Writers overthink comp titles more than any other part of the query. That’s not an insult — it’s just what Jonathan Baker, a publishing consultant who has worked as both a literary agent and an editor, has observed after more than a decade of helping authors get their queries right.
“There is no element of query letters that writers overthink more than comps,” he says. And the single biggest mistake he sees? Choosing books that are similar to yours in some way — but didn’t actually sell.
Before we talk about what to do, it helps to understand what comps are actually supposed to accomplish. Because most of the anxiety around them comes from solving the wrong problem.
What Comp Titles Are Actually Doing
Comp titles are not about plot similarity. They are not about shared themes, matching demographics, or finding a book with the same narrative structure as yours. They are about one thing: market signal.
When you open your query with “Fans of Freida McFadden and Lisa Jewell will love this,” you are not telling the agent your book resembles those books in any particular way. You are telling them: there is a shelf for this book. There are readers who are hungry for exactly this kind of story. Here is the evidence that those readers exist and buy books.
“The agent has already triangulated — figured out what shelf in the bookstore your book would sit on, who the readers are — and it’s a very quick way to do that,” Baker explains.
This also clarifies why plot matching is the wrong approach. “Nobody walks into a bookstore and says, ‘Do you have a book about a woman who’s a single mom from Cincinnati?'” Baker points out. “But if they read a book and it has a certain vibe or feel, they’re going to go look for something else like it.”
That’s what you’re capturing. Not what happens in your book. How it feels to read it — the emotional register, the pacing, the reader it’s written for.
This is also why walking into a bookstore (or browsing a shelf, literally or mentally) is genuinely useful comp research. You’re not looking for books that share your plot. You’re looking for books that would sit next to yours and attract the same reader. For a methodical process for finding those books, our companion post — How to Find Comp Titles That Actually Work — walks through it step by step. This post is about what to do with them once you’ve found them.
The One Mistake That Quietly Sinks Good Queries
You’ve found a book that genuinely feels like yours. Same genre, same emotional register, same reader. You’re excited about it as a comp. Here’s the question to ask before you use it: did it sell?
Because a comp that didn’t sell doesn’t signal a market. It signals the opposite. You’re inadvertently telling the agent: “Here’s a book like mine that nobody bought.” That’s not the message you want to send.
The problem is that publishing sales data is genuinely hard to find. BookScan memberships are expensive, and Amazon — the world’s biggest bookseller — doesn’t even report its numbers to BookScan. So the most accurate sales database in publishing is missing data from the most important retailer. What do you do?
Baker has a workaround he developed from his time working with real internal numbers. Go to Goodreads. Find the book. Look at the number of ratings — not reviews, ratings. Multiply by four or five. That gives you a rough approximation of copies sold.
A book with 20,000 ratings has probably sold somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 copies. That’s a healthy comp. A book with 800 ratings has probably sold 3,000–4,000 copies. That’s a book that didn’t find its audience, and using it as a comp quietly signals that yours might not either.
Two important calibrations:
First, this doesn’t work for middle grade. Eleven-year-olds are not on Goodreads in significant numbers, so ratings dramatically undercount actual sales in that category. (For middle grade comps, Baker recommends leaning into beloved classics the agent would know — more on that below.)
Second, you have to adjust for genre. A World War II historical novel with 15,000 copies sold is a genuinely strong comp — that’s a good performance for that category. A romantasy with 15,000 copies sold is a modest one. You can easily find romantasy titles with 100,000 to 200,000 copies sold. Context matters.
Comp Titles vs. Hooks: An Important Distinction
Here’s something that trips writers up: “Star Wars meets The Goonies” is not a comp title. It’s a hook.
Both movies are decades old and have no publishing sales data attached to them. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use that kind of framing — Baker says use it if it works. “If it instantly forms a picture in the agent’s mind and makes them lean forward, use it.” The point of a hook like that is to triangulate tone and feel in a single sentence, which it does brilliantly. It just belongs earlier in your query, as part of your opening pitch, rather than in the spot where you’re signaling market.
Think of it this way: your hook tells the agent what kind of experience your book is. Your comps tell the agent that readers exist and pay money for that experience. You may need both. They do different jobs.
Similarly, TV shows and films can work as one half of a comp pairing if the other half is a book with real sales. “The tone of Succession meets [recent literary thriller with strong Goodreads ratings]” is a legitimate move. Just make sure at least one of your comps is a book, and that it sold.
How Many Comps Do You Actually Need?
Two. Almost always two.
One that signals genre — this is the shelf your book lives on. One that signals vibe — this is the emotional or tonal register of your book within that genre. Together, they tell an agent everything they need to triangulate your readership.
You do not need to explain why each comp is relevant. Agents know the market. If you are using strong comps, the connection will be self-evident — and if it isn’t self-evident, that’s usually a sign the comp isn’t quite right, not a sign that you need more words to justify it.
“Really, agents know the market,” Baker says. “You can just mention the two books.”
Listing four comps and annotating each one (“Like X, my book also features a protagonist dealing with grief…”) has two problems. It eats word count you cannot afford in a 300-word query. And it signals insecurity — as though you’re not confident the comps speak for themselves, so you’re explaining them before anyone asks.
Where Do Comps Go in the Query?
This is genuinely a judgment call, and Baker is one of the few people who will say so directly rather than giving you a rule that doesn’t exist.
If your comps are strong — if the names will immediately signal a hungry market to any agent who reads them — put them up front. In the first paragraph, before your pitch. “Fans of Freida McFadden and Lisa Jewell will love this” at the top of a query does real work immediately: the intern reading at speed already knows this is a domestic thriller with commercial appeal before she reads a word of your pitch.
If your comps are solid but not immediately recognizable, or if your hook is stronger than your comps, lead with your hook and your pitch and let the comps do their work later. Some agents also simply prefer the pitch first — which is another reminder that there are no universal rules here, only judgment calls made with good information.
What Baker is clear about: don’t bury comps so deep in the query that an intern scanning at speed might not reach them. If they’re there to do a job, let them do it where it matters.
When the “Rules” Don’t Apply
You will read advice that says comps must be published within the last three to five years. This is genuinely good default guidance — recent comps show you understand the current market, and agents are more likely to recognize them. But Baker has spent enough time in the business to know when to set the guidelines aside.
He’s used well-regarded literary novels from the ’90s when nothing recent fit better. For middle grade, he frequently comps to beloved classics — The BFG, Holes, A Wrinkle in Time — because middle grade agents have deep emotional relationships with the books that shaped them, and those titles carry real meaning.
“There are no hard and fast rules,” he says. “Everything I say is one person’s opinion.”
The test is always the same: does this comp help the agent quickly understand who will buy this book and why? If a ten-year-old novel answers that better than anything recent, it may be the right call — ideally paired with something newer so you’re not relying entirely on the older title.
And for books that genuinely don’t have clean comps — Baker once worked with a memoirist whose book was told from the perspectives of multiple residents in a single building, a structure that had no real recent parallel — the answer is to find the closest thing and be precise about how you’re using it. You can acknowledge the unusual structure in your query and let the comps do partial rather than complete work. It’s better than a strained comp that confuses rather than clarifies.
The Bigger Picture: Comps as the First Step, Not the Whole Answer
Comps live inside a larger sequence that your query needs to execute. You start by establishing that a market exists for your kind of book. Then you differentiate — you show what makes yours different within that market. Then you make the agent feel something about the specific story you’ve written.
The comps do the first part. Your pitch paragraphs do the second and third. Get the sequence right and you’ve already accomplished something most queries don’t: you’ve given the agent a reason to keep reading before they’ve even reached your pitch.
Once your comps are solid, the next place most queries need work is the stakes sentence — the moment at the end of your pitch where everything becomes specific and urgent. That’s usually where the “didn’t connect” rejections are actually coming from, even when the comp titles are fine.
Frequently Asked Questions About Comp Titles
Do comp titles have to be books, or can I use movies and TV shows?
You can use movies and TV shows, and Baker says to use them if they work — but classify them as part of your hook rather than your market comps. A film reference tells an agent what your book feels like. A book with strong sales tells them that readers pay money for that feeling. Ideally you have at least one book comp with real sales numbers alongside any film or TV reference.
How recent do comp titles have to be?
The standard guidance is three to five years, and it’s good default advice — recent comps show you’re reading in your genre and understand today’s market. But it’s not a hard rule. If an older book is the clearest possible comp for your work, use it, ideally alongside something newer. The goal is clarity and market signal, not box-ticking.
What if I can’t find any good comp titles?
This is more common than you’d think, especially for books with unusual structures or genuinely hybrid genres. A few options: look for comps that capture one element (tone, readership, pacing) even if they don’t match the whole book; use a classic that signals the tradition your book belongs to; or comp by feel rather than plot (“the warmth of X meets the propulsive pacing of Y“). If you’re truly stuck, our post on finding comp titles walks through a step-by-step method that starts from genre rather than plot.
Can I use a book that was a massive bestseller as a comp?
Agents generally advise against comping directly to runaway blockbusters — Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, anything with “everyone’s mom has read it” status. The problem isn’t that those books aren’t real; it’s that comping to them signals you either don’t know the market well or are overselling. A mid-list title with strong but not extraordinary sales is usually the stronger move. It says: this readership exists and is being actively served. That’s what you want to demonstrate.
Should I explain why each comp is relevant in my query?
No. Agents know the market. If you need to explain why a comp applies, it usually means the comp isn’t quite right. Let two well-chosen titles do the work on their own — and use the word count you save for your pitch.
If you want to workshop your comps (and your whole query) with a publishing expert, our Collaborative Query Consultation is a good place to start. For the step-by-step process for actually finding your comp titles, see How to Find Comp Titles That Actually Work. And before any send, our query letter checklist has a comp titles section worth running through.