Dirty secret time: what an editor wants to see when they read your comp title — your analysis of comparative and competitive titles that parallel your book — is how much YOUR BOOK will sell.

Now.

An agent will want story hooks, that’s fine.

Some of them like comping games, films, even weird middle school boardgames, Dali paitings, or whatever. But that’s not why comp titles are there.

They’re there to prove — unequivocally — that your book has a market. Meaning. Readers already exist who will buy it the first day it comes out. Not folks who will discover it later in a bargain bin and make you famous posthumously. Folks that will buy it today.

Because of this, you want, in this order:

• Books that have already sold
• that are genre relevant
• and narratively similar

So let’s do one of my works in progress. Let’s flog me here for a second.

Say Arcanum, Darke County.

What is this book?

It’s a small town vampire novel like Salem’s Lot and Inception.

But one of those is a book from like forty years ago and the other’s a movie that won’t do so where do we go?

• https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-science-fiction-books-2023
• https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-horror-books-2023
• https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-fantasy-books-2023

From there, we open tabs to see if there’s a single one of them that has 3,000+ ratings ON AMAZON and that also doesn’t have Kindle Unlimited What do we come away with?

Arcanum, Darke County combines the classic small town vampire horror of Salem’s Lot by Stephen King, the family property horror of The Sundial by Catriona Ward, the “woman makes scientific breakthrough” story arc of Rhythm of Warby Brandon Sanderson, and the demonic apocalypse of The Martyr by Anthony Ryan.

An editor sees that and reads, “GOLD GOLD GOLD GOLD.” And agents have sold books on comp titles alone because of that. That’s it. That’s the secret. That’s all it is. It’s a code. I liberate you to speak marketing B.S. so that you may be free to write whatever the heck you want and your friend, the editor, can buy your genius and sell it blind to executives who only care about bottom lines.

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Photo by Hendrik Schuette on Unsplash