Comp Titles

"Comp Titles" is like the SAT analogy section meets IP-driven sycophancy meets a bad-faith determination to ignore human possibility.

Enough about me. Let’s talk about you. Explain what’s unique about yourself, and why people should be excited about that sort of uniqueness. Now describe yourself by using just two well-known people.

They can be real or fictional. At least one should be very famous. The other should be more obscure, to show you did the homework on the unique person you claim to be. If you’re feeling frisky, throw in a third person, though that may come off as a little cloying, a little desperate, a little try-hard.

This is a branding exercise. If it makes you feel terrible, this essay may help explain why.

Elevator pitches to untold riches

That first exercise is something every writer has to do with their book. It’s called a comp title. It’s where a writer says, “my novel Snowburn is a cross between the Book of Leviticus and Dancing with the Stars,” or “Hamlet meets Peppa Pig,” and the like.

When I was a young, aspiring writer, I’d send hundreds of letters, emails, excerpts, synopses and outlines to agents. Comp titles were part of that hat-in-hand schlep.

After working on something that was as close as bearable to the emergency of my own heart, or as original as my imagination could gaze, I always felt nauseous to sum up the product of a few years of my life in this fashion.

Savvy comps

The aim of comp title is to entice the personal taste and blind greed of the agent and publisher. The agent would say, “well, I do love the Book of Leviticus, I’ll take a look.” Then the publisher would say, ”we all know that Dancing with the Stars is the best television show ever.” And like that, your career was launched.