Querying and comp title research: YA New York Times best sellers from 2018-present
This one’s for the writers out there! Especially those in #amquerying land.
As I move through yet another revision on my Young Adult novel, I’m starting to look ahead to the agent querying process later this year. One of the things that I’ve been struggling with is comp titles. Of course we all feel that our book is a unique snowflake, and it can be hard to come up with the right published books to compare yours to.
Why are comp titles important?
I’m only going to cover this briefly through the lens of what I’m looking for as I dig into this research, because there are a million and one articles out there about it. Generally, the comp titles you use needs to be recent, not for a massively popular book (i.e. don’t comp Harry Potter), and should do a few things:
Give agents a quick way to visualize your book and show what it’s about, its style, etc
Validate that you know (and read in) your genre and age group
If your comp titles are particularly good, your agent might even use them to pitch editors
If you need more information on what comp titles are and how to chose the best ones, there’s tons already out there! Google away.
Make a reading list
I know that by the fall I’m going to need to be working on my query letter, which will need really good comp titles, and so I want to make a reading list now that I can start working through in order to find the best ones for my book. Since I want to be able to reference books that have done well in the market, I started with the NYT best seller list. I couldn’t easily find an already compiled list of Young Adult best sellers, specifically, so I went through every week of the NYT YA hardcover best sellers from 2018 until now and put them in a spreadsheet, along with their synopsis, author, and publisher. I’ll keep updating it periodically. Click the image to view the spreadsheet, in case it’s helpful in your own querying journey!
Other sources
Amazon can be helpful, but it’s a little harder to navigate, since there’s no easy way (that I could find) to sort recent releases or filter by past time periods. Goodreads’ Listopia and Choice Awards are useful as well. I also recommend browsing through the #pitchwars hashtag on Twitter (or any of the other Twitter competition hashtags that focus on your genre or age group) to get inspiration for what comp titles others are using.
Some NYT stats
Because I’m a nerd about data and organization, I thought it’d be interesting to do some analysis on the publishers from the YA NYT best seller list that I compiled. I took the lists of imprints and researched their parent companies (it’s a convoluted world for imprints out there, so apologies if I got anything wrong, but it should be close enough to give you an idea!) and made graphs for how many NYT best sellers those publishers had in the Young Adult hardcover category that year. The data definitely shows that the big 5 publishers consistently dominate the NYT YA hardcover lists. Click the pink image above if you want to see the raw data.
2018:
68 best sellers
32 imprints
10 publishers (parent company)
2019:
63 best sellers
30 imprints
11 publishers (parent company)
Good luck with your comps!
I hope that digging through the NYT lists since 2018 helps you find some comp titles for your book, or at least provides you with some good additions to your reading list. If you’re currently querying or thinking about it, let me know in the comments what your current struggles are, or if there are any tips you’d recommend to others!