Coming up with Comp Titles
As I’ve advertised fairly heavily on this page, I’m pitching my novel to literary agents at the moment. One of the biggest challenges I’m facing is coming up with comparison titles. i.e. “It’s James Bond meets The Revenant,” that accurately capture what my novel is about.
Most agents advise that you should only use references from novels that have come out in the last ten years or so. All of my go-to literary references seem to be from the mid 20th century or older.
Before this starts to sound like I’m about to launch into some rant about being “born on the wrong era”, being an “old soul” or any other cop out for being out of touch, I’ve got an explanation:
Like a lot of people I know, I stopped consistently reading fiction at around age twelve and didn’t pick it up again until I went to university. As a result, I played catch up for a number of years after that—mainly reading the classics that I hadn’t tackled at the age I should have.
When I first embarked on writing this novel, the bulk of my reading went into non-fiction sources. It made sense at the time. Research.
I can tell you a lot about Hungarian history, the utilization of undue influence within cults and Mao era re-education tactics, but if you ask me about contemporary novels in my genre? The list I can draw from is fairly short.
And that’s not what agents and publishers want to see. “oh great, your target audience existed sixty years ago? Find me a time machine and we might be able to sell your book to them.”
In the last few years I’ve put a lot of work into catching up on this front, but I’m not the fastest reader, so it’s a lumbering work in progress.
The funny thing is, my mind naturally leans quite heavily on cultural reference points when it comes to aesthetics. But it’s from music rather than literature that I draw these connections.
Since roughly the first year into writing this novel, I’ve thought about my novel as a mix between Pink Floyd’s “Animals” and Tool’s “Lateralus.”
“Animals” draws very heavily on George Orwell’s Animal farm—which probably aligns most overtly with my novel’s societal themes.
“Lateralus” leans heavily on themes surrounding the Fibonacci sequence, universal patterns etc— this link is definitely present in my novel—then again, I suppose the Fibonacci sequence is present in everything if you want to get pedantic…
But the real essence of this aesthetic is abstract. The point is, you can’t necessarily put your finger on it. It’s an echo of the inspiration but not quite the same.
I suspect that using musical references in a cover letter is unlikely to make sense to any agent who hasn’t done a borderline unhealthy deep dive into both of these albums.
So how have I solved this?
I’ve taken off my creative hat and tried to think as commercially as possible.
Essentially working backwards from current market trends, I’ve done more research and looked into what is currently selling in my genre. I’ve identified the contemporary titles that align most closely with my own and am steadily reading my way through them to make sure I’m not way off the mark.
This approach is never going to match up perfectly with the novel I’ve written, but when you think about the purpose of comparison titles, that’s not really the point.
The function of these comparisons is to demonstrate that audiences already exist for aspects of my novel and assure a potential publisher that they’re not going to be forced to generate momentum from ground zero if they take me on as a client.
It’s a bit gross to talk about art in these terms, but this is the reality of it.
