Let's Chat About Comp Titles
What is a comp Title?
Let’s start at the very beginning. Comp titles, short for comparison titles, are books that are similar to your own. They provide a reference for your work, helping agents, editors, or publishers understand its tone, style, themes, and place in the market.
Why do we need comp titles?
R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps Books are a very different kind of book to a Steven King novel, but both could be classed as horror. You don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with an agent who is searching for a gritty horror book, and you send her a children’s book. Whoops!
Having an appropriate comp title helps us avoid miscommunication and gets everyone on the same page.
Comp titles also help agents and publishers figure out how marketable your particular book is. If other similar books are doing well in the market currently, that would bode well for yours too.Â
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It can help them understand where they would place them in a bookshop.For example, if your book straddled the romance and horror genres, where should they shelve it at the bookstore?Â
They can look at a comp title that has a similar vibe to your own book, and understand how that was marketed and from there, get a feeling for where yours should be too. If they shelve it beside the horror books, but it leans more to romance, then a horror reader may not enjoy your books, and vice versa.
What can we learn from comp titles?
Comp Titles can teach us so much useful information.Â
One thing they can teach us is that maybe we aren’t in the exact genre or sub that we thought we were.
I had thought that my novel I am currently writing was an eco-horror. A blend of the horror genre with an ecological theme, however, this was based on a single comp title that I found initially.Â
What I’d found was a film, rather than a book (and stick around until later and I’ll explain if that’s a good or a bad thing), but following more research, and finding more books that are comp titles fr my novel, I discovered that more of them tend to be classed as sci-fi or thrillers. One that is a really great comp title has been called an eco-thriller.Â
So that was a big learning for me, with regards to how my book might be marketed, how I should market it to potential agents or publishers, and who the readership might be.
Another way Comp titles can help us, is to learn which agents like books that are similar to ours. This means we can target query letters to them specifically, rather than blast out loads of queries to agents who just may not be into our type of books (and that’s okay, not everyone is going to love your work, but it will really help going forward to know who does).Â
It’ll make you come over as more of an authority if you can name a book that they have been involved with as comp titles when you are reaching out to them, rather than other general books. It shows you have done your research and you are serious. It will help make your query stand out compared to others.Â
What makes a good comp title?
Now this can be tricky, right. One one hand, you want to use a successful comp title to compare your book to, so you’re showing the agent just how successful yours could be, but agents can see certain comps over and over again until they become less impactful. I think it was the agent Lucinda Halpern who said that she’s seen hundreds of queries with Harry Potter as the comp title. Compt titles that are so frequently overused can lose their shine.
So what do you do if you have wrote a book and Harry Potter is the perfect comp for you?
Well, you add another, less well known comp too. It’s pretty normal to include a couple of comp titles, so you can show how unique your story is. Imagine, a book that is a blend of Harry Potter and The Little Mermaid, where everything is underwater including the magic school. Now it’s not just a carbon copy. Now you’re showing the agent you’re unique offering.
How to find comp titles
Okay, that’s all well and good, but how do you figure it all out? Where do you find your comp titles? Well, it can take time.Â
You’re probably sick of hearing this, but, of the best ways to find your comp titles is to read in your genre. As you read other books in your genre, you might pick up on aspects of those stories that would make good comps for your own.
If you aren’t sure where to start, have a little google first.Â
For instance, I knew my book had ecological aspects. That was one solid point that wouldn’t change regardless of if it fell into thriller or horror or any other genre. So I started by googling for ecological novels, and guess what? There were plenty of listicles out there that I could use to find my starting point for reading in my genre. A quick look at the books blurbs let me know if they were on the right track or not before I devoted hours to reading them.
Even having a little trip to your nearest bookstore and looking at the books can help you find books that are in your genre. I recently read Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy. I found that in the new section of Barnes and Nobels, right as you walk in the door. The imagery on the front and the title both led me to it, as I could see it would have an ecological aspect.
So after you’ve found a book or two in your genre, you still might not feel like they’re quite the fit you were looking for in a comp title, and that’s okay. Once you’ve got a starting point, it gets easier. Go to those books in Goodreads. From there, you’ll be able to see what genres it has been tagged in, and it will also suggest other books to you that readers also enjoyed.
Can you use film / TV as comp titles?
This is something that I was hung up on for a while. Should TV of Film or some other kind of media be used as a comp title?
Everything I’ve read on the subject says it depends. If you have a really strong reason for using another kind of media, it’s showcasing something that you haven’t found a book that can, then it’s okay to use one. From my research, you don’t want to include two different forms of media. If you do really feel that it’s important to use one, make sure you also have a strong book you can include as a secondary comp title too.
Initially, I’d found a film that had some similar aspects to my book. Contaminated water in a small town causing problems for those who live there. It pairs really well with a book I found that has other aspects similar to my book, and was written by a household name, James Patterson. Sounds perfect, right? What a great comp combo. But, no.
As much as I’d love to use that combo, both are from 2012. What I’d be doing is showcasing that people used to like this kind of theme in a book, but recently there has been less of an appetite for it.Â
An agent only gets paid if your book sells, so they want to see that there is potential salability now, in todays market. So, I kept on searching, and thankfully found plenty more titles that are far more recent. It’s okay to use an older title if it is relevant, but back it up with something recent too to keep the balance.
Documenting Your Comp Title Research
How do you keep track of all the different comp titles you come across? I’m glad you asked!
When I come across a book I want to read, because it’s in my genre and I think it could be a potential comp title, I add it to my TBR list in Goodreads. That way I don’t lose track of it. Once I’ve read through the book, I add it to a spreadsheet, which I will show you below.
In this spreadsheet I can keep track of the dates the books were released, who the author and agent are, the publishing house, if it was their debut novel, a NY Times Best Seller, a rough estimate of sales volume, and some other notes like their rating on Goodreads, any adaptions for film or TV and any random pieces of info I found interesting in some way.
I think having a spreadsheet like this will help immensly when it comes time to query, and lessen the pressure during what will undoubtedly be a stressful time. Let me know if you do something similar already, or if this has been the push you needed to go ahead and start!
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