Chapter 2 | On Pitching
Your comparison titles need to be chosen to reflect how well you understand your book and where it fits in the literary market and broader cultural landscape.
It is okay to choose film and tv to describe your book, if it makes more sense for your story, although I recommend having at least one book comparison.
I remember Danielle Binks talking about Grace Chan’s debut Every Version of You and how she went with Black Mirror meets Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro for the comparison titles. Locally published science fiction isn’t big in Australia, and so this comparison hoped to tell the publisher that Black Mirror - which was massive on Netflix at the time - is how people were engaging with science fiction, and the Kazuo Ishiguro reference was to show that science fiction can be literary too.
Your comparison titles must be relevant to your book, instead of being a not-so-subtle hint of the kind of success you’re wanting to achieve.
Your comp titles say a lot about your story - take them seriously, think deeply about the message you want to tell about you book, and engage with literary, film and tv to make connections across a broad landscape of potential future readers. Don’t just go with whatever the current Instagram or Tik Tok trend is selling most of.