comp titles

[onewhitewhisker]

Evening all, I've been lurking on this board for a bit and wanted to start a discussion about comp titles. I am submitting to agents and reasonably happy with the submission package but really struggling with this bit. There are so many possible points of comparison (plot, genre, themes, writing style, period, setting etc) so there might be some points of similarity with a title but the rest could be wildly different and I'd be concerned about that throwing the reader/agent off and also wondering if I'm not a great judge of what my book is similar to! Also wondering if it's much easier if the book sits clearly in a genre. Mine is somewhere between thriller/mystery and lit fic. What do other people do? How have you worked out your comp titles? Thank you!

Easiest way to do this is figure out where in a book shop your book would be shelved. What section would you expect to see it in? That should help you clarify genre - and you do need to be clear about it.

Then, your comp titles are books which your readers would also read. So, 'fans of x would buy my book'. They don't have to be identical, but broadly similar in tone.

Hi Eucalyptus, thank you. In a bookshop, definitely I'd put it in general fiction rather than crime. But everything non-genre would sit there, so after that I would struggle to narrow down. Can I ask you how you would define tone? The best comparator I've come up with is Leila Slimani's Lullaby which has a few similarities both style wise (reasonably propulsive but literary) and structural (starts with a domestic crime then goes back to explore what built up to it). But this where I find it hard to be clear on genre. I don't know if you've read Lullaby, but it's described as a thriller in reviews. Yet there's one lot of murders on page one, and you are told immediately who did them. There's no more deaths, no plot twists and all the suspense is psychological. Personally I'd have called it literary fiction (and pretty sure no-one would shelve it under crime), but the cover is very clear! Thanks again.

Is it a psychological thriller? A literary thriller? If you google those terms, does it bring up books you feel are in a similar vein to yours? Can you think of authors or books that have inspired you, or who you'd expect to be put on a panel with at a literature festival or bookshop event? The point of including comp titles is to give your agent an idea of how they'd market you and how big your potential readership is. You can use tv shows or movies as a comp, it's to identify your audience base. So when I say tone, I'm thinking of readers and what they're drawn to - do you think someone who loved Lullaby would enjoy your book? Have you got a concise elevator pitch and do you know your hook? Maybe look at blurbs for other books you think might be the same genre and see if the hook feels similar in terms of stakes and emotional experience? I wouldn't overthink it; it's just helping the agent place your book and see its marketability, who it will appeal to and why.

Would it be similar to Abigail Dean's Girl A maybe? That's a psychological thriller where you know from the start who the perpetrators are but the novel unravels how and why.

Thank you. I do think someone who enjoyed Lullaby would enjoy it. I have had a lot of feedback on the pitch and hook so fairly confident in them. Literary thriller yes, psychological thriller up to a point - motivations for those seem to be generally around domestic secrets. This one the motivations are more external - it's about a doctor who commits clinical trial fraud (more gripping than it sounds I promise 😉) and his young relative's dilemma over whether to blow the whistle. So the fallout is domestic, as it's about the consequent implosion of their relationships, but the secrets less so. Thank you for the Girl A recommendation and the advice.

Sounds really interesting! There was a thriller about a surgeon with a dilemma - Do No Harm by Jack Jordan where a surgeon's daughter is kidnapped and they'll kill her if her mother doesn't kill a patient on the table, which might be a comp too. More thriller thriller than literary thriller! But yours might be Lullaby meets Do No Harm with a splash of Girl A for example - elements of each combined together? Or the literary prose of Lullaby with the ethical nightmare of Do No Harm and the psychological suspense of Girl A. Just thinking of bestselling books in the same general area to demonstrate the commercial potential and high quality of yours really. Good luck with querying!

thank you! v helpful. Will look up that one too. Hope to be back with positive news on one of the query threads at some stage. 🙂

What might be helpful is to think about the different ways you can frame comp titles in your submission letter.

'I would place it alongside titles such as...'

'It would suit readers of...'

'XYZ meets ABC with a dash of HIJ.'

'The tension of X with the whatever of Z.'

They're all slightly different, allowing you to group titles by genre, general style etc. The 'it would suit readers of...' is perhaps one of the most flexible ways of doing it, as readers don't necessarily stick to one genre, but might enjoy books with a particular style or a specific mash-up of genres.

thanks infinite - that's really useful. I like the idea of thinking about different ways of framing it so that you can hone your points of comparison somewhat. I've also discovered Literature Map, which I think I first saw on a thread on here - you put an author in and it shows you other authors that their readers also read, and the closer the names are, the more overlap in the readership. It's clearly not perfect as it relies on what people have put in, but I found it quite helpful and was also reassuring in that a lot of the authors I'm influenced by, and who I think are similar to each other, do pop up close together.