A seventh book in Rachel Reid’s gay romance series that inspired the TV drama Heated Rivalry will be out later this year but Australian fans are still struggling to get their hands on a physical copy of any of the preceding six books.
Unrivalled, the next instalment in the Canadian author’s Game Changers series, will be released internationally on 29 September, the publisher HarperCollins announced on Tuesday.
The wild success of the screen adaptation has driven a level of interest in the books that rivals that of Bridgerton, booksellers have told Guardian Australia, with paperback copies of the first two novels selling out within a day and backorders piling up.
“No one has it in stock, not even the publisher!” a Dymocks spokesperson said.
Heated Rivalry launched on HBO Max on 28 November and follows the sexual encounters and budding romance of two closeted athletes, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, competing in a hypermasculine ice hockey league. It is based on the first two of Reid’s novels, 2018’s Game Changer and 2019’s Heated Rivalry. The seventh novel will continue the story of Shane and Ilya.
The books were initially released in ebook format, standard practice for romance and for Reid’s publisher, the Harlequin imprint Carina Press. The whole series received a trade paperback release in the US in 2024 but, by the time the TV show launched, many fans were complaining that physical copies of the books were impossible to find.
A spokesperson for HarperCollins Australia said the novels had been available in Australia and New Zealand in ebook and audiobook format before December and the company had acquired print rights for Australia and New Zealand “as soon as we heard that the series was coming to HBO Max in Australia in late November”.
“We went to print immediately and print copies of books one and two were available from 18 December, with books three through six available from Tuesday 27th January,” the spokesperson said. “The delay was due to the printer being closed over the Christmas break.”
That initial print run was not remotely enough for what booksellers said was a level of interest that rivalled Bridgerton.
A spokesperson from Dymocks told Guardian Australia the bookseller’s initial stock of Game Changer and Heated Rivalry had sold out within a day.
“We currently have significant customer orders for the next shipment, plus similar numbers for the next four books in the series due out in a couple of weeks,” the spokesperson said. “It’s been our most-searched title online every week since mid-December.”
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Dymocks said reprints were due to arrive in store next week and the store hoped to have stock available before next weekend, provided there were no shipping delays.
Sophie Higgins, the head of merchandise at Booktopia, said the store had been selling more than 100 copies a day of the paperback editions of the series, including those that haven’t been released in print yet, and had sold more than 10,000 copies so far. All six books in the series had been in Booktopia’s top 10 bestsellers since the show began airing, Higgins said, and the level of interest in the ebooks had been similar.
“We’ve seen this kind of sudden demand at Booktopia before for series like Fifty Shades of Grey, driven by word of mouth and social media buzz,” Higgins said. “The other example of a series that had been out for years and was even out of print before the Netflix series aired is the Bridgerton series by Julia Quinn.”
Nick Croydon, the chief executive of QBD Books, said there had been a “clear and sustained surge in interest” in the books since the TV adaptation launched in November.
“What’s notable is that this interest extends beyond the currently released titles, with readers actively searching for and preordering books across the full series,” Croydon said. “The entire series landed in our top 20 searched books for the month.”
The series had also generated more online product reviews than the July release of a limited-edition Fourth Wing special by Rebecca Yarros, which Crydon said was “a benchmark moment for romantasy readership in Australia”. It had also exceeded the engagement levels of the Arnott’s Cookbook, which went viral in October, by 19%.
“This places Heated Rivalry firmly within the realm of culturally driven book phenomena rather than a typical genre release,” Croydon said, suggesting that the series is “breaking out beyond its core romance audience” and indicating “a long-term series obsession rather than a short-lived spike”.
HarperCollins told the New York Times in December that 650,000 books had been sold in the Game Changers series, though the publisher did not distinguish between ebook and paperback editions. Its executive vice-president Brent Lewis said: “The community around these books felt like a small town before the show. Overnight, it became a big city. We couldn’t be happier for Rachel.”
Reid has not commented publicly on the shortfall in print copies, with the exception of responding “I’m with you 😖” to an Instagram post in December by a fellow romance writer and critic, Ella Dawson, that begged HarperCollins to print more copies.