A book comp is a title that’s comparable to yours in some key ways. The graph above displays your manuscript alongside bestselling titles with similar “story DNA.” Our AI, Marlowe, has identified these as your book’s closest subject-matter comps from a rights-cleared database of bestsellers.

Unlike other sites that offer comps, Marlowe compares full novels rather than just book descriptions or metadata.

Marlowe identified these comps based primarily on subject matter, with style, mood, tone, and character agency as secondary factors. Your book is highlighted in deep purple. Your book is highlighted in deep purple, with shorter connecting lines indicating closer subject similarities. Hover over a title for a link to the book on BingeBooks.

Marlowe understands subject matter in a highly nuanced way. It considers not just scenes and events but the underlying concepts, such as coming of age, addiction recovery, psychological suspense, and so forth. If some of the comparisons in your report seem curious, Marlowe may be looking at your storyline on a different level or in a way that’s not immediately apparent. Marlowe looks for books with characters that are similar to yours in how they interact with other characters and with their environment. It also looks at mood balance to identify books that evoke emotions similar to yours.

Depending on your genre, the titles shown may vary in closeness to your work because of the vast number of books published each year. However, Marlowe is likely to identify bestsellers with notable parallels to your story.

For debut authors, identifying comps helps in marketing and positioning your book within its genre. For example, if your setting is central to the story — say, the Louisiana bayous — Marlowe may show other bestselling titles rooted in similar settings. If you’ve written an epistolary Civil War novel, Marlowe may include other titles in the historical fiction genre that rely on the structure of letters or diaristic writing.  

In the default view, comp titles may or may not belong to the same genre as your book, as Marlowe focuses on storytelling patterns across bestsellers rather than specific genre conventions. Note that if the genre doesn’t align with your story, Marlowe may still suggest books with distant parallels.

Authors run comps on their books for several important reasons:

• To find an agent
  Comps are valuable for pitching to agents, publishers, and literary professionals, as they provide instant context. For instance, describing your book as a cross between The Hunger Games and Percy Jackson tells agents it features young protagonists in high-stakes situations within a fantastical world. Agents interested in such narratives may be more likely to request to see your manuscript. Choose comps from the past five years to demonstrate your awareness of current trends in publishing.

• To help with marketing
  Having comps can assist publishers in planning marketing efforts by identifying potential audiences and promotional angles based on successful titles that resonate with similar readers. This is more relevant for indie authors — especially those who run advertising campaigns on Amazon or Facebook — than traditionally published authors.

• To show market viability
  Comp titles help point to the market potential of a new manuscript. By showing that similar books have been successful, authors can demonstrate that there is an audience for their work. This is particularly crucial in a competitive publishing environment where agents and publishers seek projects with proven marketability.

• To understand your target readers
  Comps help steer you to a better understanding of whom you’re writing for and where your title fits within the current market landscape. This helps you align your work with market expectations. Over time, it can also help you refine your story in terms of tone, style, and themes.

• To identify with the greats
  Authors like to know which bestselling authors their work most resembles. Marlowe may compare your novel to classics like Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, or Shelley’s Frankenstein, which persist as cultural staples, transcend genre boundaries, and continue to inspire adaptations across media.

While you may be surprised to see some of the titles above listed alongside yours, the variety of titles Marlowe suggests may open new perspectives on your book’s market potential. We suggest that you use Marlowe’s list of comps not as a final result but as a starting point for researching your own list of comps. Here are some effective ways to find additional comps for your book:

Online retailers’ book comps

Look up popular titles in your genre on major retail sites. Online book retailers often display related book suggestions based on customer preferences and purchase patterns. Although these recommendations primarily reflect buying trends, they offer valuable market insights.

If you start with Marlowe’s comps and research each title on websites like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, BookBub, Apple Books, or independent book sites, you’ll find more stories that share similar craft and structural elements to yours. Not only are you proving to a potential agent that your book already has a market, you are also showing that you keep up with trends in the book market in the first place — both of which make you and your book a more appealing prospect.

AI tools

Use some of the top AI tools for suggested book titles or author names that could serve as comps for your new work. Unlike Marlowe, their recommendations will be based on sales and other datapoints apart from the storyline itself, but that’s still valuable to know. The basic versions of these AI tools are free, though you’ll likely need to register: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot.

Book award winners

Another good way to research comps is to check out award-winning titles from renowned literary prize lists and competitions. You may not want to list one of the major book awards (winner of the Pulitzer, Booker Prize, or Nobel Prize in Literature) as a comp, but there are dozens of books that have won smaller awards like the Hugo or Nebula awards for science fiction and fantasy, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and others. It might seem ambitious to list a recent recipient of the Nebula Award as one of your comps, but again, you are letting a prospective agent or publisher know that you are writing with a proven audience in mind that can facilitate sales and marketing for your book. See Authors A.I.’s list of Book award competitions.

Bestseller lists

You can also seek out bestsellers’ lists from news and media outlets like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or USA Today, which are often categorized by genre and have a national scope. Books with staying power on these lists are great choices for comp titles because they remain on store shelves and in online catalogs far longer than most published works.

Goodreads

Despite reduced popularity, Goodreads remains valuable for discovering reader-generated lists and groups centered on specific subgenres. There’s also the annual Goodreads Choice Awards.

Libraries

Libraries hold a wealth of long-term titles, making them excellent for uncovering hidden gems that may no longer be readily available in retail stores. Asking a librarian for help can often yield unexpected titles to help expand your list beyond the current crop of bestsellers.

Knowing what other titles are succeeding in the market is one way to capture an agent’s attention, but you should also be aware of the general body of work existing around your book so that you can better judge what gaps exist in the market. You can tell an agent, “There are about two dozen books in this section in the bookstore, but none of them address X, Y, Z factors like my book does.”  

Online tools

Online tools that might assist in researching comp titles include:

• LibraryThing, a community-created and -maintained public catalog that comprises reader discovery, reviews, and cataloging
• EBSCO’s NoveList database, which can be accessed through a library or with the assistance of a librarian
• GNOD (Global Network of Discovery), which includes mapping tools for similar books, authors, movies, music, and art

Every month, Authors A.I. adds more books to its corpus … and Marlowe’s book comps get a little better. If you’d like to suggest additional authors or novels you’d like to see included in our corpus so that you can see how Marlowe compares them to your work, drop us a line (please be specific) and we’ll make every effort to add the titles.