Welcome back to another blog, friends! Today, I’m diving into comparable titles, more commonly called “comps.” I’ll explore what they are, why you need them, how to find them, what you do with your comps, and common problems we as authors run into with comps.
If you prefer video, I’ve got you covered:
As always, I’m sharing what I’ve learned on my journey as an author trying to get traditionally published, which means I’m querying literary agents.
What are comparable titles?
A comparable title, or comp, is a book that’s similar to yours that helps agents, editors, and publishers understand where your book fits in the market.
For example, for the adult paranormal horror that I’m currently querying, Chasing Ghosts, one of my comps is The Haunting of Velkwood by Gwendolyn Kiste.
You typically want two or three comps, and they go in your query letter. We’ll talk about what this might look like in a minute, so keep reading.
Why do you need comps?
There are a couple of reasons.
The first is that agents—and publishers, if you’re querying them directly—ask for comps. Again, they want to know where in the market your book fits. We need these professionals to be able to determine if our books have a place in the market so that they will feel more confident that they can sell them. If they think they can sell your book, you’re in good shape.
The second reason is just as important, and this is the part that I didn’t really embrace until recently. You need comps to help you write the right story, better.
Again, I’m speaking as an author trying to get an agent, but I would argue that this is important for any author who wants to sell books, whether traditionally published or self-published. You have to know where you fit in the market because knowing that information will help you determine that there is indeed a hungry audience for your book.
Let’s say, as a completely hypothetical example, that I write a sci-fi, fantasy, western, romance, gothic mashup about an alien king who falls in love with a Denny’s waitress. The story might be brilliant, but if it doesn’t have a spot in the market next to books that are somewhat similar, it’s all a moot point.
I’m noodling on new ideas for my next book, and whereas in the past, I wrote my manuscripts and then looked for comps to include in my query letter, this time, I’m looking at possible comps first to better understand these various sub-markets and what’s selling in them.
That brings me to my next point.
How do you find comps?
There are many ways.
I poke around Google, Amazon, Goodreads, and Publishers Marketplace to find recent books similar to what I wrote, or in the case of my next project, what I’m considering writing. I will search a variety of terms. For example, for my next book, I don’t want to write another straight-up fantasy. I’m considering what could be considered a paranormal romance, occult, magical realism, dark romance, Gothic romance… so these are the search terms I’m playing around with.
ChatGPT is another great way to find comps. I know, I know. We’re not supposed to use AI.
I refuse to use AI to create anything, but that’s not what I’m talking about in the case of comparable titles. Rather, I’m talking about using AI for research. This is one use of AI I am totally okay with because it has allowed me to get so hyper-specific when trying to find comps, and it works—in some cases, much better than a search engine like Google.
I will sometimes buy and read these books. I think that’s a great idea and super helpful. Other times, I just read summaries and reviews.
Be open to playing around with your searches and maybe getting more specific. It might take some trial and error, so if you don’t find anything right away, don’t panic.
We’re going to revisit this idea in a moment, but what you’re looking for in a comp is something significant that your book also has. If your book has any tropes, like an enemies-to-lovers romance, you might look for that in a comp. If your book is a ghost story that takes place in 1950s New Orleans, there is definitely a comparable title with those same elements.
Because we use comps to demonstrate to agents and publishers that there is a place in the market for our books, you want to choose comps that are more recent. I’ve seen a lot of agents say to stick to comps that were published within the last five years. (This was a mistake I made in the past! I used comps that were much older.)
I’m seeing this as kind of a growing trend: authors using movies, TV shows, and songs as comps. From the research I’ve done, the consensus seems to be that it’s okay to throw in one movie, or show, or song, but that the focus should still be on books, since that is what we’re all trying to sell. So if it were me, I would probably do two books, and one “extra”—a song, movie, etc.
Once you have your comps, what do you do with them?
Aside from using them to write better, you put them in your query letter. There are infinite ways you could word this, but here’s one way I do it. My query letter opens with:
Fans of the small-town setting of Come With Me (Ronald Malfi, 2021) and the deadly secrets of the past in The Haunting of Velkwood (Gwendolyn Kiste, 2024) will enjoy CHASING GHOSTS, an adult paranormal horror, complete at 76,000 words.
There are a couple of things here that I want to call out.
- I specified what the similarity is. In the case of Come With Me, it’s the setting. I call out why my book is similar to that comp. We’ll come back to this in a minute.
- I include the author and the year. This makes the comp more identifiable and also confirms that it’s recent.
Problems authors commonly run into when looking for comps
One thing a lot of authors say is, “I can’t find any books that are similar to my own!”
Here’s the good news. It’s very likely you’re not looking hard enough, or you’re looking in the wrong way or in the wrong places, which means there are comps out there. (Yay!)
A comp is not a book that’s exactly the same as yours. That would probably be a red flag, actually. Rather, a comparable title is simply similar to your book in some way.
Now, that similarity does need to be something bigger. For instance, you don’t want to use a book as a comp because the female protagonist has blond hair, and your female protagonist also has blond hair. That doesn’t tell agents anything about where your book fits in the market.
Let’s go back to one of my comps, Come With Me. I call out that my book has a similar setting. What it shares in common with The Haunting of Velkwood is that my book involves going back into the past to uncover and explore secrets that led to death.
My book is not Come With Me. It’s not The Haunting of Velkwood. They just have something big in common, and they are in very similar genres.
That’s another thing. In the past, I’ve wondered if you can pick a comp that has something in common with your book, even if it’s a different genre. Ultimately, I settled on no, I wouldn’t do that, because one trick to finding comps is to imagine where your book would sit on the shelves of bookstores. What books would be next to it?
The answer? Books in your genre.
I can’t imagine that the small-town setting of Come With Me would be relevant if that book were a rom-com.
So, hopefully that eases some of the pressure. You don’t want or need a book identical to your own. You want a comp that has something significant in common.
The second common problem is the same thing, but for different reasons. Some authors say, “My book is so original that there are no comps.”
- You’re probably wrong.
- This is not the flex you think it is.
I’m going to reiterate that I am speaking to authors like me who want to sell books. If you’re writing purely to write and don’t care about agents or publishers or sales, this isn’t for you.
Otherwise, if you wrote a book that you truly believe has no comps, you likely wrote a book that won’t sell. Comps ideally prove that a book has an audience. Comps demonstrate that something similar to what you wrote has been done and tested, and succeeded.
It is not a good thing that you can’t find comps. But again, I feel like more than likely, there are comps out there. So few ideas, if any, are 100% original these days. So few plots are truly original. What’s original is the spin that we put on already-written ideas.
This is not a bad thing, by the way.
I’ve heard this from agents a zillion times. If you put in your query letter that you don’t have comps because nobody has ever done what you’ve done, they will immediately pass. Bye-bye.
We should all want comps. We should love comps. Embrace comps. Comps are good.
Comps are your friends
As recently as the book I’m currently querying, comps were something I rushed through and just generally didn’t give enough attention. But now, I’m a little obsessed with them because I finally understand how instrumental they can be as a tool to write a better book and pitch it better.
I’ve heard several authors say that they hate having to pay attention to comps because it makes them feel like they’re letting the market and the industry dictate what they write, as opposed to writing what they love.
Personally, I disagree, although I see where they’re coming from. I think there is more than enough room to write a book that you know fits somewhere in the market, but it’s still your story, the one you want to write.
There’s room for both things to be true.
Thanks for reading!