Today’s post is by writer, editor, and critic Lisa Levy, whose Killer Comps service is designed to help writers find their best comps.
You’ve been slaving over your query, which might have taken longer than the manuscript. Your lists of agents in the databases and spreadsheets are all perfect. Even your synopsis looks right. But you have been avoiding a critical element of your project: comps.
Comps—short for comparison titles—are recent books that have something crucial in common with your book. Finding comps can be the most challenging part of pitching for many writers, and their ambiguity raises anxiety levels. How old is a good comp? Does it need to be the same genre as my book? What if there isn’t anything I can use that isn’t too old or obscure?
Squash your anxiety if you can and take your comps seriously. There are compelling reasons why comps count a lot. Comps are your strongest marketing tool, and the first chance you have to position your book in the market and in the world. An agent or editor should immediately understand something critical about your book based on your comps. They should help you articulate where you position yourself within a very competitive market. They are publishing shorthand, and you should speak fluent publishing when you enter the query trenches.
Primary comps, secondary comps, and the Most Popular Comp at School
Primary comps: The best place to find comps is to read books and track sales in your genre. These books are what I call primary comps, and they are the ones we stress about. A primary comp should have something major in common with your book and have demonstrated appeal to a wide audience.
Why do agents and editors want comps published within the last two or three years? Because book publishing is a slow medium: if your manuscript got acquired tomorrow by a Big Five, you can expect it to be published in around two years soonest. By then, your comps will be five years old, and even in book publishing five years is a long time ago.
Secondary comps: You can broaden the description of your book using secondary comps. They are looser, and can demonstrate that you know how to get your book to that audience. They can also suggest new audiences for your work based on phenomena other than books. Secondary comps are not necessarily timely, but they are a known quantity. These comps can be based on books or a writer’s style; 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. For example, say a book is memoir (maybe memoir plus plus plus?) about queer partner abuse that draws inspiration from archetypes from fairy tales to Law & Order: SVU. That’s Carmen Maria Machado’s gut punch In the Dreamhouse (2019), which won the National Book Award for Memoir. It’s a book I think about when writers worry that comps are homogenizing writing. There are so many wild elements and riffs and tropes in Dreamhouse it would be both a dream and a series of sleepless nights thinking about all the material Machado makes her own.
Most Popular Comp at School. Sometimes a title pops up a little too often. I call this the Most Popular Comp at School. Recently, that comp was Tara Westover’s memoir of courage, self-invention, and dreams, Educated (2018). Every memoir where the author persevered in tough times feels justified to use Westover’s book in their queries. But unless the storytelling, the setting, the characters, and the themes are the same as the Most Popular Comp in School, look for something a little more offbeat (though still a decent seller, or a prizewinner).
Don’t ignore other popular culture if it aligns with the book you are pitching. On television, Only Murders in the Building, The White Lotus, Succession, and Knives Out have all become valid comps. The proliferation online of influencers and brands have expanded this notion. If I subscribe to Oprah’s newsletter, read The Skimm, drift in and out of veganism, love true crime, and am active in the subreddit for Dateline, that is quite a bit of information to draw from: this is a potential reader for a social media thriller like the You series by Caroline Kepnes or The Influencers (2025) by Anna-Marie McLemore. If I say a book is Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (1939) with the libido of Miranda July’s All Fours (2024) set amongst a tight group of college friends a la Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992), you should get that it’s part cozy, part mystery, and part academic satire. It’s a new spin on something I like, which is a great place for comps to land. You want to be on the axis of what’s new and what’s familiar.
Finding your comps and making them stick
The potential and the possibilities are what I like about comps. As a book reviewer with 20-ish years in the publishing trenches, I have been on the other side of many pitches where the comps sold it for me. On my TBR shelf now, I have a rewriting of Little Women as domestic suspense I’m itching to read. I just got a book described as “the kind of cool-girl campus novel that will appeal to adults who grew up reading Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty or Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House.” To be frank, I don’t know those books; my guess is I’m too adult for this trend. But I was intrigued enough to keep reading: “Fans of queer literary fiction like Plain Bad Heroines and lovers of coming-of-age fiction with horror elements like Yellowjackets and Picnic at Hanging Rock won’t be able to put this one down.” This is a mouthful of comps, and a potpourri of disparate works in varied genres is not for amateurs. But the juxtaposition between book, TV show, and movie all on the edge of horror feels very now, and that intrigues me as a reviewer.
In helping other writers research comps, I give them ideas based on their queries and/or proposals, a short biography, and their ideas about comps. I will look at elements of the book which might lead to comps they hadn’t found yet: genre, setting, characters, plot, themes, period, and any other incidents of overlap I can find. When I assisted Caroline Hatchett with comps for her manuscript Iguanaland she’d originally compared it to Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (1998), the science writing of Mary Roach, and H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (2016), which I felt was too elegiac. I did like her inclusion of Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (2025), another book where a writer’s encounter with an animal leads to an inquiry about what makes us human.
But Hatchett was sitting on a comps goldmine: Iguanaland is set in Florida, and Florida has an oddball literary tradition which suits the subject and style of Iguanaland. Hatchett now has a wealth of recent-ish books about the wackiest state to choose from, including Sarah Gerard’s Sunshine State (2017), Lauren Groff’s Florida (2019), and Kent Russell’s In the Land of Good Living: A Journey to the Heart of Florida (2020).
The hunt for comps also led to new areas of interest and research for Amanda Borquaye. Her work in progress, Hypothesis of Melancholy, is a memoir about generational trauma and being an African immigrant in America. As Hypothesis is more cultural studies than straight memoir, Borquaye ideally needs a mix of books that intersect with hers in their subject, approach, and sensibility.
Borquaye’s list of possible comps were all by BIPOC women who are relatively young: Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong (2020) is an essay collection by a poet with a hefty dose of memoir; Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu (2020), a memoir by a young woman from Ghana (which was Borquaye’s homeland) which won an important award; Quarterlife by Satya Doyle Byock (2022); and Maame by Jessica George (2023), Borquaye’s strongest comp as it hits the trifecta: it’s a New York Times bestseller; a book club pick for the Today show’s Read With Jenna; and though it’s fiction, themes of Africa, generational succession, and exile characterize both George’s and Borquaye’s books.
In order to thicken Borquaye’s comps, we added books by recent immigrants—specifically African women—and about girlhood. We discussed musician Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart (2021), an immigrant’s memoir popular among younger writers; and Abi Daré’s The Girl With the Louding Voice (2020), a Jenna book club pick and NYT bestseller, which also has immigration themes. Although Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count (2025) is fiction, she’s one of the most prominent African writers internationally and the book is super recent. Finally, I suggested she add Girlhood by Melissa Febos (2021), a prizewinner by a respected queer and indigenous author which delves into the trauma themes in Borquaye’s book. Febos’s book would remind both Borquaye and her potential agent/editor that her book will not just be an important title for African writers but has the potential to have an international impact.
Note from Jane: Need more help with comps? Check out Lisa’s Killer Comps service, designed to help writers find their best comps.
Lisa Levy has over 20 years’ experience as a freelance writer, editor, and critic, including stints as an editor at the LA Review of Books and Literary Hub. She has published in major venues like the New Republic, the NY Times, the CBC, and the Washington Post, where she writes about crime fiction for Book World. She is writing a book called Funeral in My Brain: A Biography of Migraine which examines the storied history of migraine, the current treatment landscape, and how the expressions of the migraine brain prove its both neurodiverse and wildly creative. Her 20 years as a book reviewer spawned her service Killer Comps, which is designed to help writers find their best comps.
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