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Comping, the practice of comparing new submissions to other similar books, still has a place in the publishing industry but its value is limited and can hold back diversity and innovation, editors and agents say.
The practice has been brought up a number of times in recent years when discussing the lack of diversity in publishing, with critics saying it stops publishers taking risks. In an Observer article this month on the reasons why young women like Sally Rooney are now dominating literary fiction, Kishani Widyaratna, editorial director for Fourth Estate, said the reliance on comp titles needed to be challenged because it “leads to publishers reproducing what already exists”. “It doesn’t allow publishers to innovate," she said.
Marianne Tatepo (below right), commissioning editor at Ebury, explained that in non-fiction, comping often makes a lot more sense because it gives publishers a clear sense of how much interest there is in a topic.
"There is good reason to use comparisons on titles when it comes to themes and when it comes to different subjects and categories," she told The Bookseller. "You can turn to Nielsen to understand which books have done well and you might be able to map out either something to do with the subtitle or something about the presentation of the book as you look into doing your book. So I’m not kind of categorically opposed to comps because the area I’m operating in is commercial non-fiction and it’s all around understanding and being able to compare what is the most attractive to readers."
However, she did think there is an issue when comping is not based on a topic "but when instead people use comping to disqualify an entire segment of the population or subcategory of people".
"That’s when I find comping to be problematic and I think it greatly limits the opportunities for authors to be known for something," she said.
Jenny Geras, m.d. of digital publishing company Bookouture, also argued that comps work for some titles better than others.
“The answer to this question is different for commercial publishing than it is for literary publishing. Genre fiction readers, and particularly voracious digital fiction readers, are actively looking for more books that are very similar to the books they read and love. Of course, there can and should still be innovation and change within these genres, but certain conventions are expected to remain. Whereas it can be more challenging for publishers to reproduce copycats of a literary fiction phenomenon and expect to find the same market again and again. And I don’t believe literary fiction readers either want or expect that similarity,” she said.
David Roth-Ey (below left), executive publisher at William Collins and Fourth Estate, said it is “not surprising” that publishers use comp titles when trying to provide some “rational justification” of the sums of cash they are spending on new titles.
He told The Bookseller: “Inevitably, prior experience is a place that people go to try to dredge up some rationale for why you want to invest in this now. If one publisher is comping something to Reni Eddo Lodge, you know, it’s like, oh my gosh 300,000 copies or something. If you put that in your P&L (profit and loss sheet) and say ‘oh, it’s just like this, it’s going to do those numbers’ obviously you’re going to come up with a potential advance that’s vastly superior to something that could be on a similar topic that sold 3,000 copies.
“Recently there’s been a critique obviously, particularly I think on the issue around authors from diverse backgrounds where you had authors who were being comped to other similar race authors whose book may not have had the same exposure or opportunities at retail,” he said.
However, he has noticed a change in the types of books being comped: “Now we’ve got more comps of Queenie or Bernardine Evaristo. Suddenly if you peg it to those books now there’s a richer menu of options to comp things to. I don’t think the process of comping itself is inherently problematic, except for the fact that there weren’t books that represented the full range of potentiality,” he said.
With more diverse comp titles, publishers are now beginning to take risks to "try and do something original and innovative” to grow new audiences. Roth-Ey points to work being done at HarperCollins to give extra pots of marketing money to certain books: “You know, we’re competing with gaming, we’re competing with TV and radio and music, we’re competing with all these different segments and so making sure that our books are accessible and we’re bothering to promote in places other than where the Waterstones reader would naturally be,” he said.
“That helps change downstream the sales pattern, it gives us insight into what can work, it gives us time to invest in partnerships that can pay off for all our lists, not just books with a specific relevance to a given audience.”
HarperCollins' new team at HarperNorth are also working on finding new voices and readers. Genevieve Pegg, publishing director, told The Bookseller: “In our first year, it’s been clear that that means a mixture of building on what publishing does well - serving existing markets with the very best examples of beloved genres - and combining that with innovation and energy in areas publishing hasn’t always been as active in.
“Whether that’s been in sports writing from a woman of colour underlining the fact that football isn’t just a job for the boys with Melissa Reddy’s Believe Us, connecting with non-traditional audiences with Paul Mort’s audio-first Paul Mort Will Save Your Life or our upcoming crime novel, Tracks, from the amazing Karen Woods, who only accessed reading and writing later in life through an adult literacy course, it shows how many more authors and readers are out there if we can widen the net.
“Of course, the work is never done, and we know that for us, we need to stay in close conversation with readers, booksellers, librarians and writers across the north to hear what will reach the broadest readership - and trying to recognise that while it’s easy to slip into industry shorthand, the most open conversations can come when we drop the jargon.”
Emma Paterson, an agent at Aitken Alexander, argued that the comp model is "inherently conservative". She told The Bookseller: "Though I don’t think agents are as close to this part of the business as publishers are, I do agree with the broad assertion that the 'comp titles' model is an inherently conservative one—a model designed to manage perceived risk. One of the effects of this can be a stifling of innovation, originality and difference, as others have pointed out.
"Already some publishers are doing away with this part of the acquisitions process, challenging editors, publicity departments and sales teams to find new ways to advocate for the potential readership of a book. But more simply I think there is also room to innovate within the comparison model if we widen our frames of reference and think more critically and ambitiously about the nature of the comparisons we are making: not every new black writer is the next Toni Morrison, for example, nor every new Irish writer this year’s Sally Rooney. The comparison model need not reduce and limit new writers in these ways by definition but certainly the way that it functions at the moment leaves little room for intellectual expansiveness or surprise."