• By Nick Patel
• 04 Nov, 2026
• Industry

ReelShort Licenses Tessa Bailey’s Big Shot Books. Here’s What Our Chart Says About the Bet

By Nirav Patel, Founder, Vertical Charts

ReelShort is going shopping on the romance shelf. On November 2, TheWrap reported that the app has licensed two novels from Tessa Bailey’s Big Shot series, Fangirl Down and The Au Pair Affair, and that production on both started this week. TheWrap called it a shift in ReelShort’s strategy toward investing in licensed titles. Here’s what was announced, why a bestselling author would sign with a vertical app, and what our own chart data says about the bet ReelShort is making.

What ReelShort actually announced

According to TheWrap, these are Bailey’s first vertical adaptations, though not her first adaptation of any kind: a film of her bestseller It Happened One Summer, starring Nina Dobrev and Tyler Hoechlin, wrapped production this fall. The two Big Shot books are both sports romances:

• The Au Pair Affair follows a marine biology graduate student who takes a job as a live-in au pair for a stern single father who happens to be a pro hockey enforcer, and falls for her boss.
• Fangirl Down follows a struggling professional golfer who hires his last remaining fan to help revive his career.

ReelShort plans to show a preview of both adaptations at the Telly Awards on November 10. There’s no release date yet; TheWrap says they’ll likely land on the app early next year. Bailey also had a hand in the process. She worked with ReelShort’s producers and writers on the adaptations and even suggested swapping the leading men between the two projects.

The pitch to authors is speed

The most revealing quotes in the story are about time, not money. Bofan Zhang, a senior executive producer at ReelShort, told TheWrap that once the company options a book, “it’s not going to be in the library forever,” and that authors can see the finished product within about six months. Bailey made the same point from the other side: a traditional adaptation of Fangirl Down might take four or five years, and she wondered whether readers would still care by then.

That’s a genuine advantage over film and TV, where most optioned books are never made. Molly Cusick, director of licensing at Crazy Maple Studio (ReelShort’s parent), put it plainly: “So many things get optioned; very few things ever get made.” She also gave two numbers worth noting. One author ReelShort previously adapted saw book sales rise eightfold month over month after the series came out, and ReelShort, she said, has “70 million eyeballs to offer authors,” with little overlap between BookTok readers and vertical drama viewers. We can’t verify the sales figure independently, and neither the author nor the book was named, so treat it as the company’s claim.

Our read is that this flips the usual licensing relationship. Romance authors don’t need ReelShort for prestige; they need it for reach into an audience that doesn’t already buy their books. ReelShort, in turn, gets a story with a proven fan base and a name it can market, instead of a translated web novel no one in the U.S. has heard of.

Why sports romance, specifically

TheWrap reports that ReelShort approached Bailey specifically for the sports series because the genre has “performed consistently” for the app. Our chart backs that up. When we counted the sports titles on the October 29 Vertical 52, six of the 52 shows were built around a sport, and they averaged a higher VertiScore than the chart as a whole.

Two ReelShort titles make the case best. How to Dump a Hockey Star came onto the chart at #11 with 213.9 million views and about 1.88 million saves on its official ReelShort page. It was released in May 2025, more than 17 months ago, and it was still sitting at #9 on ReelShort’s own TOP shelf when we took our snapshot. That kind of shelf life is rare. Most shows fade within weeks.

The other is Worth the Chase, ReelShort’s football romance adapted from Wattpad, which debuted right behind it at #12. It had 9.3 million views and 132,475 saves when we measured it, and it held the #1 spot on ReelShort’s TOP shelf. Hockey also shows up in the app’s misses, though. The Hockey Captain That Hates Me dropped off our chart in the October 29 update after slipping from #42. A sport on the poster isn’t a guarantee.

What our data says about adapted books so far

ReelShort has adapted outside books before. Sierra Simone’s Lyonesse trilogy, starring Nico Tortorella, streamed in full in September, and the Wattpad partnership has produced Just One Kiss and Worth the Chase. The Bailey deal is a step up, since it’s the app going after a traditionally published bestseller rather than a reading-app hit, but the Wattpad shows are the closest test we have of how existing fan bases translate.

The results are mixed in an instructive way. The number we watch most closely is the save rate, the share of viewers who bookmark a show to come back to it. Across the 26 ReelShort shows on the October 29 chart, the median save rate is about 0.99%.

• Worth the Chase converts about 1.42% of views into saves, well above that median.
• Just One Kiss converts about 0.69%, well below it. It has 37.9 million views, but it fell from #19 to #35 in our latest update as its score cooled.
• How to Dump a Hockey Star, an original rather than an adaptation, sits at about 0.88%, just under the median, on a far bigger base of views.

Two adaptations aren’t a trend. Still, the pattern fits what Cusick describes: a book with a fan base brings in viewers who already care about the characters, and those viewers seem more likely to bookmark. Whether that holds for a Tessa Bailey story with a much larger readership is exactly what the 2027 releases will show us.

What to watch next

The first checkpoint is the Telly Awards preview on November 10, which should give us a look at casting and production quality. After that, three questions matter:

• Episode count. Bailey’s novels run far longer than a typical web-novel premise. Whether ReelShort compresses each book into a standard 60 to 80 episode run or stretches it will say a lot about how faithful these adaptations can be.
• Who else signs. If authors see the speed Zhang promised, expect more romance novelists to follow. If the shows underperform, this may stay a handful of experiments.
• Book sales. The eightfold claim is the strongest selling point ReelShort has. Publishers will be watching Bailey’s backlist after release to see whether it holds up.

For now, the takeaway is simple. ReelShort is no longer just turning web novels into shows; it’s competing for the same romance books Hollywood options, and its advantage is that it can actually ship them. We’ll track both Bailey titles on the Vertical 52 once they’re released. You can see how we score every show on our methodology page.