Today I want to dig into the issue of “comp titles” (comparative or comparable titles) and how they intersect with race and inclusion in publishing. This may look from the outside like an industry specific topic, but comp titles have huge implications for how books are purchased by publishers, positioned in the market, and ultimately marketed to readers.
If you have anything to do with books and publishing, you’ll know that comp titles come up constantly. A comp title is basically a previously published (usually successful) book that you’re using to explain in short order who the audience for an as-yet unpublished book. For example, you might say: Unpublished Thriller A is like Gone Girl meets The Da Vinci Code, using the latter two titles to demonstrate that Thriller A will have wide appeal in the existing marketplace and that it will sell however many copies it needs to in order to justify the advance you want to pay the author.
The conversation around comp title starts early in the process: authors use comp titles to query agents, then agents use them to pitch editors, then editors use them to make a pitch to their bosses in house. Comps often then become embedded in the DNA of the marketing plans for a book and can affect everything from cover designs to marketing budgets.
Readers who don’t know much about the behind-the-scenes of book publishing may not think much about comp titles. But at this moment, we’re all becoming aware of the inequities within the various industries that create the products we consume, and the biases in the media we consume. Book publishing is at the crossroads of two of these things, and understanding the disparities in comp titles is crucial to our understanding of the disparities that happen downstream.
This matters not only for those of us with a stake in book publishing but as a foundational cultural matter. Reading Imbram X. Kendi’s masterwork Stamped from the Beginning, I was struck by how many times books came up—from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Souls of Black Folk etc.—as being crucial carriers of racist ideas and/ or radical anti-racist thought.
If we all agree that books matter, then we can agree that it matters very much how they get made.
So, as mentioned above, comp titles are a key mechanism that editors us to lobby a book to their bosses and teams when they want to buy a book from an author. Sometimes they may have actual numbers on hand—sales from that authors previous books or some other information about that author’s platform—but with fiction, much of the decision making is both speculative and intuitive, with the editor’s “good eye” carrying more or less weight depending how high on the food chain they are. Comp titles also help an editor make a case as to why this book is worth a ten-thousand-dollar advance, a million-dollar advance or somewhere in between. Comps are being used to say what kind of reader will go for this book, and how many of them there might be out there.
And if you can’t find any comps for a book? That’s going to be a tough sell.
Last week I talked about the fact that the vast majority of the folks having these conversations (86%) are white. Obviously we can assume that lack of diversity behind the scenes would shake out to less diversity on the shelves, but in search of some numbers that could give a better idea of HOW that’s taking place exactly, I came across an excellent piece Laura B. McGrath (an associate director of the Stanford University Literary Lab who is working on a book about the business practices of the Big Five publishing houses) wrote for the LA Review of Books in Jan 2019 called Comping White, in which she talks about the fact that it’s not only the lack of BIPOC editors behind the scenes but also a systemic issue of how books are chosen using the aforementioned comp titles: one which reinforces and perpetuates a very white status quo.
So how bad are the numbers?
McGrath dug in and identified 31,876 comps (three for each book published) over a six year period. She then winnowed this down to the top fifty most comped, a list which actually was made up of 225 books because many were comped the same number of times. Out of that list of 225 books that editors were using to position and sell books across the industry, nine were by authors of color. NINE!
She zoomed out a bit more to the top 500 most comped books and that brought the numbers up to twenty-two.
I want to reiterate here that comps are not based on sales or awards won, they’re not hard and fast, they’re descriptive but they’re used like data point.
And if you can’t find the right comps, you can’t buy the book, or get a big advance, or get a big rollout
The underpinning here is that writers of color have to ‘prove’ that their work can appeal to white audiences by ‘comping white’ as McGrath puts it, unless the book happens to be very similar to one of those very small number of books by BIPOC authors that works as a comp in this context. And the double bind of comping to an already successful BIPOC author is that authors may be met with the response of “it’s already been done”.
The upshot of all of this, of course, is that BIPOC authors are having to compete harder for a narrower set of opportunities than white authors such as myself have to.
What’s especially interesting to me about all of this is that I think that the key assumption about readers—that they only want more of what they’ve already been given—is wrong. Most readers I know purposefully and happily read across a spectrum of genres, perspectives, and categories. One of the most powerful things a book can do is help to open our eyes to a different way of looking at the world, and especially when it comes to readers, most of us want new, different, and fresh, even if we might have our go-to favorites.
I hope this helps unpack this piece of the process. Stay tuned as next week I’m getting into the controversy around the #publishingpaidme.