Comparable titles
24 April 2026 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI spent two and a half hours non-stop in Waterstone's bookshop again this afternoon looking for 'comps', which was both mentally and physically taxing-- if I look any further I shall have to find another shop, because I can't face going back in there after hanging around for so long, reading so much, and buying absolutely nothing! The question you are supposed to be asking yourself, apparently, is 'which table in the bookshop would my book be on and what other books would be next to it'? (This being the actual information that publishers want for marketing purposes.)
I won't say that I looked at every single book on every single wall of the shop, including the ones that were well above my eye-level and almost above my maximum reach (presumably a big disadvantage to those random authors unlucky enough to fall alphabetically on the top shelves!), but I did look at dozens and dozens; maybe a hundred. Pretty much all the titles that weren't very obviously being marketed from the covers as detective/thrillers, classic reprints, and 'cosy' novels. And almost all of them, of course, are absolutely nothing like Arctic Raoul in any way, not least because they're aiming to be deliberately modern (no quotation marks for dialogue, present-tense narration, an awful lot of 'queer romance') and I was trying to be deliberately old-fashioned in terms of narration and style. One thing I couldn't find at all, somewhat to my surprise, was any trace of the Hornblower-clone sea stories that used to be ubiquitous -- maybe they're not fashionable, but there used to be three or four authors doing long series of them (and I have come across second-hand copies of a series that apparently involves a Napoleonic-era captain lusting after his second-in-command, with all the thrill of the Forbidden Romance -- none of that visible on the shelves today, though).
And I think the only surviving traces of the non-ironic journey/adventure novel -- as opposed to those which involve the protagonist(s) coming to terms with the hidden skeletons in their relationship/family/national history -- are probably in the fantasy genre. Apart from the fact that those are all multi-volume sagas that are depressingly similar and badly-written (and those are the ones that make it onto the commercially-published shelves); some of them even label themselves as 'romantasy' in the blurb, but they pretty much all looked like romantasy to me. I'm afraid I didn't check those out too carefully because they were so obviously irrelevant, or at least their marketing made them appear so -- it's possible there were some hidden gems, or even something that involved going on a quest to rescue your true love and then discovering that she had actually already rescued herself, but the titles and covers were very off-putting. I do remember one fantasy that featured a heroine called *Bristol*... the downmarket equivalent of 'Chelsea' or 'Madison', perhaps?
Doing 'comps' with Young Adult romantasy is self-evidently a non-starter, because it will evoke entirely the wrong idea; anyone who is potentially interested in a title because it is like one of those is *not* going to be interested in my output, so it's counter-productive :-(
Unfortunately most of the historical novels were obvious non-starters in the comparison stakes as well. A lot of them came across as being very self-consciously 'historical', dripping with atmosphere and wearing their period research prominently on their sleeves, and mine simply isn't anything like that. Partly, yes, because I haven't *done* that sort of research -- I do check details, but I don't set out to conjure up the atmosphere of a nineteenth-century Edinburgh street scene in a full-sensory spectrum. But partly also because I'm more interested in telling the story from the perspective of the *characters*, to whom all this is absolutely normal, and in the style of the original; Gaston Leroux was writing about events that supposedly took place a generation earlier, but he wasn't writing 'a historical novel' full of details of dress styles, furnishings, and strange social customs. The most he does is remark that 'nowadays' there is a casino at Perros-Guirec, or that one is as likely to see a rich butcher as a baron in an opera-box...
There were a surprising number of Viking/Dark Ages historical novels, which I felt were really too culturally remote to be worth even looking at for my purposes (likewise I skipped all the modern Japanese novels), and a good many dealing with Social Issues explored via fiction; anybody hoping for that from my work is going to be disapppinted :-( And a lot of them were historical detective stories with the era of their investigation as their gimmick, and again they really bear no resemblance to my work, which wears its era lightly and isn't focused on solving a crime. There was also a big subgenre of books with parallel present-day and historical strands, where some literal or spiritual descendent of the earlier character is discovering parallels to her (normally her) present-day traumas while investigating a series of hitherto-unknown past events -- I very nearly came away with one of those from the library, because the sea-borne element was not a hundred miles removed from the nautical travails of my own novel, then discovered at the last moment that it was another of these parallel plots, which make for a rather less comparable reading experience :-(
A lot of the modern-day novels were either 'state of the nation' novels in one sense or another, again dealing with Issues, or else focused very largely on interpersonal relationships in a drably normal existence, without any comparison to the [melo]drama of what I'd been writing. And while my 'Phantom' fiction is a thriller in the sense that the original novel is a thriller, it's not really one in the serial killer/grimy conspiracy and gangland sense of the novels that are being *marketed* as 'thrillers'. A good deal of what Raoul and Christine have to deal with is simply survival, as opposed to being evil out to get them. Erik is a threat, but they're not trying to track him down and destroy him before he can destroy them (or at least not until the very end of the book, and it doesn't work out that way anyhow!)
I found precisely three potential 'comps', only one of which is actually a good fit: Night Fire, which is about the only book in the shop that reminded me of me :-p
It's the wrong period, of course, but it 'feels' right in its approach to the era, writing from the inside out rather than fetishizing its setting; the prose is beautifully written without being wilfully obscure, it has strong horror elements without supernatural monsters, it is action/plot focused rather than romance-driven but has powerful relationships, including same-sex friendships that are not teased as sexual interest, it reminds me of actual contemporary writing of the period, the ending is surprisingly gentle and optimistic despite the subject matter, and it isn't narrowly targeted at the tropes of any one genre. *checks* Filed under "General and Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Horror & Gothic": that sounds about right for Arctic Raoul as well, which is possibly why it felt like a good match. It's next door on the same bookshop table :-)
And I would recommend it as a genuinely good book, from the very rapid skim-read I did of it (still longer than I spent on the vast majority of the others). The main problem might be that it has literally only just been published *this week* (23 April 2026), so no agent is likely to have come across it yet...
Length-wise, it's 304 pages to the 326 of my mock-up, which did feel fairly hefty, but not on the scale of the fantasy novels.
Where it doesn't match at all is in the travel/adventure aspect, and as I said, I failed to find anything at all that did :-( The other 'wild card' match that felt closer than most of the others was a very different kettle of fish: The Phoenix Ballroom by Ruth Hogan, "a feel-good British literary novel" -- the 'literary' is presumably why it stood out to me from amongst the other cosy novels :-p
I rather hesitate to use it as a comp, because it isn't an obvious match at all, other than in its general attitude towards the characters: "a novel about love, sacrifice, friendship, and the importance of never giving up on your dreams". The character names are annoyingly quirky: Kite, Swan, Hawk and even Liberty Bell(!) But it's intelligent -- it doesn't do the incredibly frustrating thing of bashing one character to make another look better, but shows that even when people seem incredibly narrow-minded and annoying their behaviour usually makes sense from their own perspective -- and Arctic Raoul does actually have that feel-good, wanting everybody to be happy element about it (non-ironic, as I said above, which is something that only seems to exist in genre fiction these days).
All the same, "The Phoenix Ballroom" is a very, very different book from "Night Fire"... which may be a good way of categorising my novel as widely straddling genres (with "Night Fire" as the 'male' comp and 'Phoenix Ballroom' to demonstrate female appeal!) or may simply come across as incoherent :-( It was just that this was one book that did feel somehow related to my writing, where almost everything else I was looking at was obviously out of a completely different school of thought.
One potential issue I hadn't realised was that Ruth Hogan is apparently also the author of the popular best-seller "The Keeper of Lost Things", of which I've seen a great many second-hand copies... and you're not supposed to compare yourself to best-selling authors! But I think that from that point of view she is probably safe enough, as opposed to saying that your book is like Stephen King or Dan Brown, or even Kazuo Ishiguro or P.D. James :-p
The third title I noted was the one and only example of published fan-fiction I found on the shelves (as opposed to the Jane Austen-marketed one, which looked promising from that respect but turned out to be based on the real-life history of her nephews and nieces, which isn't the same thing!) West of Wicked is explicitly an alternate telling of "The Wizard of Oz" -- I originally assumed it was a story about what happened *after* Dorothy got back to Kansas and was subsequently carried back to Oz by accident on a fresh occasion as an adult, but in fact it's a version of the story in which Dorothy grows to adulthood without ever being carried off to Oz in the first place. She is twenty and busy boffing the boy next door, who is much keener on marrying her than she is on agreeing to marry him (a quick knee-trembler in the hay is another matter). Then she gets carried off to Oz, her house falls on the Wicked Witch, and everything starts to unfold as per (sort of) the original plot, only with a lot more sex and girl power and general updating. Dorothy starts sleeping with the Scarecrow, who is an actual flesh and blood man in this version, and the 'Tin Man' is a heartless mercenary; if there was a Cowardly Lion, I missed him in my increasingly cursory skimming of the book :-p
But frankly it doesn't have any resemblance to my work *at all* other than in the 'published fanfiction of a public domain work' category; it turns out that the author has previously published 'romantasy', which I can well believe. And despite its length, it ends well short of the original novel, explained by the fact that it is apparently the first in a series (groan)... (She is also responsible for "the bestselling BookTok viral Vicious Lost Boys series, a Peter Pan-inspired enemies-to-lovers spicy romantasy where the villain gets the girl", which sounds like everything I dislike in fan-fiction!)
I won't say that I looked at every single book on every single wall of the shop, including the ones that were well above my eye-level and almost above my maximum reach (presumably a big disadvantage to those random authors unlucky enough to fall alphabetically on the top shelves!), but I did look at dozens and dozens; maybe a hundred. Pretty much all the titles that weren't very obviously being marketed from the covers as detective/thrillers, classic reprints, and 'cosy' novels. And almost all of them, of course, are absolutely nothing like Arctic Raoul in any way, not least because they're aiming to be deliberately modern (no quotation marks for dialogue, present-tense narration, an awful lot of 'queer romance') and I was trying to be deliberately old-fashioned in terms of narration and style. One thing I couldn't find at all, somewhat to my surprise, was any trace of the Hornblower-clone sea stories that used to be ubiquitous -- maybe they're not fashionable, but there used to be three or four authors doing long series of them (and I have come across second-hand copies of a series that apparently involves a Napoleonic-era captain lusting after his second-in-command, with all the thrill of the Forbidden Romance -- none of that visible on the shelves today, though).
And I think the only surviving traces of the non-ironic journey/adventure novel -- as opposed to those which involve the protagonist(s) coming to terms with the hidden skeletons in their relationship/family/national history -- are probably in the fantasy genre. Apart from the fact that those are all multi-volume sagas that are depressingly similar and badly-written (and those are the ones that make it onto the commercially-published shelves); some of them even label themselves as 'romantasy' in the blurb, but they pretty much all looked like romantasy to me. I'm afraid I didn't check those out too carefully because they were so obviously irrelevant, or at least their marketing made them appear so -- it's possible there were some hidden gems, or even something that involved going on a quest to rescue your true love and then discovering that she had actually already rescued herself, but the titles and covers were very off-putting. I do remember one fantasy that featured a heroine called *Bristol*... the downmarket equivalent of 'Chelsea' or 'Madison', perhaps?
Doing 'comps' with Young Adult romantasy is self-evidently a non-starter, because it will evoke entirely the wrong idea; anyone who is potentially interested in a title because it is like one of those is *not* going to be interested in my output, so it's counter-productive :-(
Unfortunately most of the historical novels were obvious non-starters in the comparison stakes as well. A lot of them came across as being very self-consciously 'historical', dripping with atmosphere and wearing their period research prominently on their sleeves, and mine simply isn't anything like that. Partly, yes, because I haven't *done* that sort of research -- I do check details, but I don't set out to conjure up the atmosphere of a nineteenth-century Edinburgh street scene in a full-sensory spectrum. But partly also because I'm more interested in telling the story from the perspective of the *characters*, to whom all this is absolutely normal, and in the style of the original; Gaston Leroux was writing about events that supposedly took place a generation earlier, but he wasn't writing 'a historical novel' full of details of dress styles, furnishings, and strange social customs. The most he does is remark that 'nowadays' there is a casino at Perros-Guirec, or that one is as likely to see a rich butcher as a baron in an opera-box...
There were a surprising number of Viking/Dark Ages historical novels, which I felt were really too culturally remote to be worth even looking at for my purposes (likewise I skipped all the modern Japanese novels), and a good many dealing with Social Issues explored via fiction; anybody hoping for that from my work is going to be disapppinted :-( And a lot of them were historical detective stories with the era of their investigation as their gimmick, and again they really bear no resemblance to my work, which wears its era lightly and isn't focused on solving a crime. There was also a big subgenre of books with parallel present-day and historical strands, where some literal or spiritual descendent of the earlier character is discovering parallels to her (normally her) present-day traumas while investigating a series of hitherto-unknown past events -- I very nearly came away with one of those from the library, because the sea-borne element was not a hundred miles removed from the nautical travails of my own novel, then discovered at the last moment that it was another of these parallel plots, which make for a rather less comparable reading experience :-(
A lot of the modern-day novels were either 'state of the nation' novels in one sense or another, again dealing with Issues, or else focused very largely on interpersonal relationships in a drably normal existence, without any comparison to the [melo]drama of what I'd been writing. And while my 'Phantom' fiction is a thriller in the sense that the original novel is a thriller, it's not really one in the serial killer/grimy conspiracy and gangland sense of the novels that are being *marketed* as 'thrillers'. A good deal of what Raoul and Christine have to deal with is simply survival, as opposed to being evil out to get them. Erik is a threat, but they're not trying to track him down and destroy him before he can destroy them (or at least not until the very end of the book, and it doesn't work out that way anyhow!)
I found precisely three potential 'comps', only one of which is actually a good fit: Night Fire, which is about the only book in the shop that reminded me of me :-p
It's the wrong period, of course, but it 'feels' right in its approach to the era, writing from the inside out rather than fetishizing its setting; the prose is beautifully written without being wilfully obscure, it has strong horror elements without supernatural monsters, it is action/plot focused rather than romance-driven but has powerful relationships, including same-sex friendships that are not teased as sexual interest, it reminds me of actual contemporary writing of the period, the ending is surprisingly gentle and optimistic despite the subject matter, and it isn't narrowly targeted at the tropes of any one genre. *checks* Filed under "General and Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Horror & Gothic": that sounds about right for Arctic Raoul as well, which is possibly why it felt like a good match. It's next door on the same bookshop table :-)
And I would recommend it as a genuinely good book, from the very rapid skim-read I did of it (still longer than I spent on the vast majority of the others). The main problem might be that it has literally only just been published *this week* (23 April 2026), so no agent is likely to have come across it yet...
Length-wise, it's 304 pages to the 326 of my mock-up, which did feel fairly hefty, but not on the scale of the fantasy novels.
Where it doesn't match at all is in the travel/adventure aspect, and as I said, I failed to find anything at all that did :-( The other 'wild card' match that felt closer than most of the others was a very different kettle of fish: The Phoenix Ballroom by Ruth Hogan, "a feel-good British literary novel" -- the 'literary' is presumably why it stood out to me from amongst the other cosy novels :-p
I rather hesitate to use it as a comp, because it isn't an obvious match at all, other than in its general attitude towards the characters: "a novel about love, sacrifice, friendship, and the importance of never giving up on your dreams". The character names are annoyingly quirky: Kite, Swan, Hawk and even Liberty Bell(!) But it's intelligent -- it doesn't do the incredibly frustrating thing of bashing one character to make another look better, but shows that even when people seem incredibly narrow-minded and annoying their behaviour usually makes sense from their own perspective -- and Arctic Raoul does actually have that feel-good, wanting everybody to be happy element about it (non-ironic, as I said above, which is something that only seems to exist in genre fiction these days).
All the same, "The Phoenix Ballroom" is a very, very different book from "Night Fire"... which may be a good way of categorising my novel as widely straddling genres (with "Night Fire" as the 'male' comp and 'Phoenix Ballroom' to demonstrate female appeal!) or may simply come across as incoherent :-( It was just that this was one book that did feel somehow related to my writing, where almost everything else I was looking at was obviously out of a completely different school of thought.
One potential issue I hadn't realised was that Ruth Hogan is apparently also the author of the popular best-seller "The Keeper of Lost Things", of which I've seen a great many second-hand copies... and you're not supposed to compare yourself to best-selling authors! But I think that from that point of view she is probably safe enough, as opposed to saying that your book is like Stephen King or Dan Brown, or even Kazuo Ishiguro or P.D. James :-p
The third title I noted was the one and only example of published fan-fiction I found on the shelves (as opposed to the Jane Austen-marketed one, which looked promising from that respect but turned out to be based on the real-life history of her nephews and nieces, which isn't the same thing!) West of Wicked is explicitly an alternate telling of "The Wizard of Oz" -- I originally assumed it was a story about what happened *after* Dorothy got back to Kansas and was subsequently carried back to Oz by accident on a fresh occasion as an adult, but in fact it's a version of the story in which Dorothy grows to adulthood without ever being carried off to Oz in the first place. She is twenty and busy boffing the boy next door, who is much keener on marrying her than she is on agreeing to marry him (a quick knee-trembler in the hay is another matter). Then she gets carried off to Oz, her house falls on the Wicked Witch, and everything starts to unfold as per (sort of) the original plot, only with a lot more sex and girl power and general updating. Dorothy starts sleeping with the Scarecrow, who is an actual flesh and blood man in this version, and the 'Tin Man' is a heartless mercenary; if there was a Cowardly Lion, I missed him in my increasingly cursory skimming of the book :-p
But frankly it doesn't have any resemblance to my work *at all* other than in the 'published fanfiction of a public domain work' category; it turns out that the author has previously published 'romantasy', which I can well believe. And despite its length, it ends well short of the original novel, explained by the fact that it is apparently the first in a series (groan)... (She is also responsible for "the bestselling BookTok viral Vicious Lost Boys series, a Peter Pan-inspired enemies-to-lovers spicy romantasy where the villain gets the girl", which sounds like everything I dislike in fan-fiction!)