Hello, dreamers. As work continues on querying for Pioneers, I’ve decided to provide periodic updates on the process. And suffice to say, things have taken another hard left. This time, the hang-up is a familiar one: comps.

Comp Titles in Modern Literary Queries

If you’re reading this, and you’re sane enough to have never tried to publish through the traditional method, you may be unfamiliar with the term “comps”. Put simply, “comps” in modern literary queries are books you feel your novel is comparable to.

The modern query requires comp titles. They’re important enough that most recent advice on writing query letters suggests placing them in the opening paragraph. It may seem counterintuitive to open a query by telling an agent what currently-published novels your story is similar to; after all, if you’re querying a novel, you believe your story is original. It’s hard to sound original when starting by saying “My book is a lot like these books you may have read”. But it’s crucial.

Comp titles serve several important purposes. For one thing, they’re meant to provide easy context for your story. Ideally, a writer will make specific comps (“My novel features the multi-POV storytelling of Leviathan Wakes with the scientific rigor of The Martian“). This gives the agent a sense of the themes and nature of your story a few paragraphs of plot summary may lack. It’s also meant to demonstrate a writer’s knowledge of the current literary market (comping a mystery novel to the work of Ragnar Johansson will work better than comping to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie).

Based on everything I’ve heard, the ideal comp is a book that bears clear similarities to yours, be it in style or themes, while also being not overly well-known (comping a book to Jurassic Park or Patriot Games is a bad idea). So far, I’ve listed Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky and All Systems Red by Martha Wells as comps for Pioneers, along with Cibola Burn and the novella Strange Dogs by James S.A. Corey, both of which are part of the Expanse series. But I’ve hit upon one major, potentially fatal snag.

Pioneers is a work of optimistic science fiction, often referred to as utopian sci-fi. That term differentiates it from the far more common dystopian science fiction. Dystopian comprises a vast amount of extant sci-fi literature, including some of the best-known works, from Dune and the Foundation series to Ready Player One and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the basis for the film Blade Runner). In terms of utopian sci-fi, without a doubt the best example is the Star Trek franchise.

The good news for me is that, in the current literary market, utopian science fiction is all the rage. A lot of agents are looking for it. This could be because, with how bleak the world looks right now, readers are hungry for a vision of the future that doesn’t start with “And then there was a decade of war, and the ice caps all melted, and society regressed and we all started eating each other”. It could also be because, objectively, dystopian has been done to death. The literary market is saturated with it. And there’s my catch-22.

I have found almost nothing in terms of hopeful science fiction out there to comp to. There must be something, anything that I can compare my novel to. But if there is, I haven’t found it. That said, I have to keep looking. I’m planning to send a question in to “The Shit No One Tells You About Writing” for their November comps special. That, of course, means I’ll need to wait until at least later this month to begin querying. At this point, it may be best to wait until the big query rush in January. But we shall see. For now, I’m continuing to rehearse my “elevator pitch”, refine my talking points, and resist the urge to start making changes to Pioneers again. Here goes everything. – MK