Get Ready For Publishing to Chase the Heated Rivalry Phenomenon

Heated Rivalry mania has swept the world, and it’s been so fun to watch the stars of the TV series becoming A-list celebrities while the books upon which the show was based hit the bestseller list years after their original publication. The phenomenon is just the latest example of how frustrating and wonderful it is that no one can predict what will be the next sensation in the book world.

When Rachel Reid’s Game Changer series debuted in 2018, it was certainly not one with the largest advance or the flashiest marketing campaign. The series, which follows two closeted NHL hockey players who go from rivals to lovers, flew mostly under the radar, even when it was announced that Jacob Tierney would be adapting the second book in the series, Heated Rivalry, for a Canadian streamer and subsequently for HBO Max.

The publishing industry has become a business that is more and more driven by data, with execs wanting to see numbers before taking any risks. But before the show debuted in November the numbers simply weren’t there. In fact, Harlequin and Ingram weren’t prepared to get books into stores in advance of the TV series coming out in December 2025 because they  didn’t anticipate a massive demand for the source material. Why would they?

Cut to 2026 and Heated Rivalry is everywhere, in memes and reaction videos, talk shows and awards shows and SNL parodies and at the front rows of fashion shows, and lots of brands are getting in on the action as well. The success of the series might actually be driving NHL ticket sales.

Heated Rivalry is not the biggest show on television, but the scale of the book business is such that even a fraction of viewers converting to become readers of the series is enough to shake up book sales. Harlequin announced that 650,000 copies of the books sold as of December, and currently three titles from the series are on the New York Times Paperback Trade Fiction bestseller list.

Cynical cash grabs will inevitably follow, but the industry also has a chance to take away some important lessons from the Heated Rivalry success.

The most recently announced book in the series, due out this fall, is neck and neck with Colleen Hoover’s latest, which benefits from being published by Amazon, on the Amazon bestseller list. That the 45-year-old author of the Game Changer series finally now has access to care for her Parkinson’s Disease that she otherwise wouldn’t is a lovely side effect and also absolutely infuriating.

There will surely be a lot of coattails-riding to come, as there always is when publishers try to duplicate the success of an unexpected breakout. Cynical cash grabs will inevitably follow, but the industry also has a chance to take away some important lessons from the Heated Rivalry success:

Readers want queer stories.
Recently The Hill published a story about how book bans in the age of Trump have had a chilling effect on LGBTQ+ stories; publishers don’t want to take a risk on books that might be vulnerable to bans. I hope Heated Rivalry’s presence on bestseller lists reminds publishers that’s a bad business decision. And I hope they will think twice before describing mostly unrelated other books as “like Heated Rivalry but without the sex” or “like Heated Rivalry but about a heterosexual relationship,” disregarding what the books fundamentally are. Maybe they’ll even take more chances on queer romance series written by queer authors!

Quality matters.
There have been numerous pieces about why Heated Rivalry has caught on so wildly with viewers and readers. I’ll speak for myself: I started watching the series because of the smut. I was there simply for the smut; I couldn’t imagine that the show would make me cry multiple times, that there would be feelings behind that sex, or that the sex would be important for character development. But it wasn’t the only factor. When I began to read Rachel Reid’s books it became clear that the humor in the series, and its lack of cynicism, was present in the source material. That’s a tricky balancing act and it requires a lot of writerly skill.

Not every book has to chase a trend.
I’ve already begun to get pitches like “like Heated Rivalry but literary,” and to that I say no! Forcing every new book that contains explicit sex scenes to fit into the popular rubric of the time is no good for anyone. Rachel Reid’s fiction is not like Sally Rooney’s fiction, and that’s okay (if we’re gonna name a literary writer that most compares to the series I’d call out Alan Hollinghurst, anyway). Taking risks on books that don’t fit into a trend is how we continue to make art! It’s the only way to make room for the next entirely unpredictable big phenomenon to emerge.