Timeline for How can I determine good comparative titles to include in my query letter?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 27, 2018 at 14:58 | vote | accept | SFWriter | ||
| Apr 24, 2018 at 19:19 | comment | added | user29032 | But you reallly have to read. Currently SF is very character oriented, as contemporary literature is in general, while Clarke is more technology oriented. That's what I mean with "market": readers expect strong charactersization no matter what genre they read, and the classics by Clarke might well be turned down by publishers today. Think of the inner turmoil of YA fiction (Hunger Games), and topics like gender, race, environment, ethics, that are popular across genres today. So in fact your novel might fight to a publisher who looks for something that has nothing to do with genre... | |
| Apr 24, 2018 at 19:15 | comment | added | user29032 | I have found the book recommendation threads on Reddit to be a good resource. Post a brief description of your own novel and ask for similar books. For example, for The Martian: reddit.com/r/space/comments/3yxcii/… I don't agree with all the books recommended there (e.g. Corey doesn't fit), but it is a good starting point, and there are some in it (Tess Gerritsen) that seem very different on the surface but have a very similar appeal in how they portrait their protagonists. | |
| Apr 24, 2018 at 19:00 | comment | added | user29032 | @DPT I find it telling that the example you choose (in the edit to your question) are movies. Let us think of the novel The Martian and where it stands. So what is it? It is near future hard SF with a strong psychological perspective. Of course the basic plot compares to all the Robinsonades from Defoe to Disney, but the contemporary field the book stands in are the novels of Kim Stanley Robinson, Robert Charles Wilson – or Arthur C. Clarke, if you wanted to name one of the starting points of the tradition of hard science explorer-engineer. | |
| Apr 24, 2018 at 18:30 | comment | added | SFWriter | I do like the word tradition better. | |
| Apr 24, 2018 at 18:26 | comment | added | user29032 | @DPT I am not talking about your writing. I am talking about your query letter. You can write what you like and still be aware of where you stand in the market (or in tradtion, if you like that word better). Whether you bend yourself to the market or not is an entirely different matter. | |
| Apr 24, 2018 at 18:06 | comment | added | SFWriter | This sounds as though you are saying either 1. write to the market that exists (=profit) or 2. if I have a dream agency identified, I might do well to comp the books they had a hand in promoting. (Neither of which feels like organic storytelling, by the way. :-) ) The first of these would kill any enjoyment I have in the process, but the second is a strategy I could adopt without losing any sleep. | |
| Apr 24, 2018 at 16:31 | comment | added | user16226 | All of this, plus: If you didn't know what the comparables were before you began, don't try to retrofit them afterwards. All you will do is set up false expectations. The agent or editor will be expecting something like the comparables and when they realize it's not, chances are they put it down regardless of it's merits. | |
| Apr 24, 2018 at 16:17 | history | answered | user29032 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |