How to Find Your Comp Titles

What is a comp title or comparison title?

Comp titles are books — usually published within the last three to five years — that sit in the same market space as your novel. They’re titles you reference when pitching your book to agents or publishers, as a way of signaling where your work belongs on the shelf, who the likely readership is, and what commercial appetite already exists for your kind of story.

Your comp title is the book your future readers are currently buying. And it usually helps to have two, so your book can sit in the middle: X meets Y.

A note on “hero books”

At The Novelry, we offer a selection of suggested hero books to our writers as part of our method to help writers unlock their stories. These exemplary books contain good writing, fantastic story structure, and are unarguably good books, acclaimed, awarded, and well-reviewed. The hero book is a tool to help a writer tackle their first draft as their north star during the drafting process.

Your hero book doesn’t need to resemble your novel on the surface — it just needs to show you how a novel works. ‍

The simplest way to remember the difference between hero books and comp titles: your hero book is the book you secretly wish you had written. Your comp title is the book your future readers are currently buying.

You might be interested in Ashley Thorpe’s blog on how to be mindful of marketing trends within the publishing industry.

Why comp titles matter for your elevator pitch

A book with no clear comps is a book that’s difficult to place — not because it isn’t good, but because it hasn’t been made legible to the market.

When most agents read a query letter, they’re going beyond your story — they’re evaluating your whole book. Is there a market for it? Who will read it? How would a publisher position it? Comp titles do a huge amount of work in answering these questions quickly and credibly.

A good comp title communicates several things at once. It signals genre and tone without requiring lengthy explanation. It demonstrates that you understand the current market and have done your research as a professional. And it gives the agent an immediate emotional shorthand — a frame through which to imagine your novel before they’ve read a single page.

Think of comps as the industry’s shared language. X meets Y. Saying your novel is “for fans of The Thursday Murder Club” or “in the vein of Celeste Ng” instantly conjures a mood, a readership, and a set of expectations. And you don’t need to compare your novel to just other novels: consider a movie or TV show too. How about video games? Marketing teams will likely appreciate a mixed-media approach in a modern world where books are being adapted faster than we can read them.

It’s all extremely valuable real estate in a query letter, where you may have only a few sentences to make an impression.

Learn more about literary agents and what they’re looking for.

Comps also matter in the room. When an agent pitches your book to an editor, or when an editor pitches it to their acquisitions board, they’ll use language like: “It has the emotional depth of Maggie O’Farrell with the propulsive plotting of Lisa Jewell.”

Again: X meets Y. Those comparisons do the heavy lifting of justifying a commercial decision to publishing professionals. A book with no clear comps is a book that’s difficult to place — not because it isn’t good, but because it hasn’t been made legible to the market.

X meets Y: how to find comp titles that are right for you

Aim for books that are recognizable and successful, but specific enough to actually communicate something about your work.

Finding strong comp titles is more of a research project than a creative exercise — and that’s appropriate, because comps are a market-facing tool rather than a personal one.

• Start with your genre and subgenre. Read widely in the space your book occupies. You’re looking for similar books, yes, but also titles that are relevant in the current marketplace. If you’re writing a psychological thriller with a domestic setting, you need to know what’s been published recently in that niche, what’s selling, and what’s already oversaturated. Comparing your novel to one of the same genre is a good start, but mixing it with something out of left field could make it really special.
• Use bestseller lists and award longlists. The Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists, the Booker Prize longlist, the Women’s Prize shortlist, and the Goodreads Choice Awards are all excellent places to find recently acclaimed books in your category. These prize-winning titles have proven market appetite and name recognition — exactly what you want from a comp.
• Browse bookstore and Amazon categories. Look at the “Customers also bought” sections and the editorial recommendations in your genre. Publishers and booksellers are already doing the positioning work. All you need to do is notice it. A good comp may live within these lists.‍
• Ask: what books will my readers already love? Picture your ideal reader. What are they buying? What’s on their nightstand? What did they post about on BookTok last month? How about your friends? The books in that ecosystem are your comps. Find these common themes to discover your future readers!‍
• Look within the industry. What has sold recently? What has been a runaway bestseller? Which books are generating hype across book fairs, online, and beyond? ‍
• Avoid using giants. It can be tempting to comp your novel to beloved modern classics like Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Gone Girl, or Lessons in Chemistry — but these are so widely cited they’ve become meaningless. They also raise the bar to an implausible height. Aim for books that are recognizable and successful, but specific enough to actually communicate something about your work.

How many comp titles do you need for a literary agent?

More is not more, here. Two or three well-chosen comps are far more powerful than a scattershot list.

The industry standard for most query letters and pitches is two to three comp titles. This is enough to triangulate your book’s position in the market — genre, tone, target audience — without overwhelming the reader or making it seem as though you haven’t been able to land on a clear identity for your novel.

Two titles are usually the minimum. One title alone can feel too narrow, and it puts a lot of pressure on a single point of reference. Three is often ideal: you might use one to signal genre, one to signal tone or voice, and one to signal readership or emotional register.

Some writers use a hybrid formula, combining a book with a film, TV show or podcast — especially in genre fiction or commercial fiction where screen adaptations have shaped reader expectations. “Fans of Fleabag and Elizabeth Is Missing” is a perfectly legitimate comp pairing if your book fits.

What you want to avoid is a long list. Five or more comp titles suggest that you’re hedging, or that the novel doesn’t have a clear sense of what it is. More is not more, here. Two or three well-chosen comps are far more powerful than a scattershot list.

Here’s a good guide on the best time to query agents.

When should you find your comp titles?

Once your manuscript is complete and you’ve moved into revision, you’ll have a much clearer sense of what you’ve actually written, which is often somewhat different from what you planned to write.

This is where many writers go wrong: they try to identify their comp titles before they’ve finished — or sometimes even started — writing the book. This puts the cart before the horse in a way that can distort the creative process.

The short answer is: find your comps after you’ve finished your first draft, and refine them when you’re ready to query.

During the writing process, your focus should be on the work itself — the story, the characters, the voice. This is the time for your hero book, not your comp titles. Trying to define your book’s market position while you’re still discovering what the book is can cause you to write toward an imagined category rather than toward the truth of your story.

Once your manuscript is complete and you’ve moved into revision, you’ll have a much clearer sense of what you’ve actually written, which is often somewhat different from what you planned to write. From that vantage point, you can look at the market honestly and ask: where does this sit? What’s it like? Who reads this kind of book?

The importance of finding a truly good comp

Comp titles are professional, strategic, and outward-facing: they’re the way you help publishing teams understand what you’ve made and who it’s for.

Your comp research should be at its most active and current in the months before you begin querying. Publishing trends shift quickly, and a book published five or six years ago is already stretching the limits of what agents consider current. You want comps that are recent enough to reflect the market your book will enter — not the market that existed when you had the idea.

Your hero book and your comparison titles are both essential but they belong to different stages of the writing life, and serve two completely different rooms: the quiet one where you write your book, and the crowded one where it has to go out and sell itself. The hero book is personal, creative and private: it’s the novel that teaches you how to write your novel.‍

Comp titles are professional, strategic, and outward-facing: they’re the way you help publishing teams understand what you’ve made and who it’s for.

Get both right, and you’ll be better equipped at every stage from the first sentence to the submission inbox. Can you find your perfect match?‍

*

The Novelry offers expert advice, one-on-one support from bestselling authors and Big Five editors, alongside a vibrant community — taking writers from first idea to a finished, submission-ready novel. Join the fiction writing school for serious writers.