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Today I bring you a guest post on the subject of comp titles, from literary critic Lisa Levy1, who covers crime fiction for the Washington Post. Just this week, Lisa wrote about new “twisty” thrillers by Jo Piazza, Sarah Pinborough, and Liv Constantine.
A few weeks ago, I solicited advice letters from Attention Economy subscribers who were struggling to find comp titles. This week, Lisa answers!
Note: I have shortened these advice letters for length.
Killer Comps by Lisa Levy
How are your comps? Be honest—most writers struggle with coming up with great comps. If you need help, you are in the right place.
What's a great comp? Something well known that clearly resonates with your book. Ideally your comp is from the last two years, but within five years is okay. A comp can be a book, a TV show, a movie, or a cultural trend. It can use the "X crossed with Y" formulation, or "if X wrote Y" works too. But sometimes those seem trite, or too commercial, or not commercial enough.
Comps are not about art. They are your strongest marketing tools. An agent or editor should immediately understand how to position your book based on comps. It's publishing shorthand, and it's vital to speak publishing when you enter the query/submission trenches.
There are two types of comps, primary and secondary. The primary comps are the most important, and the ones we all stress about. A primary comp should have something major in common with your book and must have demonstrated appeal to a wide audience. You can sprinkle secondary comps throughout your proposal. They should have an instructive relationship to your book: the subject, the style, the sensibility. A primary comp is sustenance. Secondary comps are seasoning.
How do you find the strongest comps? You ask your bookish friends. You fall into a research hole and end up on Amazon or Goodreads. You go to your local bookstore and say you liked book X, could they suggest something similar? You hope it's lying in wait on your bookshelves.
Elena asks:
How can I tell how well my comps have sold?
You have hit on a difficult topic, as actual sales numbers are hard to compute and even harder to find. I'd look at bestseller lists (New York Times, USA Today); Amazon rankings; contemporary reviews and mentions. If a book is universally loved, Book Marks is a good source of aggregate reviews; and if it was published within the last five years, use it. It also helps if a writer is well-known, if the book was adapted for TV or movies, or is on a universal topic people like to read about (e.g., marriage, monsters, murder).
Alison is asking for help for comp titles for her novel titled Wildfire Canyon:
In Los Angeles's upwardly mobile Wildwood Canyon, the fates of two families—one working class and one middle class—intertwine during a wildfire, exposing the vulnerabilities and communities that surface when disaster strikes. The story is told over the course of one week, culminating in the day of the fire, and from 4 POVs. Juan Ortega is a gay, half-Mexican firefighter who surprised everyone when he left the LA County Fire Department to work privately for the billionaire mayor at his mansion in Wildwood Canyon. His best friend Abby Magnusson, an unlucky-in-love lesbian, is trying to strike the right balance between her dedication to her job as station 67's newest captain and what she owes her loved ones. Abby's mother, Meredith, has lived in Wildwood Canyon for 40 years with her husband, an emotionally distant academic, and has recently taken on caregiving responsibilities during his illness. Juan's bisexual twin sister Pilar teaches at a school in the heel of Wildwood Canyon and is rethinking her troubled marriage after reconnecting with Abby.
When fire breaks out one November day in Los Angeles, the Ortegas and the Magnussons must face their own demons as the flames race toward them and try to help each other survive.
As far as ensemble LA stories, you have a rich tradition to draw upon. There are also a few things I can think of in terms of work v. family. You also might emphasize this is an LA book but not a Hollywood one, as that is something we don't often see. You mention The Pitt, but I would also think about shows like 9-1-1, which looks at a cascade of diverse characters at home and at work.
Primary
Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere (2017; also on the literary/commercial divide, and made into a TV series in 2020, so it's a primary comp despite its age)
Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars (2024)—more literary, large diverse cast
Karen Russell, The Antidote (2024)—dust bowl disaster, also literary
Secondary
Steph Cha, Your House Will Pay (2019)—excellent book about LA families told through the lens of the riots, literary/crime fiction.
Janelle Brown, I'll Be You (2022)—definitely look at her books and
Lisa Jewell's books which are also literary/commercial and tend toward sprawling plot/lots of characters
Marisa writes in, asking for comps for her memoir:
EVERYTHING YOU CAN’T CONTROL is a darkly humorous mental health memoir set in 2017 NYC with a focus on how workplace culture is maladapted to support us at our most complicated.
At 31, my therapist diagnosed a mixed state, the most dangerous type of bipolar episode, and recommended hospitalization. I refused, manipulated by the seduction of mania and desperate to stay out of the psych ward. I’d handle it. But between raging at everyone from strangers on the subway to my own husband, impulsive 5-page emails to my principal and co-teachers, and darting into traffic in tears, these destructive behaviors could cost me my marriage, my job—and my life.
Their last hope, my family coerced me into the hospital, a prison that I navigated by befriending a vampire-like phlebotomist, code-naming patients, starring in my very own musical, hiding from paparazzi, and inventing my version of Yelp for the psychiatric staff. Once I fought my way back to reality, I faced another battle—everyone’s altered perceptions of me—and had to decide what I really wanted in life: to advocate for people in similar circumstances.
As far as comps, I think the obvious category for comps would be psychiatric memoirs, especially those that described mixed states:
Primary
Donald Antrim, One Friday in April (2021)
Suzanne Scanlon, Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen (2024)
Secondary (older, but still worth thinking about)
Esme Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)
Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind (1995)—the definitive memoir of bipolar
Emily Fox Gordon, Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy (2000)
Sophia is also seeking help with comps for her memoir:
In LAST WORDS, a determined young woman seeks to understand herself and make sense of her father’s suicide while working as a death row investigator for clients facing execution.
Other than Alex Marzano Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body, I’ve had a hard time finding comp titles for books that are literary and weave two narrative threads together, which is an important part of my book. There are plenty of memoirs about suicide loss and parental death, but when I look at those I feel like I’m just choosing at random without finding a special reason that makes one a better comp than the other. In other words: grief memoirs feel too broad, and crime stories feel too specific. Can you help?
I'd focus on the father/daughter element and make the investigation important but secondary. There are other books that are about prison and prisoners, but I think yours is going to hang on the personal element.
Primary
Erika Krouse, Tell Me Everything (2022)—won an Edgar; about an investigation of sexual assault and Krouse's own memory of being assaulted
Lilly Dancyger, Negative Space (2021)—a daughter investigating her imperfect, heroin addict father
Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love (2019)—has the family secret element big time, probably the best seller among these and Shapiro has name recognition
Secondary (older, but still worth thinking about)
Alex Marzano Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body (2017)—given the age I wouldn't lean too hard on it, but it is a very close analogy to your book as it has the death row investigation and family elements
Leah Carroll, Down City (2017)—a memoir of a daughter with a criminal father
Hire Lisa for help with your comps
Lisa offers two levels of service for writers struggling to comp with comp titles. She’s an expert in adult trade fiction and nonfiction; no YA or kid lit.
Just the Comps ($75): You send Lisa the elevator pitch and synopsis, a brief bio, and your comp ideas. In return, you will get at least five titles. This service does not include a meeting. Just the comps.
Comprehensive Comps ($150): You send Lisa your full query if you have it, or you can send the synopsis, a bio, and your comp ideas. Lisa will schedule a 45-minute brainstorming session with you and you will get at least eight titles.
Book Gossip
If You’re Seeing This was in The Cut’s Book Gossip newsletter this week.
Town and Country included it in their list of The 20 Best Books to Read in August, calling it “a funny, dark look at the new creator economy in a way only Leigh Stein can.”
Meet me on tour
This is the complete list of tour stops for my new novel! I can’t add any more stops to this list because I’m running a Hype House in September, and I had to plan my tour around it.
Launch event in Brooklyn on August 26th at 7pm with Josh Lora (@tellthebeees) at Powerhouse Arena ***Email your confirmation receipt to my assistant Callie (assistant@leighstein.com) and she’ll send you the location for a 5pm mixer with other Attention Economy subscribers***
In conversation with Annabel Monaghan at Athena Books in Old Greenwich on August 27th at 6:30pm; registration required
In conversation with Amelia Wilson at the White Hart Inn in Salisbury, CT; registration required
In conversation with Fortesa Latifi at Skylight Books in LA on September 8th at 7pm; registration required
In conversation with
at the Rudolph Steiner Branch in Chicago on September 24 at 6:30pm; registration required
Chat Room
Tomorrow evening I’ll be interviewing John Francisconi about his job representing Penguin Random House titles to independent bookstores: what happens at sales conference? What’s the difference between marketing and sales? What can authors do to get their books in indie bookstores?
There is no link to register. Diamond medallion members of this newsletter will receive the Zoom link tomorrow morning.
Lisa is also one of my clients; for St. Martin’s Press, she is currently under contract for a nonfiction book titled FUNERAL IN MY BRAIN: A BIOGRAPHY OF MIGRAINE, about her 20-year chronic-migraine life, as well as the creative work of other sufferers, from Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath to Edgar Allan Poe and Sigmund Freud.
Thank you Leigh and Lisa for including my WIP in this! Really helpful examples and considerations as I'm working on my proposal.
K. So. First of all, I can't wait to read Marissa's EVERYTHING YOU CAN’T CONTROL. I've already formed a room in my imagination for that hospital ward.
Second: thank you! I'm so glad to know that Ms Levy's work exists. I'll be calling on her when I'm ready to start pitching.