Recently, I’ve seen lots of fretting and fighting about comp titles. I get why authors stress about them. Querying in general is an awful and anxious experience. In my view, authors stress about comp titles a bit more than they probably need to. And there is confusion about how comp titles work in part because there are different kinds of comp titles at different stages of publishing that serve different functions. So, I thought I’d write a short explainer post on comp titles. This is probably a boring subject if you aren’t a querying or submitting author, so feel free to skip this post.
I assume anyone reading this knows what a comp titles is, but if not they’re “comparison titles” used to pitch a book. You know the ones. “It’s like if To the Lighthouse and The Dark Tower had a baby” or “It’s The Girl on the Train meets The Woman in the Window with a dash of There Was An Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.” Basically, the elevator pitch for a book.
There are plenty of correct critiques about the use of comp titles, especially how they reinforce market trends—whatever is selling now will sell for forever right? (Nope)—and hurt marginalized authors. If an editor can’t find a good comp title for book—“books by X identity authors in Y genre haven’t sold well recently”—then it makes it easier to pass. So, comp titles can cause problems. I have no stake in defending their use. I don’t work in the publishing side of books at all. But comp titles are not going away and I’m writing this as an explainer post from the POV of an author.
I will say a (POC FWIW) publishing professional told me their DEI team had spent a long time trying to come up with an alternative to comp titles because of these aforementioned problems and they failed to find anything that worked as well without similar problems. They also explained the dependency on comp titles in a way I found useful: “It’s the lingua franca of publishing, the way that different departments can speak to each other.” Think of it this way. When an editor loves and wants to buy a book, they have to pitch it to the other departments—sales, marketing, publicity, etc.—who do not have time to read every single book that might be acquired. Comp titles are a shorthand that let others sign off on a title and envision how the book can be sold.
The Different Types of Comps
Last week, I saw authors upset to hear an editor say comp titles should be from the last two-three years. They’d assumed five or so years was fine. A few accused this editor of a conspiracy to “juice sales of their recent titles” which… I think probably overestimates what percentage of book purchases are from currently querying authors. It’s not a conspiracy. Editors want the last couple years because the publishing market changes quickly. Today, Romantasy is the hottest genre yet few even used that term five years ago. Five years from now, the trend might have burst. Four years ago was the middle of COVID lockdown, a very different time for what sold or didn’t. Etc.
But I also think the editor in this scenario was likely discussing a different type of comp title than the authors. We could perhaps separate comps this way:
Query comps (authors pitching to agents)
Submission comps (agents pitching to editors)
Acquisition comps (editors pitching to the rest of publishing team)
Sales comps (used internally by publishers)
Publicity/marketing comps (pitched to readers)
These each have different purposes and constraints. They can overlap or not. While this may sound dispiritingly confusing, remember that you, the writer, are only responsible for (1). That’s it! It’s your agent’s job to come up with their submission comps and you won’t even see (3) and (4). Perhaps you’ll be asked to weigh in on (5), but at that point you’ve sold the book and have a team behind you. (Unless you are self-publishing. Then you are the de facto editor, publicist, and marketer too.)
So, don’t stress too much. I’ll discuss the important writer comp (1) below, but let me briefly describe the others.
Submission comps: Here, your agent—probably with your input—is trying to entice editors and help them see the sales potential for the book. These comps are popular titles within your genre/style/subject matter from the last few years. This is the pie-in-the-sky, best-case-scenario pitch… although it’s important to not go too overboard. If the pitch is “this is the #1 breakout bestseller meets the #2 and #3 bestseller!” then everyone will roll their eyes. But again, this is your agent’s job.
Acquisition comps: If an editor likes your book, they typically have to pitch it to the rest of the publishing team and get approval for how much money they can offer. This $ amount is based at least in part on what the publisher thinks they can sell. These comps follow the same constraints as (2) except, while still optimistic, they’re more realistic than the agent’s pie-in-the-sky pitch.
As a writer, you won’t see these, so no point in stressing them.
Sales comps: After acquiring a book, some publishers use an internal comp as a guide to sales expectations and marketing campaigns. This type of comp title has the most constraints. First off, it is one of the publisher’s own titles from the last two or three years. Secondly, this comp isn’t about the literary content as much as the publishing plan and internal positioning. E.g., a trade paperback YA debut from a social media influencer would be ideally comped to another trade paperback YA debut from a social media influencer. It’s about giving the sales, marketing, and publicity teams a guideline for selling your book. “Here’s how we successfully sold a similar book before.” Etc.
Again, as a writer you won’t see these. Probably best not to think about them at all.
Publicity/marketing comps: Think of what is written on the back cover copy or how a publisher or author might tweet about the book. There are no real constraints here. This is about what entices readers. Readers do not care if the back cover copy comps to a book from 4+ years ago or whether they comp to a paperback original when the novel is a hardcover. This is just about selling and giving the reader the “vibe” of the book.
Hopefully you can see how these comps don’t necessarily overlap. Publicity material can easily comp you to books from many years ago or even things that aren’t books, like video games or movies. It’s Lord of the Rings meets Minecraft, an epic fantasy for Gen Z gamers! Those comps would be completely useless for the publisher’s sales team trying to figure out how to sell a book and in the current marketplace.
The main thing from an author’s POV is to remember you don’t have to worry about all this! It’s other people’s jobs.
The One Type of a Comp Authors Are Responsible For
This post is aimed at writers, so what about the one set of comps you are responsible for without any other help. Namely, the comps you use to pitch your book to agents.
The first mistake I see authors make is fretting that comp titles have to be identical to their books. You see comments like “It’s impossible for me to find comp titles! No one has written an anti-capitalist haunted house novel set on a cruise ship with a Norwegian-American female protagonist who has ADHD and two cats!” or whatever it might be. Your comp titles don’t need to hit every single plot point. They don’t even have to be that close. (E.g., you don’t need to find a novel with a Swedish-American narrator on a haunted airplane with dogs.) They only need to give the gist of the book in an elevator pitch format.
I’d suggest using only two titles and thinking of around three big points you want to get across. Should the book be shelved Fantasy or General Fiction? Is the central theme grief or friendship or romance? Does it have strong feminist or queer or working class themes you want to highlight? Is it a satire? Is it historical? Whatever. Then try to have your two comp titles each hit two of those big points.
Beyond getting across the vibe of your book, your comps should have sold well and be from recent history. But I don’t think you have to be as strict as the last two years. The last five is probably fine. Agents understand that you probably don’t have access to BookScan and so won’t know exactly how many copies your comps have sold. In general, you can be much looser with these “rules” at the querying stage. Still, showing you are savvy about the industry and understand the market probably doesn’t hurt. Go to bookstores. Read reviews.
But also… don’t stress this stuff at all until you get to the querying stage. Publishing is a business, but the business side often has little to do with the art side. Write the best book you can in the way that feels true to you without thinking of comps or publicity plans or anything like that. Then, only when it is finished, bothering worrying about this stuff.
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Other works I’ve written or co-edited include Upright Beasts (my story collection), Tiny Nightmares (an anthology of horror fiction), and Tiny Crimes (an anthology of crime fiction).
And one thing I've seen people do mistakenly is comp to titles that they love, but that are not necessarily successful or relevant.
Once someone told me they comped their vampire novel to Certain Dark Things, which is my vampire novel that has enjoyed very little success, because they loved it. As you say, people don't necessarily have access to Bookscan but I think a little bit of research would have shown that book is a rather obscure book and not one of my better known titles.
The other book they comped was something like Dracula, which is way too old and way to seminal in the history of genre fiction. Ultimately, chatting with this person I convinced them to comp to Empire of the Vampire and another title. I think they ended getting a few requests for fulls, although no sales of the manuscript. Though, I will note here vampire fiction has been terribly hard to sell for the past 10 years.
So, you have to be strategic.
As a reader, I find even the most accurate comps offputting when I'm trying to decide on my next book or get a sense of what's out there. I wish there was a way to hide them from book covers and jacket copy. That said, I understand them as a necessary evil, they're by definition reductive, but useful for everyone whose job exists in the space between the author and the reader.