As you work toward the publication of your book, it must be compared to something. An independent evaluation can be priceless for the comparables section of a query. We’re all struggling with the “so what?” when considering what to read. A good comps section will help place your book and point at similarities and differences.
Writing your query letter offers the easiest early step to see if your book can be published by a company. The part of your query that can serve you fastest is recent books like yours, ones that have made a splash in the market. Or books that succeeded in the market that are sort of like yours, but they left one part out. Your query helps an agent, or a publisher, imagine the success of the book. Even when that publisher becomes you, the author.
Selling your book
Publishers have to make a case to whoever sells their books. That might be a distributor, which is a sales force not working strictly for one press, but for many presses. Or it might be an in-house sales effort, if you got into a big enough publisher. Whether or not your book gets picked up will be decided by the people who sell books. Knowing what titles like your book are selling in the trade makes it easier to know if you’ve got what it takes. Agents need to know at a glance what kind of book yours is — while readers need to know if you’re going to fit among the authors they already love. Always pick a genre, even if it’s as broad as memoir.
Whether you work on your query letter or your proposal, you must find books that are like yours. The shorthand here is “a book on the same shelf as mine,” or in the same online category.
I’ve got more to share about how comps make queries get better, and proposals nurture a business plan, in the Write Stuff Substack. It’s written for authors who want to publish.
