With the holiday season in high gear, people around the world are counting the days until Christmas, often keeping track on an advent calendar. The tradition of opening a numbered door, window, or flap on a rectangular board or card to reveal a surprise on each of the first 25 days of December began in 19th-century Germany by Lutherans observing the Christian season of Advent. What started with open-the-flap calendars featuring religious imagery and wintry scenes has since been more broadly and secularly embraced. But what if young readers could have that same countdown experience within a book? Now they can, with a raft of advent calendar-inspired books featuring open-a-chapter-a-day anticipation.

As soon as Justin Chanda, senior VP and publisher of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers and self-described advent calendar fan, learned of two titles available in an innovative advent novel format—the YA romance A Heart for Christmas by Sophie Jomain, and middle grade novel The Christmas Contest by Maxime Gillio—he knew he wanted to publish them. “A Heart for Christmas was originally published in France, Italy, and Canada in 2024 with a French company called Auzou, which owns the patent on how the paper engineering works,” Chanda said. Each of the book’s 24 chapters is sealed between two pages with a perforated edge that readers can tear open by hand or with a ruler or letter opener. “It sold out in all three countries almost instantly,” he added. That same year, Lucy Pearse, former fiction publisher at S&S Children’s U.K., saw the project at the Frankfurt Book Fair. “She met with the folks at Auzou and said, ‘We want this right now,’ and called me and asked, ‘Would you be interested?’ We made a deal within two days and crashed it onto the list.”

A Heart for Christmas and The Christmas Contest (which was also published internationally first) both hit shelves on September 30 and Chanda notes that the YA title “has really exploded,” landing on bestseller lists and Amazon’s top 100 overall list. He described the marketing effort behind it as twofold. “It’s mostly digital,” he said. “Early on we made videos of how the book works, showing the mechanics of it all, and then we did some other appealing digital assets for people to share and post.” The marketing team then relied on social media influencers to move the campaign forward.

As a bonus, the earlier international editions of A Heart for Christmas have blazed a trail for the S&S titles. “We are helped by the fact that the book has been out for two seasons now, so there are all these other videos from France, from Italy, from Canada, of people enjoying this book, as well as enjoying the next book that Auzou has done, which we’re going to publish next year. It became a viral moment, and it has been exceptional,” he added.”

Middle grade title The Christmas Contest has had a slower start, Chanda said, “because we’re not able to do a lot of the same social media stuff.” But, in November, when the book landed in Walmart and Target, and had a bigger promotion at B&N, “all of a sudden the sales started to pick up,” he noted. “Now that people see it in stores, they’re clamoring for it.”

Plans are to carry the tradition beyond the Christmas season as well. “We’ve signed on wholeheartedly,” Chanda said, noting that the two companies will work in partnership to develop new projects. “Together we’re branching out into other versions of this that are not necessarily related to the holiday,” he added. “Obviously, the advent calendar theme is the real hook, but there are lots of different things you can do with self-contained, serialized novels.”

Ringing in Advent Calendar Books at Clarion

For slightly younger advent calendar fans, Clarion published the illustrated chapter book Jingle, All the Way Home: A Christmas Countdown Story by Catherine Hapka, illustrated by Kathryn Selbert, and The Polar Express: Christmas Countdown Deluxe Set by Chris Van Allsburg, both of which released on September 16. “We couldn’t help but notice the explosion in popularity of advent calendars and how they’ve become such an enduring part of families,” said Bethany Vinhateiro, editorial director at HarperCollins Children’s Books. “Kids really look forward to them and are looking for new ones featuring their favorite characters,” she added, pointing out that advent calendars have already crept into the book space with mini book calendars for the youngest readers. And while the idea of a chapter-a-day concept in a book for independent readers isn’t necessarily new, “Combining it with a Christmas story and the physical practice of opening a sealed chapter to continue that story, gives it that exact kind of anticipation and payoff you feel with a traditional advent calendar,” Vinhateiro said. “I guess the challenge is to not tear into every chapter on December 1!”

In the case of Jingle, All the Way Home, the story came before the format. It adapts Hapka’s 2019 book Santa’s Puppy, in which three kids team up to return Santa’s talking puppy to the North Pole before the end of Christmas Day. “It had the perfect bones because it was already a pacey propulsive caper where you want to know what happens next,” Vinhateiro said. “And Catherine had already written it as 24 chapters, which fit the countdown bill perfectly. We worked together and she did a brilliant revision to adapt it into this younger illustrated form.”

To bring the countdown to life, the Clarion art team and illustrator Selbert developed the fresh format. The in-house designers created pages that are patterned with Selbert’s artwork. “These patterned pages fall between the chapters, and they sandwich each one so it looks like a beautifully wrapped gift or beautiful envelope,” Vinhateiro said. “There’s a simple sticker over the edge of the pages that keeps the chapter sandwiched together until it’s time to open it and reveal a new day’s worth of reading. It took us some trial and error to get there, but it’s really elegant, and easy to use.”

Clarion’s marketing team created an animated video that demonstrates the advent calendar aspect of the book as well as a live-action flip-through video to show how the experience works, according to Vinhateiro. Those visuals are at the heart of a special influencer mailing and additional social media campaigns.

All Aboard for a Polar Express Countdown

Van Allsburg’s Caldecott-winning Polar Express turns 40 years old this year, and Vinhateiro believes families who treasure sharing the book this time of year will prick up their ears for the deluxe gift set. The slipcase package includes a hardcover copy of the book, a pop-out 3-D Christmas tree with 24 ornaments that are printed with activity ideas for every day of the season, and a countdown calendar with slots for the ornaments. “The intention is to use it year after year; it’s very beautifully constructed,” she says. “We’re aiming to have a Christmas countdown book for every reader on your shopping list this year.”

Looking ahead, Clarion, like S&S, has plans to expand the advent calendar format in other directions. “This month, we’re publishing Meet Cute, which is another reissue. It’s a collection of YA romantic short stories, but it’s got beautiful new cover art and new sealed chapters, again, with the wrapping pages. So, there are 14 stories to read from February 1 to 14,” Vinhateiro said. And for Halloween 2026, middle grade readers can look for Bump in the Night, a collection of 13 not-too-scary Halloween sealed stories by Diane Landolf, illustrated by Denis Zilber.

Vinhateiro believes that the advent of more Christmas countdown titles can prove a gift that keeps on giving. “I think a tradition like reading a special book together each day leading up to Christmas can really seal in those cozy family memories. It’s nice that there are so many new advent books coming.”