WHAT’S INSIDE THIS PACKAGE
⭐️ Story Premise — high-concept pitch, elevator pitch, and Market-Matched™ validation with dual-category positioning and competitive analysis against three named comp titles
⭐️ Complete Codex — full story bible with Tessa Corliss (33, provenance investigator) and Mateo Vidal (37, backcountry outfitter), supporting cast of 8 including his half-brother Cyrus and collector Warrick Halcombe, ten settings from Terlingua and the Solitario to the Ceniza mission ruin and the crossing below Santa Elena, an eleven-day chapter-by-chapter timeline with full date math, dual third-person voice system with four example passages each for Tessa (itemizing, appraisal-inflected, shortens under stress) and Mateo (plain, physical, lengthens under stress), relationship progression, steamy intimacy guidance with Dial the Heat™ architecture, and series seeds for 3 future books
⭐️ Chapter-by-Chapter Outline — 28 chapters + epilogue with scene breakdowns, emotional beats, key dialogue, chapter-specific sensory anchors, ending hooks, word count targets summing to 80,100, and a trope verification audit
⭐️ AI-Ready Chapter Prompts — 29 fresh-chat-ready prompts with tone, pacing, heat-level progression, embedded continuity facts, and distinct voice guidance for alternating POV
⭐️ Marketing Copy — Amazon listing with categories and 7 keywords, back cover copy, 50-word description, Instagram feed post and 5-slide story sequence, Facebook post, newsletter with 3 subject lines, 5 reader magnet concepts, reader targeting, and the Ideogram cover prompt
⭐️ Market-Matched™ Brief — market snapshot across three categories, competitive positioning, seven-keyword strategy table with per-keyword rationale, and launch positioning covering pricing, cover direction, and series strategy
One buyer. One story. Exclusively yours.
THE SALT ROAD
Tessa Corliss recovers stolen history for a living. Casting marks, chain of custody, provenance gaps — she once traced a Byzantine reliquary through a Zurich freeport without leaving her desk. She has never had to chase anything on foot, and she is very good at being certain.
Then an eighteenth-century mission cross disappears from a chapel on the Texas border and doesn’t surface anywhere. Not with dealers. Not at auction. It isn’t being sold. It’s being delivered.
Before she can get it back, there’s the outfitter who refuses her in under ninety seconds and then answers a question he shouldn’t be able to answer, the nine-day-old tire track he reads like a paragraph, four buried water caches he dug himself and won’t explain, the one motel room in Marfa on an art weekend with a swamp cooler and a single bed, and the moment his brother walks out of a truck at a mission ruin, calls him hermano, and says he’s the best there ever was.
She’s spent her life believing that a history you can’t verify is a person you can’t trust, because she watched her mother be blamed for not knowing. He’s spent eleven years being a man nobody asks about, performing restitution where no one can see it, because being forgiven would mean putting down the only thing holding his shape. Eleven days in two hundred miles of country with no signal is about to take both of those apart.
Contemporary action-and-adventure romance with dust, water discipline, and a slow burn that earns every degree of it. The kind of book where she saves his life with a come-along and a truck and narrates the whole thing in appraisal language, because that’s the only way she knows how to say it.
WHY THIS WILL SELL
→ Romance > Action & Adventure sits at 5.8 sales-to-comp (Hot Niche) with 42 estimated daily sales per top 20 title against fewer than 3,000 competing titles — a third of the inventory Romantic Suspense fields for comparable demand
→ Dual-category play with Romance > Romantic Suspense (4.3 sales-to-comp, Hot Mainstream) adds 58 daily sales per top-20 title and a far larger also-bought pool
→ Desert borderlands setting is the open lane in the category — the Action & Adventure top 100 is water and jungle; arid country is nearly unoccupied
→ Antiquities crime arrives pre-legible from prestige TV and thrillers — readers already understand looted silver and collectors who never display what they buy
→ Reformed-criminal hero where the past actually costs him — the archetype is strong-performing and usually decorative; here it drives the black moment
→ “Only one room” and “she saves him first” are both short-form share hooks — the two beats that travel furthest on BookTok and romance Instagram
TROPES:
• Reluctant Allies to Lovers
• Forced Proximity
• Road Trip Romance
• Only One Room
• Slow Burn to Scorching
• Man Running From His Past
• She Saves Him First
• Two Experts, One Truck
• Recovery Quest
• Grumpy, Protective, Unavailable Hero
• The Town That Keeps His Secret
• Competence as a Love Language
• The Notebook Entry She Left Blank
• Dual POV
HEAT LEVEL: Steamy / Open Door
Perfect for fans of: Elle Kennedy, Lucy Score, Julie Ann Walker, and Katee Robert