THE WATCH

She rebuilt her career around knowing what structures are worth saving. She's never had to make that call about a person before.

Meg Doran is a coastal preservation surveyor. She's good at remote postings, solitary work, and arriving somewhere alone with a task to complete. She's been sent to the Heron Point lighthouse for a three-month assessment — document the structure, evaluate the site, file the report. The coastal preservation authority already has a conversion plan. They anticipate her findings will support it.

Then she finds the lighthouse immaculate.

The Fresnel lens is at full operational standard. The logs have been kept, in the same handwriting, for sixty-two years. Thomas Birch — keeper of Heron Point from 1962 until his death in June 1989, one week before the Coast Guard arrived to hand the light to automation — is in the lamp room when she gets there, finishing a cleaning stroke before he acknowledges her presence, mildly inconvenienced by her arrival.

He offers to teach her the lighthouse.

Before Meg can file her report and leave, there's the specific weight of his hand on the lens housing while he shows her the cleaning procedure and corrects her technique without softening the correction; weather lessons on the gallery where he reads a 4-millibar pressure drop in the ache of a knuckle he broke in 1971; the second notebook she opens in week one and fills with what she is not putting in her field notes; the night she stands the full watch alone — 10pm to 6am — and he is visible through all of it, not working, just present the way you are present when someone is doing something you care about and doing it well; the parlor conversation that runs past midnight and covers her father, his Eastport, and what it costs to choose solitary necessary work over everything that competes with it; the storm in December where the fog bell misfires and both of them manage their respective systems through twelve hours of gale and meet in the covered walkway at hour twenty-two and neither of them moves for a while; and the log entry she writes after — both systems functional — which she means exactly.

She's spent a decade treating remoteness as a professional feature without asking whether it has become a personal one. He's kept a light running for thirty-five years because the light matters, and because leaving would mean admitting there is nowhere else for him — until she arrives, and that changes.

The coastal preservation authority wants a visitor facility. She has a reclassification argument in the second notebook and a deadline of December 20.

Warm, spare, isolated-setting haunted romance where the love story is built through the transmission of a practical skill. The kind of book where the most important line is the lens cleaning is on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Romance > Paranormal > Ghosts sits at 6.8 sales-to-comp (Hot Niche) with 55–80 estimated daily sales per top 20 title — strong demand, low competition, and a documented gap between what readers are searching for (warm, emotionally grounded ghost romance) and what the top 20 delivers; this package lands directly in that gap

→ Lighthouse and isolated-setting romance is one of the most-requested premise types in reader communities with no current top-20 occupant — active demand, no direct competitor, a setting readers will want to inhabit rather than escape

→ Dual-category stacking into Romance > Paranormal > General (5.1 sales-to-comp, Hot Niche, 70–105 daily sales) plus a browser-add third category play into Romance > Contemporary > Small Town & Rural (4.2 sales-to-comp, Hot Mainstream, 120–195 daily sales) for three-category discoverability from one book

→ Grumpy ghost / competent sunshine heroine is a rare trope adaptation — the "grumpy" dynamic reads as thirty-five years of settled certainty rather than emotional unavailability; distinctive enough to generate BookTok word-of-mouth, familiar enough to convert on the trope signal

→ Skill-transmission-as-intimacy is a high-shareability mechanic — the lens cleaning, the weather reading, the watch; specific, tactile, easy to excerpt for social proof; performs with the same readers who drive sports romance and workplace romance sales

→ Hauntings shelf cross-sell from existing Book 1 and Book 2 buyers provides immediate launch visibility with a pre-warmed audience

TROPES

• Grumpy ghost / competent sunshine heroine • Skill transmission as intimacy • Isolated lighthouse setting • Ticking clock (preservation deadline) • Touch as an earned event • The job that becomes a cause • Slow burn • Found station (minimal found family — two supporting characters, maximum intimacy) • The kept place • Second notebook as love language

HEAT LEVEL

Moderate / Warm — heat-flexible — emotionally intense throughout; physical intimacy builds slowly and deliberately; the first touch is in Chapter 15 and it is four seconds; built with Dial the Heat™ flags at four scenes so any heat level is achievable without structural revision; consent architecture clean at every level

COMP AUTHORS

Perfect for fans of Matt Haig, Susanna Clarke, Amor Towles, and Kate Morton

WHAT'S INSIDE THIS PACKAGE

⭐️ Story Premise — high-concept pitch, elevator pitch, and Market-Matched™ analysis with three-category positioning (Ghost, Paranormal General, Small Town Rural), competitive analysis with differentiation, and full series potential for the Hauntings shelf

⭐️ Complete Codex — full story bible with main characters (Meg Doran, 34, coastal preservation surveyor; Thomas Birch, 51 at death, 1989), supporting cast of three, Heron Point Lighthouse and keeper's cottage settings with full sensory profiles, 77-day October-to-solstice timeline broken chapter by chapter, dual first-person voice system with four distinct example passages per POV character, lighthouse operational authenticity notes, heat-flexible intimacy guidelines with Dial the Heat™ flags, the physics of Thomas's existence (consistent rules throughout), and series setup for the Hauntings shelf

⭐️ Chapter-by-Chapter Outline — 27 chapters + closing chapter (Winter Solstice) with emotional beats, word count targets, scene breakdowns, sensory anchors, ending hooks, and full final-third depth matching chapter one

⭐️ AI-Ready Chapter Prompts — one self-contained copy-paste prompt per chapter and closing chapter; character voice, continuity facts, sensory anchors, heat flags, and ending hook in every prompt; no prior context required; split across two files by length, fully sequential

⭐️ Marketing Copy — Amazon listing with categories and keywords, back cover copy, 50-word short description, Instagram and Facebook posts, newsletter announcement with three subject lines, five reader magnet concepts with landing page copy, reader targeting, series marketing, and two Ideogram cover prompts (Market Match and Market Match + Twist)

⭐️ Market-Matched™ Brief — three-category market snapshot table, five data-backed why-this-will-sell points, competitive positioning with differentiation, seven-keyword strategy table with per-keyword rationale, and launch positioning including seasonal release recommendation (October–November window)

One buyer. One story. Exclusively yours.