Create Your Comp List
Finding Your Manuscript’s Best Friends and Fiercest Foes
Well, well, well. Here we are at the close of January, you and I. The days are short, the weather is unpleasant, and we still have all of February to get through before we can catch a glimpse of better days ahead. Listen, I’m not a fan of February. Not to be monthist, but February is the absolute worst. The silver lining for you, though, is that the shortest month still brings you four Tuesdays and four Thursdays—eight Shelf Life articles. I’m already putting together that list of February topics. By this time next month we’ll be looking ahead to spring. Personally, I can’t wait.
Anyway, you wrote an entire manuscript and you’re thinking about putting together a query letter so you can sell it. Or, you’re working on writing your manuscript but you want to get ahead of the game and make sure you know your comps inside and out so you can benchmark as you go and make sure you’ve got everything they’ve got—and then a little bit more. (If you think that sounds like a silly way to write a book then you probably haven’t written nonfiction!)
Either way, it’s time to figure out who your comps are. Or not! I’m not the boss of you. You can be whatever you wanna do. See if I care.
You may notice that much of the information in today’s article hearkens back to my October article on Finding Your Audience. This is no coincidence; in fact, a lot of the text you’re reading today was clipped directly from that earlier piece while I was writing it. Thinking about comps comes from the same place as thinking about audience—the place inside the back of your mind that is thinking about sharing your work with the world. As I discussed in the previous article, you might feel that writing with your audience in mind impairs the purity of your writing. Or maybe you see inherent value in considering your audience as you write. Your opinion on the matter may affect when you want to start thinking about your comps. But if you want to sell a manuscript, sooner or later you’re going to have to think about comps.
Knowing your top three comps—your comparison titles—is crucial for preparing your query letter or book proposal. Agents and authors want to have a sense of what books out there are most like yours and they want you to do that research for them. If they’re interested in your book based on your query or proposal, they’ll be checking for themselves to make sure you made an accurate assessment. But right up front, as they’re scanning your query letter for information about the manuscript you’re asking them to read, they’ll be looking for some names they recognize.
What if I pick comps and the agent I queried doesn’t recognize them? Then you picked the wrong comps or the wrong agent. Agents know their business. If you’re pitching someone a book that’s within the universe of what they sign and sell, then they know the other titles out there in that space. As long as you’re not picking a self-published title that sold thirty copies—if you do that, yeah, you’ll have a hard time. Don’t worry! I’ll help you not pick that book.
There are some quick rules of thumb to remember when choosing your comps, and I’ll go over them. Then, we’ll take a deep dive into how to branch out from a starting point to find and choose a solid list of comps.
One quick note before we start: If you hear someone talking about “comp copies” or “author comps,” that’s something else. They mean complimentary copies, the free copies of a book that go out to authors and other service providers who worked on a book. Totally unrelated.
General Comp Guidance
Cool, let’s pick some comps. You wrote a magical boarding school fantasy with vampires. That’s Harry Potter meets Twilight and we’re done, right?
The first rule of comp selection is: Don’t choose the best-selling runaway phenomenon of all time as your comp. It’s not realistic and it demonstrates that your understanding of the business and your ability to critically judge your own manuscript aren’t well developed. If you have, indeed, written the next Harry Potter or the next Twilight, an agent is likely to see that potential coming a mile away. Every agent has their eyes peeled for the next breakout hit. They’re actively looking for it.
Choosing Harry Potter as one of your comps suggests that you don’t have a good sense of the genre landscape. Do you have any idea how many magical boarding school books and series are out there? If this is the area you’re writing in, if magical boarding school is your thing, you should not have trouble naming a dozen off the top of your head. Don’t leave your prospective agent room to wonder if Harry Potter is the only one you know.
Next, make sure your comp appeals to the same demographic as your book is intended to sell to. Harry Potter might be the biggest thing ever in magical boarding schools, but it’s not intended for the same demographic as, for instance, Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead or The Magicians by Lev Grossman or The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, all of which are set in magical boarding schools. If you’re writing for primarily girls instead of primarily boys or boys and girls together; or if you’re writing for new adults/adults; or if you’re writing for adult high fantasy fans with a bit of magical boarding school thrown in, then Harry Potter is not your correct comp—even if it weren’t for rule one above.
Choose a comp that didn’t flop. You’ll see a lot of advice out there about what makes a book unsuccessful before it publishes—how to make your book successful from a writing angle. But how can you tell if a book was successful or unsuccessful after it’s published? Catherine already told you not to choose a runaway bestseller, how else are you supposed to tell how successful a book is without its sales numbers?
See how your comp is doing after it’s been out for a year or more. What’s the sales rank like on Amazon? Top 100 in a major category? Top 500? Top 10 but in an obscure category? Use your judgment. There are industry sales tools out there like Nielsen BookScan or Bookstat, but they’re not free or readily accessible. You’ll just have to do the Google-fu.
Check potential comps to see if they charted on any of the various bestseller lists out there. While I cautioned you not to choose a runaway phenomenon, I didn’t say don’t choose a bestseller—those are two very different things. A book that hit one or a few bestseller lists (even if it didn’t make it to the top ten), a book that has been rereleased after a few years with a new cover or a foreword, a book whose author went on to sell future manuscripts to major publishers—those are signs that a book did well.
If you’re pitching to an agent or editor, it’s also wise to choose comps that were published by a traditional publisher. Big or small, independent or corporate-owned, doesn’t matter—but I suggest you don’t cite something that was self-published or published by a vanity press. An exception to this would be something that was self-published but over time achieved major sales and critical acclaim (eg, Wool by Hugh Howey or The Martian by Andy Weir).
This isn’t to say self-published books are never good—they often are—but gauging their sales figures can be challenging. A free, self-published book on Kindle can zoom right to the top of the sales ranks for a little while when the author pays Amazon for some promotion. That can fool you into thinking the book was successful when it was nothing of the kind—but it won’t fool an agent. (Need help figuring out if a publisher is a vanity press? I got you covered.)
Comp Collection, Comp Collation
So how do you go about rounding up some perfect comp candidates so you can check them against the above list and see if they make the cut? Well, you’re writing something you would like to read, right? It follows that people who have enjoyed other types of things that you like, will also like what you’re creating. For instance, my favorite book is Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor. If I were setting out to write something similar, that would be my first idea for a comp. To find more comps, the first thing I’d try to figure out about it is: Who else likes this book as much as I do?
A great starting point is Goodreads, where I can look it up, scroll down to the reviews, and then filter ratings down to the more than 123,500 other folks who have rated it 5 stars. More than 300,000 Goodreads users have given it a rating, and there are more than 29,000 reviews. That’s a whole lot of people whose reading habits and preferences would be very valuable for me to know.
(If you’re a member of Goodreads, you can also see which of your friends have read it, and if they’re good about rating their reads, you can see which of your friends enjoyed it. You might have a potential beta reader among them.)
Another good spot is that Large Internet Book Retailer™ where we were cruising sales ranks a few minutes ago. Daughter of Smoke and Bone has got almost 2,500 ratings, and more than 2,000 reviews. Between just these two sites, there are a lot of robust data just for the taking on people who love this book.
If someone has reviewed my comp at Amazon or Goodreads, I can click through and see what other books they have reviewed. I can look for other titles they have rated highly, and then read the reviews they’ve written on those books. Let’s say my comp choice is close to what I’ve written, but I’ve come at the story from a different angle—maybe I have a focus on queer characters, or characters with disabilities, or I’ve written for a slightly older or younger audience. I can start combing through the books that these folks loved (and spot other folks who loved the same books, and iterate outward like that) to find books that might be an even closer fit for my manuscript. And then I can take that new title back to the top of this article to assess its sales history to the best of my ability and it’s fitness as a comp otherwise.
While you’re at this—if you see a prolific reviewer on Goodreads who has five-starred and reviewed all your comps? Write that name down. That’s someone who might do you the kindness of reviewing your book down the line when it’s time to start sending out ARCs (advance reader copies).
(This branching process is also a great way to find new books to read, by the way, if you don’t have a manuscript handy that you’re seeking comps for.)
So now you’ve got your manuscript and you’ve got a robust list of good potential comps. You’ve run them all through the general comp guidance above and they fit the bill: Moderate to major sellers but not industry-breaking, once-in-a-generation event titles; that appeal to the same demographic as your manuscript; and that came out of reputable publishing houses. Last step. You’ve got to narrow it down to just three.
Here is where the power of the spreadsheet comes in handy (a hand-drawn chart in your journal would also do nicely). Down the first column, make a list of all the attributes of your book that you can come up with. If I were doing Daughter of Smoke and Bone, as though it were my own manuscript, my list might read: YA; woman-driven; fantasy; high fantasy; urban fantasy; romance; suspense; paranormal; supernatural; monsters; angels; mythology; Europe; art school; adventure; mystery; dark; emotional; plot-driven; medium-pace; age 14 to 17; descriptive writing; lyrical writing. I could go on. (I got many of these terms from the entries for this book on Goodreads, theStoryGraph, and my Novelist account through my local library.)
Next, across the columns at the top, list out all your potential comps. Then, for each potential comp, review whether it is similar to your book on each characteristic. You might want to do a simple yes/no (matches or doesn’t match), or a red-yellow-green (not at all, kinda, definitely); or a numerical rating system to measure similarity. Once your chart is filled in, you’ll have a great sense of which books are most similar to yours.
Haven’t read all of them yet? That’s okay! If you want to put something on your final list of three comps that go into your query letter, it’s probably a good idea to have read it. Otherwise, you don’t have to have read every single book out there in the world that is similar to the one you’re writing. You should, though, have an excellent sense of the landscape of books out there in the world that are like yours—before you start pitching.
The time draws near, friends. Do you know which fateful day I mean? The day we wait for all year, when we gather around nachos and pigs-in-blankets with all of our favorite owls from the prior year and line them up and pit them against one another’s owls to determine which one is the very best: The Superb Owl. I’m just kidding I know it’s about pirates this year. Birds were so three years ago. What does the season finale of football have to do with Shelf Life? Maybe more than you think! I’ve been saving up a metaphorical sportical article for you and I’ll punt it to you next week, or however you get a football from one person to another, I don’t know, possibly a stick with a net on it, whatever, I’m going to bed.
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