Don't Be Dr. Frankenstein
How Comp Titles are More Than the Sum of Their Parts
Friends,
It’s time to talk about comps. <Wilhelm scream> AKA comparable titles. Did you just shiver in fear? It’s not just spooky season! Everyone is afraid of comps.
As I read your queries—slowly but surely!—I am realizing that how I use comps and you use comps are not the same. Even in all my thinking and talking about comps before, I didn’t make this connection. I’ll explain it here:
What is a comp title?
If you are querying or otherwise pitching a book to a reader, whether that reader is a consumer who will buy your book directly or an agent or editor, a comp title is a book that’s similar to yours in an easily digestible, mostly obvious way. You might say for fans of The Prince Bride because your book is a bit of a goofy fantasy romp. Or you might say it’s Die Hard, but for kids. A comp title can be a book, a movie, a TV show, a play—any highly recognizable piece of culture. RHONY but with gerbils. Phantom of the Opera meets Mean Girls. (Everyone’s favorite comp) My Year of Rest and Relaxation but set in Victorian England. It can be formatted as this meets that or for fans of X. That part doesn’t matter. Your goal here is VIBES. Your goal here is broad strokes. Your goal here is to give the reader an idea of the flavor of your book, not the recipe. This is comps as a vehicle to PITCH your book.
I know, I know. All that stuff is about novels. What if you’re writing non-fiction? You, friend, are the Venn diagram between how fiction writers use comps and how agents/editors use comps. When you use comps in a non-fiction query letter or book proposal, you are saying lots of people bought these other books so they will also buy mine. But how do you know what books sold a lot of copies? You don’t! Unless you have a pricey subscription to proprietary point of sale recording software, you do not know how many books any specific title has sold! But let me jump ahead for a second.
What is a comp title? (part deux)
When you are an agent or an editor, whether the book is non-fiction or fiction, you are looking for comps that will say to an editor lots of people bought these other books so they will also buy this one I’m sending you right now. OH, and ~~Vibes~~. Agents say this to editors when they pitch a book so that, yes, they can communicate the book’s vibes, but also so that the agent can hand feed them favorable comps that editors can then plug into their P&Ls1 so that the magical numbers will land in the author’s favor. All these numbers are highly magical but we don’t have time to get into that right now. Editors and some agents have access to approximate sales data through the aforementioned proprietary point of sales recording software, and/or the editor’s own internal publishing house data. As an agent, the comps I come up with for/with my clients hinge a lot of sales, but also communicate vibes.
This is an inexact science to say the least! Are fiction consumer sales highly subjective and specific to each consumer? Yes! Are there still buying patterns that publishers can (mostly sorta) identify? Also, yes! As I said, this is an inexact science. But editors need those comps to put into their P&Ls to come up with an offer, as well as vibes-y comps to use when they pitch the book to their boss/marketing/sales/etc team. Those may or may not be the same books!
With non-fiction, though, the process is more difficult. Comps for non-fiction have to be immaculate. If you have too many pretty-good-selling comps, and it might look like the market is saturated already. Not enough comps could mean the topic is unrepresented or no one wants a book about that. If you only have comps from +7 years ago, it could mean the time has passed for this topic and it’s too soon for it to come around again. List too many very recent comps and it may look like you’re late to the game. Don’t despair! I know it sounds impossible to come up with comps if you are writing non-fiction! Or fiction even! Keep reading.
How do you come up with comps if you are not an agent or editor?
You do the best you can. Focus on how you would persuade your best friend to read a book, using other books/media as points of reference. Agents and editors know you only have so much access and familiarity to the information you need. That doesn’t mean you can half ass it. But industry professionals are prepared to help you with this part. They are also not going to evaluate your work on comps alone.
Go to the bookstore and library. Search online book retailers and Google Books. Talk to your librarian. You might even be able to chat with them online! What books are out there already? When did they come out? What did reviewers say about them? Do any have 4373 reviews on Amazon? That’s a good sign. Were any self-published? That’s not a good sign.2 You’re going to do the best you can and try to get the most effective comps you can. (Notice I didn’t say perfect or correct.) I know you can do it.
You aren’t, however, going to be Dr. Frankenstein when it comes to comps, whether it’s for pitching or for sales. Avoid saying your book has the brains of Cloud Atlas and the heart of The Notebook and the soul of Stephen King’s The Body. I…don’t know what that means??????? If you try to cram too many comps together you’ll end up with a lifeless monster. Pare it back some, keep it simple, and you’ll find more success.
Further you aren’t going to comp your book to THE BIGGEST BOOKS IN THE WORLD. Your Harry Potters and Twilights and Fifty Shades and Catchers in the Rye and Atomic Habits and all of Malcolm Gladwell and Brene Brown and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. It’s not because it’s sacrilege or boasting to do so. It’s not because you are claiming you’re as good as or better than these iconic, best selling, outlier books. It’s because they’re outliers (cf, Malcom Gladwell). They’re weirdos. Most books do not sell like that! Yours probably won’t either! Neither will mine! Comping your book to these isn’t wrong—it’s just ineffective. Agents and editors will just ignore them.
This is how I think about comps for real.
When I’m reading a query, or even back cover copy of a published book, and I see comps, I read them, see if I even know which cultural touchstones they’re referencing, usually think huh, and keep reading. Sometimes a particularly good comp will get me excited, but I get excited about a book/query because of many other things that are not comps. If you do not have earthshatteringly good comps, you still have plenty of chances to catch a readers’ eye.
In non-fiction, it’s a little different. If I don’t know the genre that well, I might google the comps, get an idea of what the reviews looked like, who published it and when, and sometimes that can dictate how excited I get about a potential project. I’ll still keep reading (as non-fiction authors don’t always present comps in the query). It could be that this author is barking up the wrong tree with her comps and I know some much better ones. It could be that the comps aren’t great, but the idea very much is! I won’t know until I look at the whole picture, the whole query/sample/proposal/book/whatever. It’s not comps or nothing.
As you can see, my reactions aren’t see bad comps and reject it instantly or See good comps and sign up the author immediately. They are one piece of the puzzle. One tool. One piece of the monster.
My goal here is to demystify comps for you slightly, to give you an idea of how agents and editors use them so that you may more effectively choose yours and to but your primal fear of comps to rest. I hope I did that. I hope all your comps animate your books and give them life.3
Spookily yours,
Kate
Profit and Loss Statements: the thing that spits out numbers that become an advance offer
No shade to indie authors. Self-published books just aren’t relevant for traditional publishing comp titles. Unless, of course, it’s YOUR self-published book and you sold a TON and you’re looking to go trad. Then the comp is yourself! lol
See what I did there?????????? That one was for you, Cristin.
Best rational explanation I've read about comps. "Vibes" might still equate to gut-feel divinations, but at least you mentioned POS and other data. Still a struggle to see how genre breakers make it into acquisition (="super-vibes"?) but at least it's a solid grounding on trying to get it right.
In the admittedly very niche field of European royal history (Romanovs, Bonapartes, Queen Victoria's family, etc.), one of the frustrations for authors and resders in recent years has been the unwillingness of agents and editors to take a risk on almost anything remotely out of the box. Established authors, successful in the field, have great ideas for a biography of an overlooked figure or a new angle on something, but instead we just get the gazillionth book on Queen Victoria or Anastasia and her sisters or Edward VIII that offers nothing new.
Same in other historical periods: All those redundant Tudor books and pointless Lincoln and Churchill biographies when we are already blessed with excellent ones in abundance, and historians querying ideas that get rejected for being too risky. I guess it's sound business but as both a reader and potential writer I wish industry pros would be a little bolder sometimes in the historical non-fiction space.