How to Make Comps Work for You
Unfortunately, they're actually useful.
Hello friends,
This month’s regular newsletter is coming a little early, because a special-edition newsletter is coming next Tuesday. You’ll see.
I’m currently teaching a yearlong novel-writing incubator with the MetroWest Writers’ Workshop. In January, we defined our novels’ emotional cores. In February, we’ve been outlining.
As part of the advance work to prep for outlining, I asked my students to come up with a list of “comparative titles,” or “comps.”
Comps are talked about a lot in the querying space. Querying authors are encouraged to include comps in their query letters when seeking agent representation — to say their book is “for fans of X and Y,” or that it’s “A meets B meets C.” For example, “Until Death is for fans of Rachel Harrison, Grady Hendrix, and Mona Awad.” Or this recent deal announcement that pitches a book as “How to Get Away with Murder meets The Hunger Games.”
That last one is all very well for a book that’s already been sold. In that case, the point is to get consumers to buy the book, and consumers already love How to Get Away with Murder and The Hunger Games.
Querying authors, though, are encouraged to comp (a) books (as opposed to movies or TV shows) and (b) books from the last few years specifically. This is because the audience of a querying author is not the consumer but the agent. And you are trying to convince the agent that he or she can sell your book to an editor. So the point of comps is to show the agent that a bunch of similar-ish books have sold in the past few years, and therefore s/he can (probably? Hopefully?) sell yours.
The book I queried before Until Death was tentatively titled Blood on the Ice. (If I ever return to it, I plan to re-title it either Served Cold or Childless Cat Lady.) I comped it as “Godzilla vs. Kong meets Ling Ma’s Severance,” and I got a bunch of bites but no agent with it. After I recovered, I considered the rejections I’d received, which all talked about the book’s “commercial potential” — something about the book clearly felt commercial, and also, Godzilla vs. Kong meets Ling Ma’s Severance sounds dope — but they added that they “didn’t have a vision for it in the current market.”
And it dawned on me that part of my problem was, I had been thinking about comps wrong. I had been thinking that an agent would say, “Ooh, this book sounds neat, therefore the reading public will want to buy it, therefore I can sell it.” But the consumer is too far downstream.
Blood on the Ice hadn’t fit neatly in either the weird-girl-fiction space or the hard-sci-fi space. It was a good book; I still believe this. But it kicked off with a very sci-fi setting and then slithered into a sort of interior, feminine headspace. It was too sci-fi to sit next to the weird-girl lit and too… upmarket, I guess, to sit in sci-fi. And then the main plot was mostly thriller. Where was anyone supposed to shelve it? What editor was anyone supposed to sell it to?
I now believe the point of comps is to tell an agent, with confidence, Here’s where they’re going to shelve this book at Barnes & Noble after you sell it. Right between X and Y. And so you should pitch it to the editors who buy those kinds of books.
But here’s the thing: You want that to be true.
So you should look at your comps before you write the book.
Here’s the assignment I gave my students.
Develop a list of comparative titles (a.k.a. “comps”) for your book. Where do you see your book sitting on the shelf, and what books are next to it? Pick at least three books, preferably five, preferably published within the last few years. Then, make a list of everything these books have in common. Be as lengthy and detailed as you can. Consider:
Point of View: Are your comps all/mostly in first person or third person?
Verb Tense: Are your comps all/mostly told in present tense or past tense?
Length: Do all your comps seem to be about the same length in terms of word count? How long is that?
Number of protagonists: Do they all/mostly have just one protagonist, two protagonists, or more? If more, how many? Do all of these protagonists get similar page time, or is one person clearly the main event? If the latter, is it a similar character every time?
Genre conventions: What else do all of these books have in common? Do they all have twenty-something women as their protagonists? Do they all take place in outer space, or in the Cotswolds? Are they all portal fantasies or fairy tale retellings? Etc.
And then… your book should match.
By the way. I personally believe the market does crave — and reward! — literature that feels fresh and visceral and individual and offbeat. So I don’t think of this as “selling out” or even “writing to market.” I think of it as “Trojan Horse-ing my weird shit.”
News
Until Death — my debut horror novel about the wedding industrial complex, releasing May 19 from Little, Brown, and, yes indeed, perfect for fans of Rachel Harrison, Grady Hendrix, and Mona Awad — is featured in CrimeReads’s 27 New and Upcoming Horror Novels To Look Out For In 2026!
The wedding industry is, obviously, the perfect venue for horror, and this tongue-in-cheek take on the nightmare of planning a memorable union makes the most of this natural affinity. I won’t spoil the novel’s many delicious surprises, but rest assured, this one makes for incredibly satisfying reading.
🎉🎉🎉, also 👰, also 💀.
I’m also very pleased and excited to be a member of the Debutante Ball’s class of 2026. There are seven of us releasing throughout the year, and the first of us, Samantha Chong, is debuting in March with PRODIGAL TIGER, a YA fantasy that’s gotten a starred review from Booklist! We’ll be documenting our journeys on Substack and Instagram — subscribe & follow to follow along, if you like.
And, of course:
This is a helpful way to think about it! Comps make me bristle a little because it does feel so commercial, but it’s smart to be able to tell an agent or editor what my book’s shelf-neighbors would be. I’m gonna steal your writing exercise