Since the release of her first novel in 2013, Tessa Bailey published nearly 50 romance novels before the publication of It Happened One Summer. She has published standalone novels as well as several series of her own and in concert with other authors. She has published independently as well as with traditional publishers, and several of her books have reached bestseller lists, making her a prolific and successful hybrid author and a recognizable name in the romance genre.

Her heroes are men of strict integrity, for instance in her Line of Duty, Crossing the Line, and Academy series, which feature heroes who are police officers or police officers in training in Chicago and New York City. Many of her heroines are experiencing upheavals in their life, like the leads from the Hot and Hammered trilogy. She also enjoys writing heroines who create upheaval in the orderly lives of their heroes, for instance in the Girl series, and her Romancing the Clarkson series also tells the love stories of a set of siblings.

Bailey experiments broadly with tropes like the marriage of convenience and girl-next-door setups, and she also enjoys writing relationships between characters of very different socioeconomic backgrounds.