Use Amazon to Find Great Comp Titles

First of all, welcome to my rendition of the A-Z Blog Challenge! Blogging from A-Z is all about getting words out there, every single day. As this is probably my biggest struggle as a writer, I'm all about it. Plus, I can't wait to make some new friends in the blogosphere. So welcome to my blog, and let me say now I'm looking forward to visiting yours!

The A-Z Blog Challenge was started by Arlee Bird, and as such, since today is "A," we're all giving him a shoutout. It's a phenomenal idea, has only steamrolled into a larger and larger community with each year, and I'm happy to make this year my first year participating. Thank you, Arlee, for creating such a fun challenge! You can check out Arlee's blog at Tossing It Out.  


My other A for today is Amazon. Or specifically, How to use Amazon to Find Comp Titles. If you're like me, you've heard a lot about comps: pick a good one, don't use a mega-bestseller, find one that reasonably represents what you write, but isn't such a precise match that an agent or publisher will think your book has already been written.

And if you're like me, this left you scratching your head. How on earth are you supposed to find a book that meets all those criteria?

Well, we have a super, free, and easy to use comp title resource in Amazon. The guys and gals over there spend all their days aggregating data—who says they should be the only ones who get to mine it?

Here's how to do it.

1. Find a book you've read that's somewhat like yours.
2. Check the "Customers Also Bought" links at the bottom of the page. Most often, these are going to be books in the same genre. Read their summaries, download a sample of the ebook to your tablet if you have one to check out the writing style, etc. BUT DIG DEEP! The first few books in this pile will be the books everybody is reading; those mega bestsellers that don't do you a lot of good as a querying author—as much as my books might be like John Green's, I don't want anyone to think I've  put on airs about how big I think I might sell. So click through three, four screens until you see books you haven't heard of before. Check *those* out. 
3. Check the sub/sub/sub genre. These days, Amazon thrives on metadata. (See a great post by agent Kristin Nelson on that here.) You'll see books being ranked as #1...but in Romance > Cowboy > Billionaire > With Pet Dragon > Who Turns Into Human. It seems silly, but it's a huge boon to you. Go to the lowest part of that sub-genre of a book, and see what other books are there with it. Then back up a level (to "Billionaire" in my fake example), and check out the books there. The more detailed you go in the hierarchy, the more likely you are to find books that are close to yours...and ones that not everyone on the planet has heard about, but which nonetheless have decent sales. 
4. Look at the person who wrote the most popular review. You can say a lot of very valid bad things about Amazon reviews. But one great thing about them is that prolific reviewers often review in the same genres, because that's what they like to read. So find the most popular review, or the review you agree with most, and click on "See This Person's Other Reviews." Boom. More comps. 
5. Hit your library. If you're made of money, great. Go ahead and add these cool books to your cart and click "purchase" (or load them on your e-reader). But if you're of more modest means like most of us, add them to your cart...and then print your cart and hit your library's website instead. You don't need to own your comp titles, and you don't even need to read all of every single one of them...you just want to find books that are enough like yours that you can lift them up as good examples.

So have fun, but be careful...looking for comp titles is sure to land you a new favorite author or two.  Happy hunting!



This month I'm participating in the A-Z blog challenge. My theme is "writer hacks," or 26 shortcuts you can do as a writer to get the most out of writing and the journey toward and through publication. Find out more about it at a-to-zchallenge.com, and hop around to read the other cool blogs that are part of the challenge!

Know the Reasons, Rule the Rules

Disclaimer: so maybe I'm not qualified to pontificate on what makes for successful submissions, since I don't have an agent. Maybe I'm totally wrong. I don't usually post about submissions, or queries, or anything of the sort. But I'm going to go out on a limb and post this anyway. Because this is something I see a lot, and it frustrates me every time. And please indulge me, even though I've written about this before.


Today's post is brought to you because I had an interesting discussion on twitter with Dahlia Adler about query etiquette and read someone on AW asking about how to have the "perfect query" within a half hour of each other. Together, those events got me thinking. (A dangerous pastime, I know.)

Navigating the land of submissions is pretty crazy and hectic and there's a lot of information out there about how you should write your book, how you should pitch your book, what your query should say, what it should look like, who it should be sent to, when it should be sent, when you should follow up and to whom...

The list goes on. And on, and on, and on. And the problem is, you can hear both sides of the coin. One industry professional might say, "Never send pages." Others will say, "Always send." Some will say, "Nudge after six weeks." Some will say, "If I haven't replied, it means I'm passing."

But out of this, people say there are hard-and-fast rules to querying, rules to writing query letters, rules to writing the manuscript itself. How can that be?

I'm reminded of a misstep I made in my writers' group maybe two months back. I was critiquing one members' overuse, in my opinion, of speech tags, particularly of the "he muttered" and "she shrieked" variety. I offered this advice: "The rule I've heard is, if you can make it silent (i.e., have no speech tag), that's better than 'said;' if you need a speech tag, 'said' will go unnoticed, and if 'said' won't do the trick, then reach for the extravagant tag."

One of the other members said, "You know, I don't like rules. I think writing rules often aren't true. I don't think we should tell people what they have to do."

I was sort of hurt. As far as I was concerned, I hadn't just told the writer that he had to do things my way, yet that was how the other group member interpreted it.

Then I realized that the problem is the word "rule."

We think of rules as things to be adhered to at all cost. The things that get your name on the board in elementary school (if teachers still do that). The rules of law.

But in writing, and even in querying, I find the "rules" to be something very different.

For example: can you open a query with a rhetorical question? Well, here's the thing. Many agents will hate it. Some may auto-reject. Some may begrudgingly read the rest of the query and decide based on the rest of the query they don't like the book. A few may read the rest of the query and decide to ask for pages.

Now the "many agents will hate it" part makes it maybe not the best idea to include. It's risky. "Don't open your query with a rhetorical question" is a fabulously smart guideline. But does that mean that no query ever ever ever should have a rhetorical question, and every one that does will never find an agent? Absolutely no. Just check out any archive of successful queries, and you'll see a few with just such a device.

Same thing with the speech tags. As we sat at the table in Caribou Coffee, I tried to figure out how to explain what I'd meant. A few minutes later, I offered, "You know, I tend to use that rule at the revision rather than the composing stage. I don't sit and go, 'can I remove the speech tag here' while I'm writing. But if I look over a manuscript and see a lot of 'he muttered' and 'she sighed,' it's a sign that I can probably make the text smoother."

Not a rule. Just a sense that, hey, this way tends to work better than that way. But the gods of writing are not going to smite me (or my writing group pal) for the occasional "he muttered."

The rules of the land of writing, even professional writing, are far from absolute. And more important than knowing "the rules" is knowing why they exist. Rhetorical question queries often cause the agent to answer the question, "No" or "I don't know" and then you've lost momentum, and the agent's attention, after the first sentence. Extreme speech tags affect the rhythm of the page and draw the reader's attention to the tag rather than to the speech.

Know the why, and the rule becomes something you can use to your advantage. My current query doesn't open with a rhetorical question, not because I've heard that's "the rule," but because knowing exactly why those are often disliked, I find there's a more effective way to draw a reader into my query. I rarely use speech tags because if I can just get the characters zipping back and forth, the reader hears their dialogue rather than sees me trying to explain how they said it.

The "rules" aren't absolute, but they exist for reasons. Know the reasons, and you rule the rules.

Which is why I offer this: my one hard and fast rule for writing and selling your book. The only rule I live by. It works if you want an agent, it works if you have a giant contract from the Big 6, it works if you write for small presses, it works if you self-pub. It's the closest thing to a universal rule I can think of, and for me, it covers all the necessary bases.

Write a great book. And then be professional about how you pitch it.

That's it. As far as I'm concerned, nothing else is set in stone.

Do you find yourself breaking rules? Do you think about them? Is there a rule you live by, but because of the why rather than the what? Is there a rule that you feel is set in stone? Drop me a line in the comments.

Are Blogs a Thing of the Past?

So last Thursday, Jessica Faust over at Bookends, LLC announced that Bookends will be disbanding  daily posting (and posting little, if at all). I'm sad to see them go—I find that I refer others to them frequently for discussions of how to sub a book that's been subbed, how to talk to an agent if you've already had an agent, and lots of other things that some agent blogs don't address.

Jessica said an interesting thing in her post, however:

It doesn't seem like blogs have as much "power" as they used to, especially with the ease and speed of sources like Twitter and Facebook. Most important, however, I don't have the passion for the blog that I once did. While I will surely miss hearing from the authors I've learned so much from, I think I will find other ways to interact.

It's an interesting question. Have blogs lost their "power" in the face of speedier sources? I know that I tend toward Twitter, but that, as far as I'm concerned, is a personal preference, mostly due to my time. And that and it's a lot easier to connect to people in 140 characters than on a blog. I'm nothing if not a verbose person and twitter keeps me down to earth.

On the other hand, could that be a sign of the times? It's faster to tweet than to blog, so perhaps my preference is exactly the same as others. 

There's something refreshing about stretching out for a full post, being able to better extol the benefits of something you've enjoyed (like Bookends' blog) and get a chance to talk to others about it. So I like to have that room, also, even if a lot of the time you'll also find me in 140-character bites on twitter. (@jsschley, if you wish.)

What do you think? Are blogs a thing of the past? (And, by extension, are all of us on-submission authors wasting our time cultivating them?) Do "faster" social media take precedence over blogging in this day and age?

And whether blogs are passe or not, I will certainly mourn the passing of this one. Thanks for all your time, Jessica and Bookends. It's been a great ride.

The One Rule to Rule them All

I don't usually blog on the submission process. I don't think it's a terribly effective use of space. But I was reading a blog of a soon to be self-publishing author, and in it I saw something I see a lot--on author blogs, on Absolute Write, on twitter, etc. And that is the idea that agents, editors, the publishing industry as a whole are in the business of making rules and hoops and hurdles for authors to jump through in order to get their books published. 

And I can understand where it comes from, to a degree. Yes, agents have ideas about how to pitch things. And they have ideas about what is popular. And they have ideas about what sounds like good writing. And for heaven's sake, yes,  put two agents in a room together and they may disagree on all but one thing that they both prefer to see. (Want evidence of that, mosey on over to WriteOnCon and visit the live chat transcripts from this last year's conference.) But all those things they say work? They're things they've seen work.  When you view 100 queries a day—and I can't fathom that, the most I ever saw as the slushpile reader was ten!—you have a sense of what is going to make an individual query stand out in those 100. They aren't "rules." As someone who sat on first one side of the desk and is now sitting in a tiny kid's chair on the other, as near as I can tell, there is only one rule:

Write an awesome and marketable book.

Take the time to pitch it well.

And then, be ready to keep pitching, and to keep revising, and to keep working.

That's all. Yeah, you can get caught up in write the query this way, write the query that way, don't use a penname, do use a penname, don't ever send an email with an attachment, don't double-space in an e-mail, do double space in an email, yadda yadda. But in the end, I've found that it's more about just using common sense, and being professional, and first and foremost, having a good book.

Of course, I'm not agented yet, so, take that with the requisite canister of salt. But in the meantime, I'm holding fast to a great piece of advice I stumbled across just as I was starting on this whole adventure (and I wish I could remember the source, but I don't--if someone knows, please help!):

There's a term for writers who don't give up: Published.

Blog Rec: BookEnds LLC on Submissions

Every agent tells you, "Don't blog about the submissions process!" Which, frankly, I don't. I think it's kind of odd to talk a lot about fulls and partials and getting your hopes up, and it just intensifies the roller-coasteriness of something that's already pretty roller-coastery.

But that doesn't mean I can't point to someone else's post! :)

Jessica Faust over at BookEnds LLC revisited a post she wrote in 2009, "Submission 101" with some updates on how to handle being on submission. Her advice is almost always wonderful and clear, and this post is no exception. I especially liked her comment on how, as a writer, to handle the increasingly common practice of "no reply means no:"

This is one of those issues that stresses submitting writers out more than anything and, as we learned in Agentfail, causes more than a little anger and frustration. My advice is that if the agency has a “no response means no" policy, note that on your query-tracking sheet and move on the minute the query goes out.

I've been running this practice ever since I got an email saying the agency responds in 6-8 weeks even when it was clear from other data that about 95% of all requests came within six days of the query.  It saves a lot of heartache, and, if someone gets back to me, yay! Happy surprise. So, I was happy to see someone on the other side of the desk validate my intuition.

If you're a writer on sub, wander over there and read. Lots of great advice.

Jessica Faust at BookEnds LLC on Submissions

In Brief: Nelogism

quer.a.noi.a (n.) 1. That moment shortly before you hit "send" when you turn yourself into a quivering mess, asking "Is this the right agent at this agency?" despite having spent hours or days verifying the same, or look at the opening you've already over-edited and declared complete and realize you used the same word twice in twenty words (and it wasn't an article!), or are otherwise convinced that somehow this agent will not only reject you but also communicate to the wider publishing world that you are a hack.


Symptoms alleviated only upon clicking "Send Mail."