The Clash of the Comp Titles

OR why I keep comping my written works to movies and TV – not just books

When I first began my querying journey in September 2021, there loomed large ahead of me a challenge unlike anything I'd ever face: picking comp titles.

According to editor Sam Brody:

"Comp titles (also known as comparative or competitive titles) are ones similar to yours, which you can use as a shorthand to describe your book. There are three different ways to use comp titles: If you like X, you'll like Y; it's X but with Y; it's X meets Y."

Thanks to Discord servers and the magic of Twitter, I've been connected with many amazing authors and, while we can all agree picking comp titles is a pain in the a**, it seems my particular pain differed from theirs; while they struggled to find the perfect book to comp to their WIP, I was struggling to feel like my manuscript "deserved" to be compared to any other published books out there. After all, that's such a high bar to set...

Which, yeah, in case you didn't already know, I have a massive case of imposter syndrome. There likely is no cure.

ANYWAY, by the grace of God and Ren, my mentor-slash-sounding board, I managed to get some comps together for this manuscript: STATION ELEVEN meets A BEGINNING AT THE END meets Mad Max: Fury Road. And when the time came for me to cobble together comps for my thesis-turned-current WIP, my CPs and I figured out that the best call to make is FEED meets the Theranos/Elizabeth Holmes scandal meets Arcane.

If you're seeing a trend here, you're not wrong: I watch a lot of action/adventure/queer media. And that has – for better or for worse – colored how, why, and what I write. So it would stand to reason it seeps into my comps too.

Myriads of Media

I've seen some writers say they don't watch a lot of TV or movies in the genre(s) they write, and other writers say that's all they consume. I'd say I fall somewhere in the middle; I veer sharply toward action and adventure films (the byproduct of growing up on Mission: Impossible and Star Wars movies in the early-to-mid 2000s), and watch TV shows ranging from crime procedurals and documentaries to limited series productions and animated action shows that break my heart on every rewatch (yes, this is a callout post @ Arcane).

The fact that I love consuming stories that come at breakneck speeds and are often spaced out to tell the exact story that needs telling in exactly the amount of time it needs to be told in is part of why the way I write fiction has been so irrevocably shaped by my media consumption. In fact, I'd say that my TV and movie-watching habits are second only to fanfiction in terms of things that have formed and molded the way I write. So it stands to reason that I would embrace those titles as my comp titles if ever I can.

And besides, if I had a book, TV show or movie to comp the manuscript I'm currently querying to, I wouldn't have needed to write this book. So there's that.

To Comp or Not to Comp?

I've seen a lot of thoughts over the months on whether or not people should comp their WIPs to non-book materials. And while I know every agent, editor, and writer likely has a different thought, mine is pretty simple (as all my thoughts are): comps are comps, and if they work, they work.

For me, I want people to know what they're getting into – specifically what the defining narrative elements of my manuscript are. For the manuscript I'm querying, it's fast-paced narrative+action scenes+cross-country apocalyptic roadtrip+the mortifying ordeal of being known while also struggling to find your place in the world. For my current WIP, it's sisterly relationships and their burdens+technology and how its advancement can fuck people over+how the system fucks chronically ill people over. So you can see why my comps would lean into those themes, regardless of format.

That said, your mileage may vary. If you have the perfect comps that mix current genre conventions with great sales pitches, amazing! But if you're like me and just...don't...I say go for it. I'd rather an agent know what they're getting to before they crack into my pages.

Also it's just cool that something I wrote can be comped to my favorite movie of all time.