogram cover prompts with settings lines

⭐️ Reader & Promo Kit — Instagram and Facebook posts, newsletter announcement with three subject lines, reader magnet concepts, reader targeting, and series marketing

⭐️ Market-Matched™ Brief — market snapshot table, five data-backed “why this will sell” bullets, competitive positioning against three comp titles, seven-keyword strategy table with rationale, and full launch positioning including category recommendations, pricing strategy, and cover direction

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

→ Fantasy > Cozy sits at 9.3 sales-to-comp (Hot Niche) with an average of 60 daily sales per top 20 title — this premise slots natively into the fastest-growing category in the paranormal cozy space, which moved from a standing start to confirmed Hot Niche in under 12 months

→ Dual-category stacking with Mystery > Suspense > Ghosts gives a second legitimate ranking path in a high-volume mainstream audience already primed for inherited-property premises and ghost-shopkeeper plots

→ The fair-play mechanic directly addresses the #1 complaint in paranormal cozy reviews — the magic here is evidentiary, not determinative; the shop provides timestamps, never answers; this is a structural differentiator with no equivalent in the current top 20

→ The Ozarks setting is unrepresented in the paranormal cozy top 100 — every current top seller is New England, Pacific Northwest, or coastal; an Arkansas hill town with a specific regional voice captures reader novelty without category risk

→ The series premise scales to 10+ books on the same mechanic — each new arriving object opens a new mystery without mythology escalation, mirroring the high-volume release model that drives the best-performing paranormal cozy series in the space

TROPES:

• Inherited magical shop • Homecoming / fish out of water • Amateur sleuth • Ghostly ancestor (bell code only — one ring yes, two no, three danger) • Fair-play puzzle mystery • Quirky small-town ensemble • Slow-burn with the skeptical locksmith • Small-town secret beneath the murder • The shop timestamps what the police can’t use • The killer dropped something • Evidence that arrives on its own schedule • The locksmith who won’t believe it but helps anyway

Content Intensity: Clean — death is off-page; the ghost is warm and cozy, never frightening; the secondary romance is a hopeful spark only, fully closed-door; no explicit content of any kind

Perfect for fans of B.I. Skinner, Tara Lush, Danielle Garrett, and Ellery Adams.

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