How to Choose Comp Titles for Your Query Letter

Comparable titles — "comps" — are the two or three published books you cite in your query to tell an agent where your manuscript sits in the market. They're one sentence of your letter and one of the most misunderstood. Agents use comps constantly: when they pitch editors, editors use them to pitch sales teams, and sales teams use them to pitch bookstores. A writer who comps well is demonstrating, in ten words, that they understand the business they're trying to enter.

The four rules agents expect

1. Recent. Published within the last five years, ideally three. Comps prove there's a current market for your book; a 1998 comp proves the opposite. (Older classics can work as a secondary flavor note — "a contemporary Rebecca" — but pair them with something recent.)
2. Same category. An adult thriller should comp adult thrillers. Comping your YA manuscript to adult literary fiction confuses the positioning you're trying to clarify.
3. Successful, not stratospheric. The sweet spot is books that performed well — earned out, got review attention, found readers — without being genre-defining phenomena. Comping Harry Potter, Gone Girl, or Fourth Wing reads as naive, because those are outliers nobody can predict, and because every slush pile is full of them.
4. Honest. The comp must genuinely share something with your book — tone, structure, premise, audience. Agents know these books. A mismatched comp is worse than none.

Formulas that work

Where to find comps

If comps are hard to name, treat that as research to do, not a step to skip. The fastest sources: the "customers also bought" and "editorial reviews" sections of recent books in your genre; your genre's recent award and "best of year" lists; bookstore shelf-talkers in your section; and — most directly — the notable sales listed on agents' profiles. Our agent database lists recent sales for hundreds of agents; the books an agent already sold are both comp candidates and proof that agent is right for your list.

Read (at minimum, deeply sample) every book you comp. Agents ask about comps on the phone. "I haven't actually read it" is not a survivable answer.

Comp mistakes that hurt queries

• "There's nothing like my book." Agents hear this as "I don't read my genre." Every sellable book has neighbors.
• Comping only mega-bestsellers — or only books by your dream agent's biggest client, which reads as flattery rather than positioning.
• Comping tone-deaf pairings. If your two comps share nothing with each other, the intersection is unreadable.
• Self-published or out-of-category comps for a traditional deal pitch — agents need comps from the market they sell into.
• More than three. Two is standard, three is the ceiling. A list of six is a writer hedging.

Where comps go in the query

Comps live in your snapshot paragraph, alongside title, genre, and word count: "THE UNDERSTUDY HOUSE is an 89,000-word upmarket suspense novel — The Last Mrs. Parrish meets The Turn of the Key." One sentence, then move into the story. See full annotated letters in our query letter examples, and the complete structure in the query letter guide.