THE COUNTDOWN CAMPAIGN

Suki Raman has spent five years earning her place at Marrow & Selby Creative Agency — one brief at a time, no shortcuts, every line with her name on it. She knows good copy when she writes it. She knows a threat when she sees one. Brendan Shaw, charming and relentlessly exacting and absorbed into the agency through an acquisition nobody asked for, is both.

Then their creative director announces he’s retiring, and the promotion will go to whichever of them best leads the Halloran & Greer Advent Campaign: twenty-four posts, one per day, all of December, co-written. By the two people competing for the same job.

Their first argument leaks. Four thousand reposts decide it looks like flirting. The client wants more.

Before Suki can get the performance back under control, there’s the deal they shake hands on in the only private room in the building, the Day 5 post that goes viral and makes her text him the numbers at 10 p.m. without thinking twice, the line he adds to a draft on Day 10 that is in the campaign’s voice and also clearly not only that, the evening they stay late enough that the motion-sensor lights go out on the rest of the floor and they write the best post of the campaign at a kitchen table talking about something that stopped being about copy an hour ago, and the audience — which has been watching the whole time — identifying them by name before either of them has said a single true thing out loud.

She’s spent five years making sure the work speaks for itself, because the alternative is being seen, and being seen is how you lose. He’s spent eight months in a building where everyone decided about him before he arrived, performing certainty so fluently he’s forgotten what the real draft sounds like. Twenty-four days of an advent campaign are about to require both of them to submit the version they didn’t plan to send.

Christmas workplace romance where the performance and the reality are not as separate as either of them organized their lives around. The kind of book you read in December one chapter at a time and finish on Christmas Eve knowing exactly what the last post means.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Romance > Christmas sits at 9.1 sales-to-comp (Hot Mainstream) with 380–440 estimated daily sales per top 20 title — a proven peak-season category with a strong evergreen tail into Q1

→ Dual-category positioning with Romance > Workplace (8.6 sales-to-comp, Hot Mainstream) gives legitimate year-round discoverability after the Christmas window closes

→ The 24-chapter advent structure is genuinely unique in the category — no current Christmas romance bestseller can replicate it; readers who run December reading challenges actively search for this format

→ Viral romance meta-element is BookTok-native — the audience watching a love story unfold in real time mirrors how romance readers experience content online; “find the person who notices your mechanism” is a shareable line

→ Equal professional footing addresses a vocal reader complaint — rivals-to-lovers with no boss/subordinate dynamic and a promotion resolution where neither character sacrifices their career is a specifically differentiated selling point

→ Sweet/closed-door positions this for the underserved quality slow-burn audience — significant reader appetite for workplace romance without explicit content; heat-flexible structure serves readers at any level

TROPES:
• Enemies to Lovers
• Workplace Rivals
• Fake-for-the-Cameras
• Viral Romance
• Forced Collaboration
• Competing for One Promotion
• Dual POV
• Advent Calendar Structure
• The Performance Becomes Real
• Slow Burn
• Banter as Foreplay
• The Work IS the Romance
• Someone Notices the Mechanism
• The Post They Didn’t Plan to Send

HEAT LEVEL: Sweet / Closed Door — emotional intimacy throughout; one first kiss that takes twenty-four days to earn; the most intimate scenes are a printed draft left on a desk and a kitchen at 8 p.m. with bad coffee

Perfect for fans of: Sally Thorne, Rachel Lynn Solomon, Emily Henry, and Christina Lauren