How to Ace Your Book Proposal with Nonfiction Comp Titles
How to Take Your Book Proposal to the Next Level
Have you heard of comp titles before? You might not have—but if you have, it’s probably because you’re writing a book proposal to try and sell your book.
Good news: I’m here to tell you how to use this somewhat obscure book proposal section to wow agents and editors.
By finding and including great comp titles, you can show that you get publishing, you understand the market for your book, you’ve put in the work and done the research, and most importantly, that your book can sell.
What is a comp title, anyway?
The phrase “comp title” is actually short for two different things, but they’re pretty much used interchangeably, so you don’t have to worry about that too much.
Specifically, “comp title” is short for both comparative title and competitive title.
Or, to put it another way: books that are like yours and books that yours would be competing against (and therefore still books like yours!).
In fiction, comp titles are usually in the simple format of “x meets y” or “x meets y plus z”—something like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Pacific Rim with a dash of True Blood.” (A book I’d be very entertained to read, tbh.)
Nonfiction comp titles are significantly more detailed.
This is because nonfiction is much more segmented and topic-specific. Literary fiction, for example, is a very broad category, and many books will be appealing to large segments of the audience.
In nonfiction, on the other hand, people usually buy books for a much more specific purpose and/or topic. So, self-help books are competing against psychology books—not against books about knitting or environmental science.
What are comp titles even for?
Comp titles exist, basically, to tell people in publishing that books like yours have sold well before.
This is part of how you convince said publishing professionals that your book will sell well—after all, look at all these other, similar books that sold thousands of copies! The reader interest is already there!
Comp titles also give editors and other publishing professionals a better sense of what your book is about and how it compares to other books on the topic.
How do you include comp titles, then?
Comp titles should make up their own section of your book proposal (you can look up book proposal templates or submissions guidelines to get an idea of where best to place it).
The comp title section should have its own heading, be listed in the table of contents, and contain a list of roughly four to seven books, presented like this:
Title:
Author:
Publication date:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Notes:
A simple “x meets y” might be looking real nice in comparison to all those fields—but when chosen well, the more detailed and specific nature of nonfiction comp titles can make them a powerful tool in landing a publishing deal.
Most of the information for this template can be found either on Amazon or on the publisher’s website. (Much as I do hate to direct people to Amazon, they’re generally the most efficient way to look these things up.)
I’ll give you an example of what this template looks like filled in, and then we’ll break it down section by section. For an example, I’ll be using Self-Love Workbook for Women by Megan Logan, a great and very successful workbook that I worked on.
Title: Self-Love Workbook for Women: Release Self-Doubt, Build Self-Compassion, and Embrace Who You Are
Author: Megan Logan
Publication date: 9/29/20
Publisher: Callisto
ISBN: 978-1681885643
Notes: This section should ideally be around three to six sentences. More on this later!
In the meantime, let’s break this down piece by piece.
Title, subtitle, and author
These are pretty self-explanatory. Do make sure to give the full title and subtitle—this makes it much easier to tell what the book is about and how it compares to yours at a glance. And helps the person reading your book proposal look it up easily later.
For author name, you’ll want to type it exactly as it’s listed on the cover of the book and/or the publisher’s website.
Publication date
Increasingly, Amazon is saving you some scrolling and putting all of the specs for books right under the book description. The publication date is also listed in gray right after the book title, at the top of the page.
Here’s the thing, though: you really can’t pick a book with just any publication date.
No, you’re specifically looking for a book published between six months and three years ago. Books less than a year and a half old are even better, but the books you choose should never be older than five years unless absolutely necessary. Meaning, unless you literally cannot find five books that are less than five years old and substantially similar to yours.
This is all to make sure that the sales record for the book is lengthy enough to be useful, but (very importantly) not so old that it’s out of date.
If you can only meet the guidelines for one of these categories, this is the one you want to pick.
Publisher
Again, pretty easy to find and self-explanatory.
As for the details:
First, you’ll want to try to make sure that multiple publishers are represented. This is to show that books like yours are successful (and being published, period) across the industry—it’s not just one publisher that’s doing something special.
While you’re at it, try to avoid self-published books, which will list a publisher such as CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. (Unless you know for a fact that the book sold really well.) Nothing against self-published books! It’s just much harder to guarantee that they sold well enough to be good comp titles.
ISBN
So, the good news is that getting the ISBN is probably the simplest thing on this list, for all that you might only have a vague idea of what it is. There’s no criteria here!
The ISBN is basically the unique serial number assigned to each book—think of it like a model number for computer parts. You can find it in the row of icons on Amazon that I included above.
Notes
The notes section is where you really make your case, as in actually write it out.
The notes section should be roughly three to six sentences for each book, and explain how each book compares with yours.
What is similar? Where do they diverge? Why is this a good comparison? How much does the book’s angle/audience/topic/market overlap with yours? What does your book bring to the table that the other books are missing?
Generally, this is done as one paragraph. However, I’ve also seen this section instead broken up into “What’s Similar:” and “What’s Different.” (Each on their own line of text, of course.)
However you choose to format it, though, every notes section should double as a pitch for your own book. Heck, if you can manage it, every sentence should double as a pitch for your own book in one way or another. You need to make sure the “self-promotion” is relevant and justified, but there are a lot of different ways to do that.
Every time you get stuck, come back to the question: Why is this book’s success proof that your book will sell?
That, really, is what it all boils down to.
Estimating sales
The whole reason that comp titles exist is to prove that your book can sell—so, naturally, you want to pick comp titles that have sold well.
Unfortunately, this is extremely difficult. There is almost no reliable, publicly available sales data for the book industry. Even the leading industry tool, Nielsen BookScan, only tracks a limited number of sales outlets and covers approximately 75% of actual sales. Publishers and Amazon are the only ones with real, accurate data, honestly.
Luckily, though, there are a couple ways to estimate how well a book is selling indirectly, primarily by looking at its info on Amazon.
You’ll want to scroll down to the Product Details section, which looks like this:
An Amazon page gives you two main tools to try and estimate a book’s sales: the number of reviews and the best sellers rankings.
For reviews, my super loose rule of thumb is that I assume a book’s sales are roughly 10 to 20 times its number of reviews. The fewer copies a book has sold, the more I use the 10 times estimate instead of the 20 times one—after all, if there’s only eight reviews, half of those could easily be close friends or associates of the author who were specifically asked to leave a review to help out.
Looseness aside, review-based estimates have another big advantage: they’re cumulative and reflect lifetime popularity.
That’s in contrast to the other main tool in your toolbox, the best sellers ranking, which is continually updated to reflect the current situation. (You know, like normal bestseller lists.)
But, the best sellers ranking does have a huge advantage, and it’s this: TCK Publishing’s Amazon Book Sales Calculator. Yay for semi-empirical data! Impressively, they claim a 6% margin of error, which is by far the best of any tool I’ve seen (including, sometimes, the official Nielsen tools used by the publishing industry).
Importantly, TCK Publishing’s calculator specifically displays the current number of books sold per month and per day. So it won’t give you a total number of sales, but it will still leave you far better informed than you would otherwise be. I’d also recommend checking out the extensive details on Amazon’s algorithm and using the Amazon Book Sales Calculator, which can be found by simply scrolling down the page.
That’s All, Folks!
Thanks for reading, and best of luck with your book proposal! Go out and show those editors how well your book can sell!
