How to find your comps

Comps (or comparable titles) are for everyone. Whether you’re pitching traditional or going indie, comps help you solve your story’s problems, understand your genre, and position yourself in the market.

So how do you choose them?

I like to organize comps into categories so that I know what I’m looking for, and then how to focus my attention when I study the book more closely. I use four general categories:

• Style

• Plot

• Genre

• Problem Specific

  
  

Style comps could be in any genre, and are books whose prose you particularly like. Consider the eloquence of Leigh Bardugo’s prose in Ninth House versus the brutal, quick, and sharp sentences that Gillian Flynn writes in Sharp Objects. In general, these are usually pulled from books you’ve read before and that stuck out in your mind, though as you’re reading other plot, genre, and problem-specific comps, you may stumble upon a good style comp too!

Plot comps are books that share a similar type of plot to yours. To find these, you have to abstract the pattern of your plot from the specifics: is it a heist story at its heart like Six of Crows? Is it a “breaking into a secret place” plot like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone? Or maybe a rebellion/overthrow story like Mistborn, or a closer quarters, domestic thriller like Mexican Gothic. This will take some thought to pull out the basic pattern of your story, and you may even find it easier to start by comparing it to movies. Then, once you’ve identified what type of plot you’re working with, you can do what I do (and yes, it’s both this simple and this complicated): start using your search engine of choice to find stories that have a similar pattern if you don’t already have some in mind. (I browse a lot of Reddit threads, then read reviews to find out if the book is what I’m looking for) You’re going to have some hits and some misses, but that’s all a part of the process! It takes time, so don’t rush it, and work a little bit at a time if you have to.

Genre comps are, as the name implies, books that are similar to yours that fall in your genre. If you’re writing in genres that have plot expectations, like crime or romance, this is likely where you’ll pull most of your comps from. You’re looking for patterns across multiple stories that tell you what the audience expectations are, while also looking for stories that share similar elements as yours to position yourself in the market.

Problem-specific comps are books you go looking for when you have a particular problem or skill you want to develop further. This may be a broader skill, like dialogue or handling exposition and information, or it could be more specific, like writing an unlikeable protagonist. 

Breaking your books into categories helps you identify what specifically you’re looking for, and then, while you’re reading, helps you to focus on what you need to get from the book. As always, I recommend reading books you want to use as comps twice over! Once as a reader, and then again to do a deep analysis.

Dana and I spent a full hour talking about how to find comps, the processes we use to find them, and how to use them to best effect on The Story Deep Dive podcast! If you want to learn more, you can watch on YouTube, or listen on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts!