At this time’s submit is by author, editor, and critic Lisa Levy, whose Killer Comps service is designed to assist writers discover their finest comps.

You’ve been slaving over your question, which could have taken longer than the manuscript. Your lists of brokers within the databases and spreadsheets are all excellent. Even your synopsis appears proper. However you may have been avoiding a crucial factor of your undertaking: comps.

Comps—quick for comparability titles—are current books which have one thing essential in widespread together with your e book. Discovering comps might be probably the most difficult a part of pitching for a lot of writers, and their ambiguity raises anxiousness ranges. How previous is an efficient comp? Does it should be the identical style as my e book? What if there isn’t something I can use that isn’t too previous or obscure?

Squash your anxiousness in case you can and take your comps significantly. There are compelling the explanation why comps depend lots. Comps are your strongest advertising device, and the primary probability it’s a must to place your e book available in the market and on this planet. An agent or editor ought to instantly perceive one thing crucial about your e book based mostly in your comps. They need to make it easier to articulate the place you place your self inside a really aggressive market. They’re publishing shorthand, and it’s best to communicate fluent publishing while you enter the question trenches.

Major comps, secondary comps, and the Most Well-liked Comp at College

Major comps: The very best place to search out comps is to learn books and observe gross sales in your style. These books are what I name major comps, and they’re those we stress about. A major comp ought to have one thing main in widespread together with your e book and have demonstrated enchantment to a large viewers.

Why do brokers and editors need comps revealed inside the final two or three years? As a result of e book publishing is a gradual medium: in case your manuscript bought acquired tomorrow by a Large 5, you’ll be able to anticipate it to be revealed in round two years soonest. By then, your comps might be 5 years previous, and even in e book publishing 5 years is a very long time in the past.

Secondary comps: You’ll be able to broaden the outline of your e book utilizing secondary comps. They’re looser, and may reveal that you know the way to get your e book to that viewers. They will additionally counsel new audiences on your work based mostly on phenomena aside from books. Secondary comps will not be essentially well timed, however they’re a identified amount. These comps might be based mostly on books or a author’s type; a TV present, a film; or a cultural development. It could use the “X crossed with Y” formulation, or “if X wrote Y” works too. For instance, say a e book is memoir (perhaps memoir plus plus plus?) about queer accomplice abuse that pulls inspiration from archetypes from fairy tales to Legislation & Order: SVU. That’s Carmen Maria Machado’s intestine punch Within the Dreamhouse (2019), which gained the Nationwide Guide Award for Memoir. It’s a e book I take into consideration when writers fear that comps are homogenizing writing. There are such a lot of wild components and riffs and tropes in Dreamhouse it will be each a dream and a sequence of sleepless nights desirous about all the fabric Machado makes her personal.

Most Well-liked Comp at College. Typically a title pops up just a little too usually. I name this the Most Well-liked Comp at College. Lately, that comp was Tara Westover’s memoir of braveness, self-invention, and desires, Educated (2018). Each memoir the place the writer persevered in powerful instances feels justified to make use of Westover’s e book of their queries. However except the storytelling, the setting, the characters, and the themes are the identical because the Most Well-liked Comp in College, search for one thing just a little extra offbeat (although nonetheless a good vendor, or a prizewinner).

Don’t ignore different common tradition if it aligns with the e book you’re pitching. On tv, Solely Murders within the Constructing, The White Lotus, Succession, and Knives Out have all turn out to be legitimate comps. The proliferation on-line of influencers and types have expanded this notion. If I subscribe to Oprah’s e-newsletter, learn The Skimm, drift out and in of veganism, love true crime, and am energetic within the subreddit for Dateline, that’s fairly a bit of data to attract from: it is a potential reader for a social media thriller just like the You sequence by Caroline Kepnes or The Influencers (2025) by Anna-Marie McLemore. If I say a e book is Agatha Christie’s And Then There Had been None (1939) with the libido of Miranda July’s All Fours (2024) set amongst a decent group of school buddies a la Donna Tartt’s The Secret Historical past (1992), it’s best to get that it’s half cozy, half thriller, and half educational satire. It’s a brand new spin on one thing I like, which is a good place for comps to land. You wish to be on the axis of what’s new and what’s acquainted.

Discovering your comps and making them stick

The potential and the probabilities are what I like about comps. As a e book reviewer with 20-ish years within the publishing trenches, I’ve been on the opposite aspect of many pitches the place the comps bought it for me. On my TBR shelf now, I’ve a rewriting of Little Girls as home suspense I’m itching to learn. I simply bought a e book described as “the type of cool-girl campus novel that can enchantment to adults who grew up studying Libba Bray’s A Nice and Horrible Magnificence or Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth Home.” To be frank, I don’t know these books; my guess is I’m too grownup for this development. However I used to be intrigued sufficient to maintain studying: “Followers of queer literary fiction like Plain Dangerous Heroines and lovers of coming-of-age fiction with horror components like Yellowjackets and Picnic at Hanging Rock gained’t be capable to put this one down.” It is a mouthful of comps, and a potpourri of disparate works in different genres just isn’t for amateurs. However the juxtaposition between e book, TV present, and film all on the sting of horror feels very now, and that intrigues me as a reviewer.

In serving to different writers analysis comps, I give them concepts based mostly on their queries and/or proposals, a brief biography, and their concepts about comps. I’ll have a look at components of the e book which could result in comps they hadn’t discovered but: style, setting, characters, plot, themes, interval, and another incidents of overlap I can discover. After I assisted Caroline Hatchett with comps for her manuscript Iguanaland she’d initially in contrast it to Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (1998), the science writing of Mary Roach, and H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (2016), which I felt was too elegiac. I did like her inclusion of Elevating Hare by Chloe Dalton (2025), one other e book the place a author’s encounter with an animal results in an inquiry about what makes us human.

However Hatchett was sitting on a comps goldmine: Iguanaland is ready in Florida, and Florida has an oddball literary custom which fits the topic and magnificence of Iguanaland. Hatchett now has a wealth of recent-ish books in regards to the wackiest state to select from, together with Sarah Gerard’s Sunshine State (2017), Lauren Groff’s Florida (2019), and Kent Russell’s Within the Land of Good Residing: A Journey to the Coronary heart of Florida (2020).

The hunt for comps additionally led to new areas of curiosity and analysis for Amanda Borquaye. Her work in progress, Speculation of Melancholy, is a memoir about generational trauma and being an African immigrant in America. As Speculation is extra cultural research than straight memoir, Borquaye ideally wants a mixture of books that intersect with hers of their topic, method, and sensibility.

Borquaye’s checklist of doable comps had been all by BIPOC ladies who’re comparatively younger: Minor Emotions by Cathy Park Hong (2020) is an essay assortment by a poet with a healthy dose of memoir;  Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu (2020), a memoir by a younger lady from Ghana (which was Borquaye’s homeland) which gained an vital award; Quarterlife by Satya Doyle Byock (2022); and Maame by Jessica George (2023), Borquaye’s strongest comp because it hits the trifecta: it’s a New York Occasions bestseller; a e book membership decide for the At this time present’s Learn With Jenna; and although it’s fiction, themes of Africa, generational succession, and exile characterize each George’s and Borquaye’s books.

With a purpose to thicken Borquaye’s comps, we added books by current immigrants—particularly African ladies—and about girlhood. We mentioned musician Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart (2021), an immigrant’s memoir common amongst youthful writers; and Abi Daré’s The Lady With the Louding Voice (2020), a Jenna e book membership decide and NYT bestseller, which additionally has immigration themes. Though Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Depend (2025) is fiction, she’s one of the vital outstanding African writers internationally and the e book is tremendous current. Lastly, I advised she add Girlhood by Melissa Febos (2021), a prizewinner by a revered queer and indigenous writer which delves into the trauma themes in Borquaye’s e book. Febos’s e book would remind each Borquaye and her potential agent/editor that her e book is not going to simply be an vital title for African writers however has the potential to have a global influence.

Observe from Jane: Want extra assist with comps? Take a look at Lisa’s Killer Comps service, designed to assist writers discover their finest comps.

Lisa Levy has over 20 years’ expertise as a contract author, editor, and critic, together with stints as an editor on the LA Overview of Books and Literary Hub. She has revealed in main venues just like the New Republic, the NY Occasions, the CBC, and the Washington Put up, the place she writes about crime fiction for Guide World. She is writing a e book referred to as Funeral in My Mind: A Biography of Migraine which examines the storied historical past of migraine, the present remedy panorama, and the way the expressions of the migraine mind show its each neurodiverse and wildly inventive. Her 20 years as a e book reviewer spawned her service Killer Comps, which is designed to assist writers discover their finest comps.