Comparisons

When developing and planning a book, it’s good practice to have an idea where it goes on your shelf, and more importantly, where you are aiming to put it in the market. That’s one thing, but your book has to be different. Further, it has to be yours in style and feel, and in how you handle the content/story.

We’ve discussed marketing etc before, because that’s one of the most important things for publishing and especially agents, so they know who to pitch it to, but it’s worth investigating what sets my book apart from those ‘similar-but-not-quite’.

One of my ‘comps’ is Will Hill’s Department 19.

Looks good, the blurb promises good things. It doesn’t slouch on militaristic and action punch, but is more fantastical than Covenant because it’s aimed at a YA (Young Adult) audience, so it fits nicely in our comparison spectrum because it anchors where we’re going, but it’s similar enough to make my book the next step.

Covenant is harder-boiled than this, but not quite as much as our next comp, and one mentioned a good few times on my blog: John Steakley’s Vampires.

Ok, now we’re getting close. Grit, grime, giblets. It was turned into a film with James Woods, that’s how hard-boiled this book is. Violent and vicious with no holds barred, it sits firmly alongside our book – albeit further along the shelf.

Between this and Department 19, we now have our two extremes, our outliers we use to bracket what our book has that our comps also have, and more importantly what they don’t. For this, we now need to turn to our third comp. Charles Stross’ The Laundry Files.

Described as: An innovative spin on H.P. Lovedcraft’s “Cthulu Mythos,” the Laundry Files is perfect for fans of weird fiction and bureaucratic humour with a technological twist.

Now we’re closer again to the fantastical of Eldritch Horror, but what Stoss does here is bring in the absurdity of the Bureaucrat, and unapologetic British humour/scorn that exists in spite of it. It hands an everyday realism to the whole affair, and it also bends the genres it touches upon. It’s David Brent, but his Office runs the admin department of hell.

Perfect – but we’re still not done. Will Hill’s work is often compared to, and likely inspired by, a cult UK TV program called Ultraviolet, written by Joe Aherne – and it is there, dear adventurers, we must go in the next blog post.

Until dawn.