Whatever works. The idea is to get the agent or editor to want to read your story. I always get pulled in when someone references Practical Magic meets whatever... I love that movie :)
Good advice, as usual. I like the comp thing as a fun brainstorming exercise. When I was in film school, it led to a script that I had a blast writing. I had just seen The Book of Mormon in New York and on the plane ride home I watched Reservoir Dogs. I thought it might be fun to mash up those archetypes and tones, and that script wrote itself in a couple of weeks.
This is super helpful for me! I know my audience but not the recent books they may have read. My MS is a science fiction dystopia romance...like Hunger Games... but WITHOUT the arena concept, which every other Hunger Games copycat focuses on. It's set in a future Authoritarian Whitehouse. It has a "debutante meets rebel spy" romance. I don't think there is a direct comp.
Interesting. So genre alone for fiction is ok. I’ve met some authors who had a hard time thinking of comps. What a relief for them. Screenwriting is different. It’s ok to use a classic movie as a comp even if it’s from the 80’s.
Not sure what you mean by "genre alone". Saying it's a thriller or a romance doesn't convey story. You still need to point to other books that tell me what your book is about.
It could also be a mashup genre - Mrs. Dalloway meets Mission Impossible. A period piece where an unassuming woman is actually an international spy.
No, I always want to know what their story is about. Sometimes they don't really get their plot across well enough to frame what I'm going to read -- especially the tone of it.
The rule is to have current best-selling books as your comps -- to show your book is saleable and convey where it fits on the shelf.
My point is the requirement they be current makes no sense. So if they want to reference a book from 1980 and another from 2000, they should -- and also use movies and TV show plots if they work. It shouldn't have to be just books.
Comps always seem like a market vibe check and a bad one at that if people don't understand that they are ideally just to help the editor acquiring editor agent whoever get a very quick idea of what they're dealing with. Like you say, I've never heard of an editor just hearing comps and then passing immediately.
A smaller publisher can get a book out a little bit quicker than that, but I would still rather someone. Yeah now this is just good advice.
It's the elevator pitch problem just a different version of it. And a lot of authors are. How can I put this? Awkward weirdos who may not be what I would like to call camera ready. So say they got minute that 30 seconds for some reason. Not that this is incredibly common but someone says okay. Picture me and then they're like a deer in the f****** headlights. Same goes with comps.
In my opinion anyway. I think I commented on something that you wrote yesterday... And you replied but I have ADHD and my meds haven't kicked in and I'm still drinking my coffee and it takes me 2 hours to wake up. But thanks for not being one of the charlans on this goddamn platform. So many people out there are just either regurgitating things from books that are already on most of my bookshelves because I'm an editor or they are just bad.
I wish I had a better way to express it but it's too early. Just bad is good enough.
Stay golden. You're doing the Lord's work.
Dictated not typed because I only do talk to text in the morning. Apologies for any strange punctuation and overly conversational tone.
Emil, you're awesome. :) I get what you're saying. I try not to be a charlatan and while this is my opinion on comps, and I may have thoughts on other things that might deviate, the overarching structure of writing that works doesn't really change.
So, while I try not to regurgitate what's out there, I might try to put in a way that is more easily understood. Sometimes craft books can present things in a way that isn't accessible to some in terms of the way they think and learn. I know that was the case for me for Story Grid - I wanted to so badly to learn their method, but I couldn't get past the word "Foolscap" For some reason I absolutely DETEST that word. I realize it's the name of the type of paper (yellow legal pad) but it seemed like it was every other word and my brain would cringe every time I read it, so I couldn't absorb what they were teaching.
You're awesome too! I'm just a freelance editor and indie author in the midwest who's been around way too long.
" the overarching structure of writing that works doesn't really change." - This, exactly.
"I know that was the case for me for Story Grid - I wanted to so badly to learn their method, but I couldn't get past the word "Foolscap" For some reason I absolutely DETEST that word." - Mood and a half! Fuck, I almost couldn't get past that word but fuck, I've gotten through so much worse and the guy who wrote that book has a science background (like me) and he started right in the first chapter just, no bullshit, this is the business. That was fresh. Foolscap isn't JUST yellow legal pad though, if I remember correctly, it's even more annoying. It's the extra long old style yellow legal pad...
And the method is basically.... Refer to my first quote up there. Inciting incident, middle build, climax and resolution. The most interesting thing about the whole book is how it handles genre (really sort of logically and scientifically, go find a rundown of that or the infographic they have with the five elements of genre in a cloverleaf and bam, you got 90% of the book in the bag if you already know storytelling. Also, non-charlatan. Focuses on forms, and forms are actually important, not formula, which is the whole of charlatanism's business model. (that cat can fucking die along with every beat sheet cribbed from Hollywood et al. Also every single "writing coach" who wrote two episodes of Law and Order 20 years ago that still somehow manage to get people to pay them to tell the client how special and precious they are, until the money runs out.)) A few other interesting points and stats in there but boom, there ya go.
Now we can collectively never think of that fucking word again.
Also, I vibe with how you put the craft out there to be understood without all the extra shit smeared on top.
Graphically put, but still valid. " It's the extra long old style yellow legal pad"... yes, that's the one I was referring to, and I'm still angry at whoever named it. I'm glad I'm not alone in being skeeved by the word.
I have his original big sized Story Grid book - I'm going to have my husband redact the "offensive" word so I can read it. I was actually sent a poster of the genre clover back in the day. So I have it.
Yeah, interesting fact, when I was in county jail, those were the only legal pads they would give us, so I have about fifty of them completely filled (seven months fighting my case, six months in the feds) The other interesting fact is thank god, instead of "no you can't stab the other inmates" rubber pencils, they let us have simple blue felt tipped pens. I went through five of them a week for the entire duration.
Yeah, the big impossible to wield book, same one I have. I'd have the word redacted because honestly it's not got THAT many appearances, just enough to rankle whenever I read it.
And as a stationery dork, that type of xtra longboi legal pad is NOT common. You gonna have to go to Office Depot/Max/ULTRA or wherever, go all the way back on the left side of the store (it's almost always the left), and find it in their vast selection of legal pads. (I'm a fan of legal pad holders/folios, whatever, so I have extensive experience here.) There will be two brands, the house brand which is like writing on the devil's tongue, and Oxford, which will have faux leather at the top emblazoned with the word OXFORD and is also like WRITING ON THE TONGUE OF SATAN. They will both cost five times as much as any other legal pad you're standing in front of per three to five count pack, and then then they wouldn't even fit in my fucking legal pad folios, so who cares?!
The genre clover is interesting, but also I could see it being ever so mildly annoying to decode without the surrounding context.
What frustrated me about comps when I queried agents was that I didn’t write my novel with the idea to make it like any other book. I wrote it in the first place because I’d combed the SF/F shelves of bookstores (new and used) for a few years looking for a book like it and I couldn’t find one — so finally I started to write what I wanted so desperately to read. In terms of style, I could comp to Le Guin; in terms of dystopia, to Atwood. But the story and world itself? No one, at least no one I’d ever read. I got that comps are a shortcut, but it’s almost like the point is that agents don’t want anything very original (or maybe don’t believe it exists).
Joshua, what agents and editors don't want is to hear "there's nothing out there like my book" we do want original -- but it's going to connected to/inspired by something. I totally understand what you're saying when you said you wrote the story you wanted to read, which is great.
Another way to approach it would be to focus on style - maybe figure out what the closest concept to your story is and frame it like, "Imagine if X was set in (your world)"... highlight what makes your story different, but grounding it in something familiar.
I’m in the middle of my first novel, so I’m probably not at the point where I know exactly what it is, but when I talk about it to friends I’m saying that my main character is Emma Thompson playing Captain Jack Sparrow. And if pressed for comps, I’m saying it’s Firefly on the high seas, meets At the Mountains of Madness.
Exactly, Sean. You may not be done, but the way you're explaining it to your friends no doubt make them go "Oh, yeah, I can see that"... And the way you noted book comps exactly illustrates what I'm trying to convey. Good luck on the writing :)
I only know two of those... Lessons and Demon. So without any info like "a contemporary take on"... I'll say it's set between 1050-70, about a poor single mother of little means, but who is academically intelligent, and she wants to make a better life for herself/family.
Oh, that’s hilarious. Um..not quite ;) It’s about A young South African woman coming of age as apartheid ends in South Africa. Who goes from shrugging off bombs and being right there at Nelson Mandela’s inauguration…to 30 years later lying broken in a woman’s bathroom in somewhereville USA.
Nadine Gordimer’s The Lying Days is about a young South African woman who becomes aware of the reality of her country…Lessons in Chemistry is (among many themes) about the patriarchy in the workplace and what it does to woman and how to have to navigate it…and Demon is the modern contemporary odyssey version…of someone who has to find where they belong in a world that doesn’t want them/doesn’t care about them.
Fair enough. To me it's less element based to use The Lying Days meets Demon Copperhead. Having an actual query would give plot summary as well, to be able to see what the connection is.
You can also see how it affects things when someone goes in blind and doesn't know all the comps that are used. This happens to me a lot with sci-fi. I rarely represent it - and I never know the comps because I'm not reading that genre.
I think you've also created a fun game of guess the plot from the comps :)
Another version could be Titanic meets Bonfire of the Vanities…where the ship and the iceberg are metaphors for two people on a collision course…unbeknownst to them…and what corporate structures do to our souls… (not just the markets). So…South African diplomat goes to Palestine, survives violence, comes to America…falls apart…rebuilds herself…what does that compare to?????
Basically: comps felt REALLY hard for this one. But my readers said “contemporary Odyssey”, workplace themes, Nadine Gordimer for South Africa…even they struggled to say “comparable to.” They said, mostly, it was very much its own thing.
Really great advice as usual Renee! Being able to reference tv and movies--I feel unleashed! There are so many more comps available when you include those.
Although I wonder--would it be wise to comp a sci fi tv show when it was originally a book? For example, I wouldn't want to reference The 100, or The Expanse, or Dark Matter as tv since they were originally books?
Noor, most of TV seems to be based on books anymore. I think you can absolutely use the book w/author -- and people who watch TV will also know. For instance, I didn't read the Man in the High Castle, but I watched the show.
Richard, that's where writers can set themselves up for their first query red flag- if it looks like they're comparing themselves to best-selling authors (writing style) rather than the stories they tell.
Thanks Renee! I was talking market. I always thought a comp meant projected readership. In other words, if you love this (very popular) author, you'll love me. I would never compare style. I only sound like me : )
Richard don’t get me wrong, you can say “fans of this author” to show your style. This is the area where I agree that you shouldn’t compare yourself to the “greats”. If you ARE as good as Stephen King etc. then your work will show it.
For me I’d say something like “Fans of Jeffrey Deaver’s Bone Collector (or Lincoln Rhyme series) and James Patterson’s Kiss the Girls” will like this novel. That tells me I’m going to read an intense thriller/serial killer book… and I’m excited to jump in ♥️ Yes, my parents are very proud… 🤷🏻♀️
I never thought of referencing a television show or song. I’ll have to give those options some thought!
Whatever works. The idea is to get the agent or editor to want to read your story. I always get pulled in when someone references Practical Magic meets whatever... I love that movie :)
Thank you for the advice, Renee!
Good advice, as usual. I like the comp thing as a fun brainstorming exercise. When I was in film school, it led to a script that I had a blast writing. I had just seen The Book of Mormon in New York and on the plane ride home I watched Reservoir Dogs. I thought it might be fun to mash up those archetypes and tones, and that script wrote itself in a couple of weeks.
This is super helpful for me! I know my audience but not the recent books they may have read. My MS is a science fiction dystopia romance...like Hunger Games... but WITHOUT the arena concept, which every other Hunger Games copycat focuses on. It's set in a future Authoritarian Whitehouse. It has a "debutante meets rebel spy" romance. I don't think there is a direct comp.
Maybe it’s a Hunger Games sans Reaping Day meets House of Cards… or you can always couch it as “Imagine if Katniss Everdeen did xyz”…
It's Future America Bridgerton where undercover Jack Ryan rejects the diamond 😂
Interesting. So genre alone for fiction is ok. I’ve met some authors who had a hard time thinking of comps. What a relief for them. Screenwriting is different. It’s ok to use a classic movie as a comp even if it’s from the 80’s.
Not sure what you mean by "genre alone". Saying it's a thriller or a romance doesn't convey story. You still need to point to other books that tell me what your book is about.
It could also be a mashup genre - Mrs. Dalloway meets Mission Impossible. A period piece where an unassuming woman is actually an international spy.
I thought you were saying you don’t need comps for fiction.
No, I always want to know what their story is about. Sometimes they don't really get their plot across well enough to frame what I'm going to read -- especially the tone of it.
The rule is to have current best-selling books as your comps -- to show your book is saleable and convey where it fits on the shelf.
My point is the requirement they be current makes no sense. So if they want to reference a book from 1980 and another from 2000, they should -- and also use movies and TV show plots if they work. It shouldn't have to be just books.
Ah. Got it. My ADD was acting up today. Thx for clarifying.
Comps always seem like a market vibe check and a bad one at that if people don't understand that they are ideally just to help the editor acquiring editor agent whoever get a very quick idea of what they're dealing with. Like you say, I've never heard of an editor just hearing comps and then passing immediately.
A smaller publisher can get a book out a little bit quicker than that, but I would still rather someone. Yeah now this is just good advice.
It's the elevator pitch problem just a different version of it. And a lot of authors are. How can I put this? Awkward weirdos who may not be what I would like to call camera ready. So say they got minute that 30 seconds for some reason. Not that this is incredibly common but someone says okay. Picture me and then they're like a deer in the f****** headlights. Same goes with comps.
In my opinion anyway. I think I commented on something that you wrote yesterday... And you replied but I have ADHD and my meds haven't kicked in and I'm still drinking my coffee and it takes me 2 hours to wake up. But thanks for not being one of the charlans on this goddamn platform. So many people out there are just either regurgitating things from books that are already on most of my bookshelves because I'm an editor or they are just bad.
I wish I had a better way to express it but it's too early. Just bad is good enough.
Stay golden. You're doing the Lord's work.
Dictated not typed because I only do talk to text in the morning. Apologies for any strange punctuation and overly conversational tone.
Emil, you're awesome. :) I get what you're saying. I try not to be a charlatan and while this is my opinion on comps, and I may have thoughts on other things that might deviate, the overarching structure of writing that works doesn't really change.
So, while I try not to regurgitate what's out there, I might try to put in a way that is more easily understood. Sometimes craft books can present things in a way that isn't accessible to some in terms of the way they think and learn. I know that was the case for me for Story Grid - I wanted to so badly to learn their method, but I couldn't get past the word "Foolscap" For some reason I absolutely DETEST that word. I realize it's the name of the type of paper (yellow legal pad) but it seemed like it was every other word and my brain would cringe every time I read it, so I couldn't absorb what they were teaching.
You're awesome too! I'm just a freelance editor and indie author in the midwest who's been around way too long.
" the overarching structure of writing that works doesn't really change." - This, exactly.
"I know that was the case for me for Story Grid - I wanted to so badly to learn their method, but I couldn't get past the word "Foolscap" For some reason I absolutely DETEST that word." - Mood and a half! Fuck, I almost couldn't get past that word but fuck, I've gotten through so much worse and the guy who wrote that book has a science background (like me) and he started right in the first chapter just, no bullshit, this is the business. That was fresh. Foolscap isn't JUST yellow legal pad though, if I remember correctly, it's even more annoying. It's the extra long old style yellow legal pad...
And the method is basically.... Refer to my first quote up there. Inciting incident, middle build, climax and resolution. The most interesting thing about the whole book is how it handles genre (really sort of logically and scientifically, go find a rundown of that or the infographic they have with the five elements of genre in a cloverleaf and bam, you got 90% of the book in the bag if you already know storytelling. Also, non-charlatan. Focuses on forms, and forms are actually important, not formula, which is the whole of charlatanism's business model. (that cat can fucking die along with every beat sheet cribbed from Hollywood et al. Also every single "writing coach" who wrote two episodes of Law and Order 20 years ago that still somehow manage to get people to pay them to tell the client how special and precious they are, until the money runs out.)) A few other interesting points and stats in there but boom, there ya go.
Now we can collectively never think of that fucking word again.
Also, I vibe with how you put the craft out there to be understood without all the extra shit smeared on top.
Graphically put, but still valid. " It's the extra long old style yellow legal pad"... yes, that's the one I was referring to, and I'm still angry at whoever named it. I'm glad I'm not alone in being skeeved by the word.
I have his original big sized Story Grid book - I'm going to have my husband redact the "offensive" word so I can read it. I was actually sent a poster of the genre clover back in the day. So I have it.
Yeah, interesting fact, when I was in county jail, those were the only legal pads they would give us, so I have about fifty of them completely filled (seven months fighting my case, six months in the feds) The other interesting fact is thank god, instead of "no you can't stab the other inmates" rubber pencils, they let us have simple blue felt tipped pens. I went through five of them a week for the entire duration.
Yeah, the big impossible to wield book, same one I have. I'd have the word redacted because honestly it's not got THAT many appearances, just enough to rankle whenever I read it.
And as a stationery dork, that type of xtra longboi legal pad is NOT common. You gonna have to go to Office Depot/Max/ULTRA or wherever, go all the way back on the left side of the store (it's almost always the left), and find it in their vast selection of legal pads. (I'm a fan of legal pad holders/folios, whatever, so I have extensive experience here.) There will be two brands, the house brand which is like writing on the devil's tongue, and Oxford, which will have faux leather at the top emblazoned with the word OXFORD and is also like WRITING ON THE TONGUE OF SATAN. They will both cost five times as much as any other legal pad you're standing in front of per three to five count pack, and then then they wouldn't even fit in my fucking legal pad folios, so who cares?!
The genre clover is interesting, but also I could see it being ever so mildly annoying to decode without the surrounding context.
What frustrated me about comps when I queried agents was that I didn’t write my novel with the idea to make it like any other book. I wrote it in the first place because I’d combed the SF/F shelves of bookstores (new and used) for a few years looking for a book like it and I couldn’t find one — so finally I started to write what I wanted so desperately to read. In terms of style, I could comp to Le Guin; in terms of dystopia, to Atwood. But the story and world itself? No one, at least no one I’d ever read. I got that comps are a shortcut, but it’s almost like the point is that agents don’t want anything very original (or maybe don’t believe it exists).
Joshua, what agents and editors don't want is to hear "there's nothing out there like my book" we do want original -- but it's going to connected to/inspired by something. I totally understand what you're saying when you said you wrote the story you wanted to read, which is great.
Another way to approach it would be to focus on style - maybe figure out what the closest concept to your story is and frame it like, "Imagine if X was set in (your world)"... highlight what makes your story different, but grounding it in something familiar.
I’m in the middle of my first novel, so I’m probably not at the point where I know exactly what it is, but when I talk about it to friends I’m saying that my main character is Emma Thompson playing Captain Jack Sparrow. And if pressed for comps, I’m saying it’s Firefly on the high seas, meets At the Mountains of Madness.
Exactly, Sean. You may not be done, but the way you're explaining it to your friends no doubt make them go "Oh, yeah, I can see that"... And the way you noted book comps exactly illustrates what I'm trying to convey. Good luck on the writing :)
If I said "Lessons in Chemistry" meets "Demon Copperhead" meets "The Lying Days" (Nadine Gordimer)...what would that say to you?
I only know two of those... Lessons and Demon. So without any info like "a contemporary take on"... I'll say it's set between 1050-70, about a poor single mother of little means, but who is academically intelligent, and she wants to make a better life for herself/family.
Am I close?
Oh, that’s hilarious. Um..not quite ;) It’s about A young South African woman coming of age as apartheid ends in South Africa. Who goes from shrugging off bombs and being right there at Nelson Mandela’s inauguration…to 30 years later lying broken in a woman’s bathroom in somewhereville USA.
And why did you tie it to these books?
Nadine Gordimer’s The Lying Days is about a young South African woman who becomes aware of the reality of her country…Lessons in Chemistry is (among many themes) about the patriarchy in the workplace and what it does to woman and how to have to navigate it…and Demon is the modern contemporary odyssey version…of someone who has to find where they belong in a world that doesn’t want them/doesn’t care about them.
Fair enough. To me it's less element based to use The Lying Days meets Demon Copperhead. Having an actual query would give plot summary as well, to be able to see what the connection is.
You can also see how it affects things when someone goes in blind and doesn't know all the comps that are used. This happens to me a lot with sci-fi. I rarely represent it - and I never know the comps because I'm not reading that genre.
I think you've also created a fun game of guess the plot from the comps :)
Glad you had fun with it. I did!
Another version could be Titanic meets Bonfire of the Vanities…where the ship and the iceberg are metaphors for two people on a collision course…unbeknownst to them…and what corporate structures do to our souls… (not just the markets). So…South African diplomat goes to Palestine, survives violence, comes to America…falls apart…rebuilds herself…what does that compare to?????
Basically: comps felt REALLY hard for this one. But my readers said “contemporary Odyssey”, workplace themes, Nadine Gordimer for South Africa…even they struggled to say “comparable to.” They said, mostly, it was very much its own thing.
Really great advice as usual Renee! Being able to reference tv and movies--I feel unleashed! There are so many more comps available when you include those.
Although I wonder--would it be wise to comp a sci fi tv show when it was originally a book? For example, I wouldn't want to reference The 100, or The Expanse, or Dark Matter as tv since they were originally books?
Noor, most of TV seems to be based on books anymore. I think you can absolutely use the book w/author -- and people who watch TV will also know. For instance, I didn't read the Man in the High Castle, but I watched the show.
Such great advice. Thanks for sharing!
My comps are authors, not books. Authors with a current bestseller, and long careers. Who wouldn't want another Liane Moriarty?
Richard, that's where writers can set themselves up for their first query red flag- if it looks like they're comparing themselves to best-selling authors (writing style) rather than the stories they tell.
I'm about to read a Liane Moriarty book.
Thanks Renee! I was talking market. I always thought a comp meant projected readership. In other words, if you love this (very popular) author, you'll love me. I would never compare style. I only sound like me : )
Richard don’t get me wrong, you can say “fans of this author” to show your style. This is the area where I agree that you shouldn’t compare yourself to the “greats”. If you ARE as good as Stephen King etc. then your work will show it.
For me I’d say something like “Fans of Jeffrey Deaver’s Bone Collector (or Lincoln Rhyme series) and James Patterson’s Kiss the Girls” will like this novel. That tells me I’m going to read an intense thriller/serial killer book… and I’m excited to jump in ♥️ Yes, my parents are very proud… 🤷🏻♀️
Such great advice. Writers stress over this so much!
Absolutely 💯