A story of two seemingly mismatched hearts brought together by fate, proving that sometimes, the perfect love story is hidden in the pages of a well-loved book.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Melissa Ferguson’s The Perfect Rom-Com, which releases on February 11th 2025.
Aspiring author Bryony Page attends her first writers conference bursting with optimism and ready to sell her manuscript with long-shot dreams of raising awareness for The Bridge, her grandmother’s financially struggling organization where she teaches ESL full-time. But after a disastrous pitch session, she stumbles into correcting another author’s work in a last-ditch attempt to make a good impression with the agent. And she, as it turns out, is spot on.
No one is more surprised than Bryony when the agent offers her the opportunity to be a ghostwriter for Amelia Benedict, popular rom-com novelist. Bryony agrees on one condition: she’ll write books for this vain, demanding woman just as long as Jack Sterling, literary agent of the legendary Foundry Literary Agency, works to sell her own book too.
What nobody predicted, however, was that Bryony’s books would turn Amelia Benedict into the Amelia Benedict, household name and bestselling author with millions of copies sold around the world.
And just like that, the Foundry Agency can’t let her go.
But on a personal note, Jack is realizing he can’t either.
It was a dark and stormy night.
I mean, not technically.
Technically it’s actually remarkably warm for a January afternoon in Nashville, Tennessee. Men and women of all ages are practically skipping down the sidewalk on the street below, twinkles in their eyes, hope in their chests. Just a moment ago I watched from the three-story glass wall of the conference center as one stuffy-looking businessman actually dropped his phone call to commence sharing crackers with a squirrel. Crackers. With a squirrel. Having a little lunch together on a green bench while taxis and tour buses flash by, windows down, hair in the breeze.
Everybody in all of the city is basking in the unusual sunshine.
Learning life lessons.
Having existential breakthroughs.
Except for me.
No, I, twenty-nine-year-old Bryony Page, have the distinct pleasure of my mind crackling like a thunderstorm while I pace outside the conference pitch room on my final day of the American Society of Writers conference, awaiting my final pitch appointment that will determine whether the past two years of writing my heart and soul out was life-changing or, in actuality, a complete and utter waste of time.
And then, of course, there’s my sister on the other end of my phone. With her own particular brand of “trying to help.”
“It’s your last day, Bryony,” Gloria says in my ear, a nails-down-the-chalkboard kind of twang in her voice. “You just have to buck up. Pull yourself up by those bootstraps. Slap that book on the table—”
“Proposal,” I interject, pivoting on the thin hotel carpet.
A manager in the distance is frowning mildly at my legs, looking like he’s calculating exactly how many times I have to pace this exact path before I’ll wear a hole in his carpet.
“—and get back on that horse because you are going to have a rootin’ tootin’ good day, ya hear? This is it.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose, trying to ease the tension. On the bright side, I’m not hyperventilating. Hyperventilating is what the man to my left is doing as he exits the pitch room and collapses onto the first bench he finds.
Neither am I crying.
Crying is what the woman to my right is doing while another conference attendee is shaking her by the shoulders, telling her to pull herself together because she has, according to the clock above the door, thirty seconds before she’s up.
No, what I am doing is getting my pre-pitch pep talk. The same pep talk I’ve received from my sister the past three pitches over the past three days I’ve been at this writers’ conference nine hundred miles from home. Only, as each day has gotten progressively worse, the rejections have piled up higher and higher, and the stakes have risen to dangerous levels, the pep talks have grown . . . weirder. Longer. Just worse.
My sister, Gloria: dignified court reporter in the courtroom, whimsical adult-child every moment out.
I know what she’s doing, though. The harder she sees me struggle, the more absurd she gets.
Some people’s love language is baking casseroles and sending letters. Hers is providing distraction—even at the cost of throwing on a Big Bird costume and dancing down a congested hospital hallway waving streaming blue ribbons (i.e., during our friend’s seven-year-old daughter’s recovery from tumor removal). And right now, without question she has at least four tabs open on her phone on websites about “Southern slang” while she grasps at straws for any sort of distraction from these tortured few minutes before my last and final pitch.
(Not to mention she found it raucously funny that I called her from a line-dancing saloon my first night during a “meet and mingle.” Needless to say, life at the conference here in Nashville, Tennessee, is a far cry from our little borough outside New York City. And to my misfortune, it turned out, I did not happen to have any life-changing chats with agents while doing the Boot Scootin’ Boogie.)
I let Gloria continue as I turn on my heels and pace beside the doors, taking in words like “highfalutin” and “can’t never could” and attempting small chuckles every few moments for her sake.
And to my surprise, it’s actually helping in a small way. Just hearing her voice rattling off anything, anything at all, braces me. It’s not fixing me, mind you. But it’s stabilizing enough that I’m not getting any worse.
At least eight people are pacing in the massive room around me (all of whom are contributing to the manager’s stress). Most with heads bent, mumbling to themselves as they stare at their papers. Some, like me, on their mobiles, getting their own personal pep talks—that no doubt don’t include phrases like, “There’s someone for you, B. After all, there’s not a pot too crooked that a lid won’t fit.”
And as the long hand on the clock strikes twelve, I feel an urge to flip open my proposal folder and recheck everything. Just one more time.
It’s unnecessary. I’ve checked to make sure my papers were all there and in order at least a dozen times.
But I have to see. I have to confirm it did not magically disappear in the past sixty seconds.
My one-sheet. Check.
My business card crafted on some site I’d never visited before, where I ordered two hundred for the sole purpose of this weekend (and 197 still linger at the bottom of my bag). Check.
My sixty-page proposal prepared to tell literary agent Jack Sterling every single bloated thing about my life, career, and book.
I don’t work as an ESL teacher. I am a philanthropic academian with a bent for loyalty and integrity in my fifteen years of service.
I don’t have a gerbil named Biscuit my old roommate abandoned when she left me halfway through a yearlong lease. I am in the animal rescue service and provide therapy—via allowing Biscuit to come to my classes so my students can find comfort in stroking his soft black fur during anxiety-ridden testing weeks.
I do not have a newsletter of forty-six people comprised of 25 percent family and 75 percent students. I have a global-spanning news outlet with a roster reaching people from twenty-seven countries and counting.
I have three sample chapters.
I have a pen I can gift him that has my name and email, just in case he loses my business card.
I have a paper clip with my name and email I can slip on my papers in case he loses my business card, and my pen, and my proposal and folder, and all electronic receipts regarding my name and information.
I have . . . everything. Down to the bandages on my blistered heels from walking miles inside these conference halls the past few days and attending classes about how unprepared I was to do something as idiotic as try to sell my book when “don’t you guys know that two million new books come out each year?” and “let’s not even begin to think about the destruction wrought by AI.”
I’ve diminished beneath celebrity speakers sharing their glory stories of old, writing books on washers and dryers before receiving the big phone call with the six-figure advance.
I’ve sat in on marketing classes informing me how I need to run a successful website, newsletter, blog, Goodreads, BookBub, Instagram, Lemon8, Threads, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, X, and Clapper account before even considering reaching out to an agent, because of course publishers can’t publish books without successful authors. Never mind that it’s impossible to be a successful author with a thriving platform on social media without actually having, you know, a book.
I’ve done one-on-one sessions only for editors to circle every page of my first seven and tell me precisely thirty-two things I did flagrantly wrong.
I’ve been rejected by three agents during three pitches. The whole reason I came.
If dictionaries were made entirely of pictures, there’d be a large photo of me under the word defeated.
My eyes flicker up to the clock on the wall and I swipe at one particularly annoying lock of brown hair that keeps falling over one of my eyes. The energy in the room is lifting. Shifting as people gather up their supplies and begin to stand.
“Are you done, Gloria?” I say into the phone.
She stops midsentence. “You feeling energized yet? ’Cause I can do this till the cows come home.”
“I’m up,” I say in a hush. “They’re about to open the doors.”
“All right, all right, I know you’re . . .”—she pauses, clearly hunting for a clichéd phrase—“busy as a cat on a hot tin roof, so I’m going to cut to the chase ’cause this is key. Here we go!” she says, and I pull the phone from my ear after a thunderous clap. “Repeat after me: I, Bryony Sophia Page, am a strong and intelligent woman—”
My mouth remains clamped shut.
“—and I don’t care if I have had three agents tell me my stuff was crap—”
The doors burst open, lanyards swinging from the necks of two conference staff. People begin to stream out.
“—or that that woman said my proposal wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on—”
My heart begins to beat frantically. I clear my throat. My jaw tightens.
“—and I will not waste my time on anyone who’s slicker than pig snot on a radiator—”
You can do this, Bryony. You have gotten this far—you can do this.
Do it for The Bridge.
Do it for your students.
Do it for you.
“—or waste my time on anyone who’s as useless as a screen door on a submarine—”
Excerpted from The Perfect Rom-Com, by Melissa Ferguson. Thomas Nelson, 2025. Reprinted with permission.
