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[akje]

So...comp titles. This is a topic I have unpopular opinions about. Yes, publishers want to know there's an audience for your book by comparing it to other books that have sold well recently. But that's why all the books sound the same today and nobody is doing well. Ideally, every book should be unlike anything that's come before it. What the readers really want, I think, is something different. They just don't want to gamble on something they have to pay so much for without knowing whether they'll like it. Books are a singular product in that they're the only thing you purchase sight unseen, and in many cases can't get a refund for. Those unhauls on YouTube represent a lost fortune.

Worse yet is trying to figure out what to compare your book to. The book that inspired my current wip is Song of Achilles, and yes, I'm planning to use that as a comp title. But it's 14 years old now, and there really hasn't been a book like it since. Whenever I search for similar novels, all I get is a string of Greek myths that otherwise have nothing in common.

To my mind the main storyline was the romance. Romance can take place in any place or time period, though, so I'm not really interested in the ancient Greek setting. Mine takes place in the equivalent of Georgian/Regency England, but in a fictional country. That makes it a Ruritanian romance, right? Have there been any Ruritanian romances since The Prisoner of Zenda back in 1894? I suppose that gives me one more comp title.

And just this morning LitHub published a post about books with fictional settings. I'm wondering now if any of these could be comp titles...

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Yes, publishers want to know there's an audience for your book by comparing it to other books that have sold well recently. <<

I can see some sense in batching stories, because most readers have favorite topics -- I will seriously consider any story about xenolinguistics, for instance.

But not all stories have close comparisons. Take the Neanderthal comic book I bought off Kickstarter a few years back. I could compare it to other wordless books, or other science stories, but there really isn't anything else similar to it. Okay, I recognized most of the flora and fauna from reading the sections of Jean M. Auel that everyone else skipped, but those were novelizations rather than graphic novels.


>>But that's why all the books sound the same today and nobody is doing well.<<

That helps explain why I go into a bookstore and everything is either something I've read 500 times or the first couple sentences are something I definitely do not want to read. It's gotten so bad I've had to resort to starting in the magazine section of the bookstore, where I can still find something worth buying, so the universe doesn't have a kernel panic attack over me not finding anything in a bookstore.

I do still find good things from crowdfunding, some from friends, some on Kickstarter. Much of that is innovative, which I like. I've lined my house with books, I don't really need a 501st lost prince story.

I've had better luck crowdfunding my own work too. I've done convention publishing but it is just so slow. Crowdfunding removes both the guesswork and the lagtime. \o/ And then, what are my readers prompting me for? Stuff the mainstream isn't giving them. Gothic fluff. Postapocalyptic hopepunk. Asexual protagonists. If there were close matches in the mainstream, people wouldn't be asking me to write it, they'd ask for something else. That's kinda the point.


>> What the readers really want, I think, is something different. They just don't want to gamble on something they have to pay so much for without knowing whether they'll like it.<<

Something counterintuitive I learned from crowdfunding: the best way to hook people on a new series is to give away the first installment free, so they can see how cool it is and will want more. For a while Baen was doing that with novels -- they had a CD loaded with free electronic copies of first books in a bunch of series, that came stuck inside the cover of a new hardback. Clever. Anyhow, once somebody sponsors a thing, it goes up for everyone to read. I've got hobby-editors, basically, who back particular series.

Good luck finding comp titles for your work.

Re: Thoughts

[akje]

Thank you! And good luck with your crowdfunding too! (੭*ˊᵕˋ)੭‧˚₊*̥✧

Yeah, I'm kind of surprised at how the ebook revolution is turning out. I thought once anyone could publish a book and there were no longer any gate keepers, then we'd start to see some real innovation in books--a lot of experimental work and ingenious stuff that would never be published by the big five. But everyone just wants to make money--though I can understand that--so they try to rewrite what's already selling big. Can't blame them, but it's disappointing. (ノ_<、)ヾ(´▽｀)

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Yeah, I'm kind of surprised at how the ebook revolution is turning out. I thought once anyone could publish a book and there were no longer any gate keepers, then we'd start to see some real innovation in books--a lot of experimental work and ingenious stuff that would never be published by the big five. But everyone just wants to make money--though I can understand that--so they try to rewrite what's already selling big. Can't blame them, but it's disappointing.<<

Oh, it's out there. It's just harder to find. Publishers used to be good for locating worthwhile reads, but now most of them are printing crap.

The places I find the most innovative work are:

* Kickstarter. I just backed an anthology of queer cozy academia. :D

* Fanfic. It's a lot better written than it used to be, at least the best stuff is.

* Individual author websites. I've found some great SF that way, far better than Asimov's mopey crud.

* Crowdfunding. You can ask for and get what you want. Check out dialecticdreamer and Feathering the Nest which is still open today.

Re: Thoughts

[akje]

Oooh, I agree with you about the fanfic. I haven't read any in years, but there were some on A03 that were really good. Same with author websites. I've been collecting website addresses for awhile just as inspiration for creating my own site, but I've found a lot of good stuff on some of them. I'll check out the others you mentioned. Thanks for the suggestions! ( ˆ◡ˆ)۶ ٩(˘◡˘ )