As I put together the querying information for my agent(!!!) I panicked over a bunch of the things she needed.  One of them was a list of comps, or comparable titles.  Publishing Crawl Podcast talks about comps a lot when they talk about queries so I knew they were important, but how on earth do you pick them?  Basically all I knew was that you should never pick the 1% of authors to use as a comp (So J.K. Rowling and Stephen King are right out, for example) because everyone does that and no one believes them.  (Usually with good reason.  “It has magic” does not make your book like Harry Potter.  Rejected query blogs are fun to read.)

So, as I always do when I’m freaking out and inside my head too much about something to do with writing, I turned to my friend who works in publishing.  She has this magical ability to become an expert on whatever she’s doing at any given point in time, so as long as my question is in her field she has an answer.

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