My Problem With Finding Comp Titles
Recently, I’ve been trying to find a small publisher for my latest novel, The Poisoned Moon, which is about two men who meet a near perfect doppelgänger for a women they each once loved, but who recently died. The reason I’m looking for a small press is that most small presses don’t require a list of comparable titles the way nearly every agent I’ve looked at does. At first, comp titles didn’t seem like much of a problem, but when I began to do my research (reading submission guidelines, checking in on literary Twitter, and following agent’s social media feeds and wishlists), I started to run into problems. The titles I thought of as comparable to my novel were not acceptable comp titles to the agents. One book was too famous of a “bestseller” and had been made into a movie, and was too old, the second book was too obscure and too old, and the third book might be acceptable depending on the agent because the book was published in 2019 and might be too old for some agents but not others.
What has made it all the more frustrating is that the tips I’ve read on how to find comps are, quite frankly, unhelpful. Everything seems focused on those writers who are writing to satisfy a neatly defined and specific sub-genre market like Romance, Thriller, Mystery, or what I’m going to start calling “popular” Literary fiction (i.e. formulaic character driven stories by people with MFAs) and aren’t doing the things I find most compelling about good literature: taking a risk and trying to be original. Instead, it feels like this focus on finding comp titles is forcing writers to, essentially, ‘typecast” themselves into a reproducible style.
Now comp titles weren’t always a thing the way they are now. Fifteen to twenty years ago, when I was trying to land my first novel, comp titles weren’t required. They were a suggestion you could opt to use if you thought it would help increase your book’s appeal but certainly not something you had to worry about if you didn’t provide. Now it’s become yet another thing a writer needs to research in order to “premarket” their book. Agents, editors, and the big publishers are now so squeezed and streamlined in their effort to compete with Amazon that it feels like they won’t bother taking on a book unless they know beforehand what the SEO keywords should be for that book to appear in the search algorithms. And they rarely seem interested in any fiction that doesn’t hew to a standard story structure (think Freytag’s Pyramid i.e. a basic five act structure). In fact it sometimes feels like the Big Five are demanding the kind of rigid story structure that Hollywood has been demanding in their screenplays since the 1980s.
Consequently, I end up being rather bored by most contemporary fiction I pick up in the bookstore, just like I don’t watch a lot of contemporary cinema in the theaters anymore. I tend to gravitate toward independent movies, books from small presses, and the classics because they feel less rigid and predictable.
That desire to find things that interest me on many varied levels like content, structure, and form means my influences are varied; Jack Kerouac (both his prose and poetry), Ernest Hemingway (prose), John Berger (prose, poetry, and art criticism), Michael Ondaatje (both prose and poetry), Bobbie Louise Hawkins (prose and poetry), James Tate (poetry), and various non-literary people like musicians, film directors and film editors, psychologists, sociologists, and visual artists. There are also individual works (literary, scientific, cinematic, musical, visual) that I draw on to influence my work. So, when I say my work isn’t that similar to the majority of work out there, I’m not saying that it’s entirely unique or wildly original. What I’m saying is that the majority of work out there coming from the big publishing houses is filtered through a small cadre of agents and therefore it’s getting considerably more aesthetically homogenized than its been in the past because it’s being filtered through a narrower chokepoint than it ever has been through before, and I don’t seem to fit through that chokepoint. In fact, a larger and larger portion of writers no longer fit through that chokepoint anymore, which makes me think the books that would be good comps for my book are also not getting published.
When every book getting published by the Big 5 has to go through the same small number of agents who are comparing those books to three previously published books that did well, but not too well — and that were represented by that same small cadre of agents — that means all those books will begin to feel like a new remix of the same old book. Agents, after all, are just readers like the rest of us and are just as prone to preferring something familiar over something new as the rest of us.
That might be a bit of an overgeneralization. I know that. But this whole trend of demanding comp titles is, I think, detrimental to good literature.
Now, generalizations suck, so, I’m going to use my own current manuscript and situation to illustrate my point. And just to be fair, here’s a warning of a sort: some of you will miss the fundamental insecurity and self-doubt and instead read a lot of this as self-importance and arrogance — i.e. you’ll interpret this as if I were saying “I wrote a book unlike anything else ever” when, in fact, I know exactly what other books my book is like, the problem is my comps are unacceptable comps to agents, and I am having a hard time finding newer books in the same vein because, I believe, Amazon and the Big Five have created a homogenized literary aesthetic that prizes repeatable mass appeal over artistic risk and efforts at originality.
I generally start a project with an image that I can’t let go of; for instance, a man biting a woman’s shoulder (my first published novel), or someone discovering a suicide (my unpublished novel, The Palace of Winds). Then that image gets paired with other ideas that have been floating around in my subconscious for a while — the war in Bosnia, or my grandfather’s life as a road kid during the Great Depression. For The Poisoned Moon, I had this image of a man seeing a woman who is a doppelgänger for his deceased wife. That got merged with my desire to write a story about an ex-girlfriend who died of brain cancer. So, I sat down and started writing what I call “explorations,” which is just me trying out characters, tones, images, scenarios, etc. to work my way toward or away from that original image I started with. Inevitably, I reach a dead end. So, when I struggle to get a story rolling, I put it aside and do other things. I also begin to skim my personal library and sniff around bookstores and libraries looking for books that are doing something different with the hope of unlocking something for me.
By the time I reached my dead end with The Poisoned Moon, I knew I wanted to tell a story that would be “the saddest story ever told,” and that I wanted a certain narrative tone and mood that employed distance and subversion to create tension and engagement. So, I started looking around for other novels that might help me imagine a way to access the vague concepts rattling around in my head.
I’d read Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being before, and remembered how Kundera’s narrator had acknowledged that a fiction was being constructed to illustrate something about love and regret. This was a start, but it didn’t get me unstuck. Some time later, I was reading one of the books in the Graywolf Press series “The Art of” called The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between by Stacey D’Erasmo. In that book she wrote at length about William Maxwell’s novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, making use of the subjunctive mood. D’Erasmo’s description and analysis intrigued me, so I went out and got the book. It floored me — and it gave me the second key to unlock my own story. In Maxwell’s novel, the narrator is an old man who says he is telling this story as a “roundabout, futile way of making amends” for failing to be a friend to someone from his youth. That was exactly what I’d had in mind for my story about my ex-girlfriend who’d died of brain cancer. What’s also fascinating about the narrator’s story is that he also acknowledges a great portion of what he has to tell the reader is imagined — a fiction.
Those two books, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), are well over thirty-five years old. I was too young to have read them when they came out, let alone to have been interested in reading them at 9 or 13 years old. I read one because it’s famous and was made into a movie that I liked. I found the other by reading the non-fiction work of a writer I’ve never read who was writing about intimacy in fiction. This is important to keep in mind because one of the things I’ve seen some agents throw at writers who balk at finding comp titles is an accusation that the writer isn’t reading widely enough. Maybe, in some cases, this is true. Leveling that accusation at me — or any serious writer who might struggle with or resist comp titles (does Michael Ondaatje need to provide comp titles to his agent or editor?) — is presumptive and rude. I read widely, in and outside the fiction genre, and all of it feeds into my fiction. Should I comp my book to Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death? Sheldon Solomon’s The Worm at the Core? Judy Grahn’s philosophical work around metaformic theory? An obscure poem of Taylor Mali’s called Topless Photograph of Juliette, Taken by Chase Biggs? No, I can’t, at least according to the rules the agents want me to follow, because they’re all too old.
To me, there is no expiration date on what is worth reading, or what can or should inspire and influence my work. Readers are constantly rediscovering “old” books, why do our comp titles have to be restricted to front list books from the last two orthree years? As a writer with a 40 hour a week day job who lives alone and must do all of my own unpaid regenerative labor, I have to make some hard choices on how to spend my limited reading time— and I choose quality over currency and quantity.
Now, I’ll admit, I’m intensely self-conscious about how much I’ve read and how much I’m reading now. I also feel like I got a late start, and that my access was limited by an education system that failed me. So, I probably spend a little more time going back and picking up the books I “should” have read when I was younger instead of reading as much of this year’s new releases as I can. Some of them are pretty fucking worthless anyway. I’ve come to that conclusion because I spend a lot of time in bookstores looking for things to read (and my to-be-read bookcase at home is already over-full). Sadly, in the last twenty years or so, I’ve tended to buy fewer and fewer “front list” titles. The front list titles I do buy are usually ones by writers I know, or are recommended to me by writers and booksellers I know. And even then, I sometimes balk. I’ve always loved wandering bookshelves, and I love odd, random, exciting discoveries. Usually it’s at my favorite local indie bookstore, Watermark Books, but I also engage in bookstore tourism whenever I travel. It’s fun not only to see the small-but-mighty and very charming indie bookstores in other towns, but to also browse their unique selections (the inventory at indie bookstores is wildly divergent as opposed to the inventory at every Barnes & Noble).
It was at the Bookbar (now sadly closed) in Denver, Colorado, where I found the final key to my own project. While browsing their shelves in May of 2019 I found Lindsey Drager’s 2019 novel The Archive of Alternate Endings (My local indie store hadn’t stocked it unit I raved to them about it). Archive did something rare that almost no book I randomly pick off the shelves does anymore: surprise me. The story pairs the Hansel and Gretel folktale with the reappearance of Halley’s comet, telling multiple stories of those who disseminated or came in contact with relics of the Hansel and Gretel tale during those periods when the comet was passing Earth. It’s a gorgeous book that juxtaposes a stellar phenomenon with very earth-bound and moving human struggles.
With that as my final key, I was set loose into my story. I knew how I was going to create the tone, voice, and mood I wanted. I knew where to position my narrator in relation to the story, and what that narrator wanted out of telling the story. I wanted a story that would, at first, appear to be focalized through multiple points, including an almost god-like position that would clue the reader in on certain artifacts and their context that would then imbue the story of the two main characters with additional depth. Slowly, through the course of the story, that god-like narrator would let slip certain clues about his bias and then, at the end, reveal himself as one of the two men wrestling with the appearance of this doppelgänger and his relation to manhood, masculinity, regret, forgiveness, and redemption.
It took me almost a year to finished the first draft, which was right about the time the pandemic kicked off. During the heart of the pandemic, while isolated in my tiny apartment with two cats, I revised and rewrote and tinkered the novel into its final shape. The advice to find comps was in my head because I’m not ignorant of the damn industry I work in, so I started looking and immediately lost hope. By the time I had a completed draft I was comfortable with (sometime in 2022), my one current comp title — The Archive of Alternate Endings — was already too old to use as a comp for most agents.
So, what are those guidelines for find comp titles, anyway?
A guest post on agent Jane Friedman’s blog by Star Wuerdemann collects various guidelines from agents on how to find comp titles, and it’s like reading a confusing research paper assignment from high school. One agent says using TV and movies is okay, but another says that once a book has been made into a movie it’s off-limits. One says you have to find the “perfect” comp, and that no comp is better than a poor comp (but they all demand comps, so what do you do if you feel that all your closest comps are still poor comps? Not offer any comps and hope they don’t reject you out of hand for not following their guidelines to provide comps?). One says to focus on the last few years, going back up to ten years if needed, but another puts the cap at three years, and still another puts it a two years. Some say to take a look at what books would sit on the shelves next to yours, and what writers you might end up on a panel with at a convention or seminar. In one form or another they all say to look for comps with a similar plot, tone, theme, character, character journey, category, genre, POV, or influences, and finally to make sure your comps are “popular” but not “ubiquitous.”
So, let’s take a look at the aspects of my novel, The Poisoned Moon, that could be used to find comp titles — at least as far as I see it — and follow the advice in Ms. Wuerdemann’s post. My list is as general as I can make it, and uses terms and phrases that might appear in a Library of Congress category or topic search, as well as more variable terms.
1) doppelgängers
2) man-woman relationships
3) masculinity
4) men’s interpersonal relationships
5) art
6) archeology
7) myth
8) space exploration
9) cave exploration
10) strippers
11) jealousy
12) Wichita, KS — Fiction
13) solar system — moon
14) multiple points of view
15) meta fiction
16) Fiction — General
17) the eternal return
18) goddess art
19) metaformic theory
20) stalkers
21) episodic structure
22) interconnected vignettes
23) religion
24) sex
25) Subjunctive mood
26) male friendships — fiction
Now, alphabetically, any book I publish, being “literary fiction,” will sit on a shelf near Emily St. John Mandel (interesting side note: we both had our debut novels published by Unbridled Books in 2009), and David Malouf. I admire both of these writers, but Malouf isn’t that well known in the states, and I’ve not read much of his work. He’s in his eighties and his most recent novel was published fourteen years ago. Emily is fantastic, but aside from an occasionally episodic style to our structures, and some similar themes in our early work, we’ve diverged dramatically in the last few years since Station Eleven (2014) was published that any comp would be out of date and imperfect (not to mention I can’t use Station Eleven because I see it as both ubiquitous and it was made into a mini-series for HBO). I could end up being on a panel with Aleksandar Hemon because my first novel has the Bosnian War as a backdrop, but we don’t otherwise have much in common and wouldn’t be on a common panel for our later books. I did my MFA at Naropa University, so, I could be on a panel with Laird Hunt, but the books he’s currently writing don’t really have similarities to what I’m writing. His older books do, but they’re all beyond the two to three year threshold most agents are looking for. Any other literary writer I might end up on a panel with is either too obscure at the moment (Duncan B. Barlow, Junior Burke, Troy James Weaver) for any comp to mean anything to an agent knocking on doors to the Big 5 with my book in their hands.
I recently talked to a couple of booksellers I’m acquainted with about my novel, and asked if they knew any titles that might be similar. Despite their in-depth knowledge of upcoming titles and access to advanced reader copies (ARCs), the only title they came up with that seemed similar to them was House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, which is twenty-three years old. A valiant effort but way off the mark. A more recent suggestion they gave was How High We Go In the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu, but like Station Eleven it might be too science fiction-y to be a good comp for my book (and there’s a talking pig).
Of my twenty-four broad categories, some are so broad as to be irrelevant except as qualifiers to the rest of the list (multiple POV, literary fiction), and some lead in undesirable directions. Most books that employ a doppelgänger as a theme or construct are science fiction or horror. Stalkers and strippers lead to suspense, thrillers, and crime novels. “Questioning masculinity” leads to “toxic masculinity” and lands me again in crime and thriller novels, women’s fiction (stories about women liberating themselves from awful men), or YA dystopian sci-fi, or a lot of non-fiction ranging from men’s rights screeds to early 90s mens movement philosophy. Novels dealing with strippers and sex lead to porn or Romance.
So, I tried story elements. My novel hints at a few tropes, but actively subverts those tropes, so I don’t really consider using them as avenues of research, but let’s give it a shot. One echo is “Fridging” where a character dies or is injured to move the plot forward; however, the dead wife in this story is presented as a focalizing thread in the narrative rather than simply being dead. Also, it’s not her death that spurs the emotional journey of the two men, it’s the arrival of the doppelgänger. Now, the doppelgänger makes use of the “hooker with a heart of gold” and “manic pixie dream girl” tropes, but subverts them by essentially running them in parallel through the two male focalizing characters and exposing the tropes as masculine romantic delusions, and by giving the doppelgänger her own agency, then setting all of that against the specter of a toxic male stalker.
Using those tropes leads me to things that either aren’t good comparisons for my novel (romantic comedies), are outside of my genre (the damn sci-fi/fantasy prevalence of doppelgängers), or, again, too old .
In other words, what I think my novel is about on a thematic, structural, symbolic level, doesn’t get me a list of two to three year old literary novels that feel better than random matches. I have to be broader, more shallow. I have to throw out any structural comparisons because in all my searches, I’ve only found a couple of books that kind of do what I’m doing structurally and one is Lindsey Drager’s book and the other is Ondaatje’s forty-plus year old books Coming through Slaughter and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. And although it doesn’t occur in the verb structures in the narrative, my novel relies on the feeling of a subjunctive mood created by the arrival of this doppelgänger — a great “What if” type of story — and the only book I’ve found like that is Maxwell’s. Also, at its heart is the story of two straight men wrestling with what it means to be a good man in a society that seeks to isolate men from each other and their own feelings of grief and loss, and that pushes them unconsciously toward various forms of toxicity, and benevolent sexism — and I can’t find any literary fiction that’s doing that.
The majority of books I find that deal with masculinity and alternate expressions of masculinity are either simply being critical of masculinity or are books by gay writers about gay characters. I could use one of those as a comp, but the audiences are wildly different. I doubt gay men would be terribly interested in my book and, sadly, most straight men, if they do read, shy away from literary fiction and lean toward sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, detective, or thriller fiction: genres that are typically reinforcing classic masculine and gender structures, but even if they did entail non-toxic expressions of masculinity, or the questioning of masculinity, their genre disqualifies them as comps for my book because the audiences are segregated in the minds of marketers.
So, I find myself in a bit of a dilemma. If I trust my own understanding of my novel, its comp titles are all out of date and therefore not comp titles at all. When I start digging and searching, I end up in places that don’t really seem to fit, therefore they are not “perfect” comps. I’m sure someone, somewhere, might read my book and say, “oh, this is like book X,” but how long and how widely should I search for that mysterious title before I start sending out my novel? This is why I’m focusing on small presses, and why, in general, I’m so concerned about health and viability of the literary landscape.
Do we really want to live in a literary world where you can read anything you want but only as long as it’s a remix of the latest James Patterson or J.K. Rowling novel? I know I don’t.
