I was at Dymocks bookshop in Brisbane CBD last weekend, searching for comp titles for my work in progress novel (currently called Love and Distraction but likely to be renamed again soon). It’s notoriously hard to find good comp titles so it was great that the staff were super helpful and really took the time to help me out.
I’m due to pitch to publishers in two months time at the Romance Writers conference in Adelaide, so I need decent comps for then. I’ve selected some comp titles before, but they won’t fly during a pitch because they are too old and not romances – so not really comp titles at all, just books that gave me a warm glow.
The new comps need to be:
- Romances, so happy ending and all that
- Contemporary Romcoms or Romcom adjacent
- Ideally published in the last 5 years and definitely within the last 10
- Not enormous sellers that everyone knows – so Emily Henry and friends are out
- Not super spicy. My work in progress is on the sweet side so the comp title should be too
- Ideally Australian
- Not billionaire romances, sports or generally awash with alpha males. My male lead is definitely on the beta end, and that’s why I love him
- Ideally some element of neurodiversity but that’s a nice to have
And that’s quite the list. The most difficult ask is ‘not super spicy’. Most recently published romances are steamy, so identifying the sweeter ones is tough. A book might have a chaste pink cartoon cover featuring a couple delicately kissing then within 10 pages they are both naked and devouring each other. Judging a romance book by its cover just doesn’t work, so I enlisted the help of the Dymocks staff.
Over the next twenty minutues, four of us (three of the staff plus me) rifled through the romance, YA and general fiction sections in search of the perfect comp. I came away with The Next Big Thing by James Colley and Welcome To Your Life by Bethany Rutter – two very promising candidates, and I’ve noted down another half a dozen potentials for later. A decent result all round.
Not every bookstore is as good as Dymocks though. The smaller ones often don’t have the stock, especially if you need to get very specific, and some larger stores have no romance sections at all. It’s as if they are pretending the genre doesn’t exist. Not only does Brisbane Dymocks have a really good romance selection, it has knowledgeable staff who were happy to spend their time selecting me the right book – no matter how difficult and specific my requirements were.
Thanks guys.
