Since debuting on HBO on November 28, Canadian TV series Heated Rivalry—a queer romance about two closeted ice hockey players—has become a word-of-mouth megahit. Now, sales of the novel on which it’s based are following suit.
Rachel Reid’s opponents-to-lovers romance of the same name, the second book in the Canadian author’s Game Changers series, was originally published in 2019 by Harlequin’s Carina Press imprint. But just in the last two months, the title has seen an explosion in sales.
Unit sales of Heated Rivalry have shot up nearly 600% between the week ended November 29, 2025—when the show premiered—and the week ended January 10, 2026, according to Circana BookScan. Sales have steadily climbed since early December, with the trade paperback selling just shy of 23,000 copies in the week ended January 10, landing at #7 on Bookscan’s weekly overall bestseller list. For reference, the trade paperback sold just under 42,000 copies in all of 2025, per Bookscan.
Deadline has reported that a second season of Heated Rivalry is in the works and will be based on Reid’s The Long Game (2022), which picks up Ilya and Shane’s story where Heated Rivalry left off. The book already reached #21 on Bookscan’s weekly overall bestseller list for the week ended January 10, and release-to-date unit sales have ticked up to 65,300—an eye-popping climb from just 6,200 as of the week ended November 29.
For its part, Harlequin is also betting that Heated Rivalry won’t cool off anytime soon. On January 12, the romance publisher announced a new novel in the Game Changers series—Reid’s third starring the Heated Rivalry characters Ilya and Shane—which is slated for this fall.
Readers’ appetite for LGBTQ+ romance has steadily grown over the past decade, with sales more tripling between 2021 and 2025: the category sold 900,000 print units last year, up from just 250,000 in 2021.
