Tag Archives: publishing

How to Comp

15 Tuesday Aug 2023

Posted by in Advertising, HPIC, Musings and ponderation, My Fiction, Pacifica, Utopia and Dystopia

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I’ve known for a long time that writing is a business. But knowing that writing is a business is no guarantee that one knows how the business works. There’s good circumstantial evidence that for the past 20+ years, I haven’t had the foggiest idea about what I’m doing.

Where my writing career is concerned, I’ve tried to follow Steve Martin’s exhortation to be “so good they can’t ignore you.” But what that quote elides is that it’s still up to the writer to give the audience a chance not to ignore you. I could be as good a writer as Emily Dickinson, but if I don’t know how to get people’s attention, my career could still end up like, well, Emily Dickinson’s.

I’m facing this challenge as I go out for a literary agent for my third novel, Pacifica. (I have an excellent agent, Scott Veltri, for TV and movie projects, which is the hope for my novel Exit Black. But Pacifica is not on the list of 10,000 books I would think of for a movie tie-in). As anyone who has ever gone out for an agent knows, a query letter is one of the writer’s few early opportunities to show their understanding of writing as a business. And one of the things I’ve only recently gotten a feel for is the importance of comps for the novel I’m trying to sell.

Comps–short for comparative titles–are a short list of recent books that are similar to the novel you’re selling. And there are apparently rules, or at least norms, regarding the art of good comps. Here are the ones I’ve picked up at conference panels, in writing guides, and intuition:

  • Pick no more than three books (though apparently one of the books can be a movie or tv program)
  • Pick recent, commercially successful works, but
  • Avoid comparing your work to that of literary A-listers (e.g. no Annie Proulxes or Cormac McCarthys)

Are these the rules? If I knew, more people would probably be reading my writing. If you have better intel on how comps work, please jump in the comments or feel free to DM me! I can tell you what wasn’t working for me, though:

  • Not offering a list of comps in my query letter
  • Comparing my work to Ursula K. Le Guin’s (though I don’t think I’m wrong! Read Stranger Bird yourself and you be the judge)
  • Dissing other writers’ work (at the time I was lathered up about what I called the Harry Potter Industrial Complex)

None of these remarks got me an agent, and I suspect now that that was because my approach showed that I didn’t understand how the publishing business works. Agents and publishers want to know comps for a simple reason: they want to know what has already sold well that is similar to the book you are selling. It doesn’t matter if your book is the most exquisitely constructed exploration of the human heart since Anna Karenina–an agent wants to know if your novel will sell.

Is that a mercenary attitude? Maybe. Is it a rule that you must have comps? Absolutely not. But there’s also no rule that says I have to wear pants to a job interview. If I want to wear jorts to my next job interview, that’s my right as an American. However, wearing jorts to an interview will foreclose on just about every job offer outside of a very small set of jorts-positive jobs, many for which a 53 year-old man wouldn’t be an attractive candidate anyway.

My last unsuccessful job interview. Photo credit Carlyn Eames

So, what am I pitching as my comps for Pacifica? My three are Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow; Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, and Russell Brand’s The Magic Kingdom–three very different books (and one of them I wasn’t even crazy about). But they’re three recent, commercially successful books, each with a passing resemblance to my book about a guy who has a religious vision playing video games which spurs him to found several increasingly ridiculous, polyamorous intentional communities. I guess that’s not exactly a concept which sells itself. Hopefully the comps will help me market it.

What’s Your Science Fiction Pen Name?

26 Thursday Apr 2018

Posted by in fantasy, Musings and ponderation, My Fiction, Politics, Science Fiction

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I’ve really been getting into ambient music lately, and I’m noticing that many ambient artists–maybe most of them–have stage names. Loscil, Biosphere, Oöphoi–many of these folks name themselves as though they were themselves science fiction characters.

I’ve also been wondering a lot about identity in my writing, whether the fact that I’ve been published many times before makes it likelier for new editors to accept a story of mine for publication (it doesn’t seem to–I’m definitely an opening act as far as magazines and podcasts are concerned). But I do like the idea of my writing having an existence which is separate from my gender and ethnic and religious and sexual identity.

If fantasy and science fiction writing were more like ambient music (or if I thought it would accomplish something for me to take on a mysterious, Banksy-esque persona), I would choose the name Gravitrope or Pánfilo for my nom de plume. Both of these names resonate with me for personal reasons: for much of my thirties I was in a band called The Gravitropes, and I feel a kind of spiritual affinity for gravitropism, which is the ability of sprouting seeds to send their first shoots away from the pull of gravity and their first roots towards it. Pánfilo is a wonderful old Mexican name pulled from ancient Greek; the name means “lover of all.” I picked the name for one of my alter egos in my next novel, Pacifica.

One might wonder whether my taking on a writing name like Gravitrope or Pánfilo would be an attempt to game the publication system of speculative fiction. To their great credit, fantasy and science fiction editors are actively working to publish voices from a full diversity of genders, ethnicities, and sexualities. Would a writer with a pen name that seemed less white and male get a little more attention from editors today? Inasmuch as I hold the most privileged identities on the planet–I definitely present as white, male, straight, cis-, Christian, and it’s not worth quibbling over ways that not all of  those labels are perfectly, scrupulously accurate when the labels are definitely more true than not and when they are really markers of social privilege that I’ve held my whole life–it’s fair to say that if I took on a name that suggested a different gender, or genderlessness, or a different ethnicity, I would be dismissed as a poseur. I also don’t want to do anything that will make it harder for people from the full spectrum of humanity to get greater attention for their work. And, if there’s something I can do to help others from that fuller spectrum get published (short of refraining from writing myself), I’ll do it.

Having said that, there is something liberating in sending a story to a magazine under a different name, or to a magazine that uses a blind submissions process (i.e. you send the story in anonymously and the editors only learn who you are if they decide to publish your work). I don’t know whether I’ve had any better luck–or worse luck–getting published in blind-submission venues than in others. But I do like the prospect of my writing being read on its own terms, irrespective of who I am or who editors think that I am. I’d like to imagine my work reaching across boundaries of ethnicity and gender and history to tap at the bedrock of the human condition–in other words, I hope that my stories might function as works of art rather than simply as statements about what it means to be white and male in America.

That’s a fantasy, I know. But hey, I’m a fantasy writer.

And you? If you were to write sci fi under a pen name, what would you choose?

 

hierher

Photo credit: Hierher