The Comparable Titles Game
"List some books that are similar to yours. (500 characters or less)" reads the query manager entry for both Kristin Nelson and Stephanie Rostan, two professional literary agents.
It's not explicitly required by all lit agents and publishers, but some folks advise including a "comp titles" section on any query letter.
I haven't tended to, but it was definitely in my formal proposal (which, in turn, is required by some lit agents and publishers for any nonficton queries, and memoirs are nonfiction), and I had a standalone Comparable Titles snippet I could include whenever it was a part of what was requested.
So now that I've generated at least a rough draft of my third book's query letter (see previous blog post), I've started work on assembling a list of other books that Within the Box has some important resemblance to.
"You may be intimidated or skeptical, thinking either that your idea has to be unique in order to pique their interest, or that your book needs to be similar to others, or else there won’t be an audience for it. The reality here, like with most things in life, is somewhere in the middle", says Kevin Anderson.
Yeah... I'm not aware of any other first-hand account of being in a rehab clinic that turns out to have similarly sinister overtones. Or a genderqueer person's narrative about having their inability to function well socially attributed to their drug-addled mental instabilities instead of pinned to marginalization and society's biases and attitudes. But let's see... books with a lot of internal thought-processing and which invoke a sense of a possibly unreliable narrator who may be more messed up than she thinks she is, in a place or in the care of people who are supposed to be taking care of folks but may be doing something a lot more evil...
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh looks promising. It's a first person narrative from an unguessably different individual, one who seems sharp but perhaps damaged goods in some not fully explained way. Definitely an outsider. She's not institutionalized but works in one (a juvenile reformatory prison). A facility that is at least officially and nominally about doing good but pretty evidently, from the narrator's observation, isn't. A narrator who cares about her interactions with others and is vulnerable on a number of parameters, but not in the usual manner; she's an interesting mixture of impervious and insecure. And Eileen is even more self-immersive than Within the Box -- very little action and events have occurred in the first 60 pages.
Dennis Lehand's Shutter Island takes place in a high security forensic psychiatric hospital. The main character and his companion are federal marshals brought in because one of the committed inmates has gone missing. But readers learn pretty early on that the main character has some hidden agenda of his own involving a murderer who killed someone in his own family, a murderer committed to this same facility. And he may not be wrapped as tightly as he likes people to think. Something's totally up with the shrinks running the place, too. They're not playing honestly with the agents; the marshals don't believe the inmate could have escaped without assistance from at least some staff members, perhaps highly placed ones. And now, 50 pages or so in, I'm seeing signs that they may be doing conscious and deliberate things to manipulate their federal guests... or is it the narrator's paranoid imaginings?
I'm also 45 pages into A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. The first person narrator is the younger sister of Natalie, a brilliant high school student who created entertaining stories but whose imaginings are going very dark and twisted. Natalie is clearly suffering -- she says so -- and her behaviors are impacting others in her family negatively, making her situation different from that of a person who may merely be perceived by others as deranged.
You get more of that from A. Mark Bedillion's Psychiatric Survivor. Or that's my expectation at any rate. I haven't started it yet, it just arrived in the mail. But it's billed as "from misdiagnosed mental patient to hospital director", and it clearly comes from the critical perspective that we call the psychiatric patients' liberation movement or the anti-psychiatric movement. So it is unlikely that the author will position himself as believing he needed to be in the facility, and equally unlikely that the people running it will be portrayed as agreeing with him.
Another couple books I picked out as prospects are Good as Gone by Amy Gentry, which a brief inside peek revealed itself to me as a suspense tale in which a daughter returns after years of being missing, but the mom actually isn't at all sure that this girl is really her. That creates the worry that the situation may be a dangerous one for her family. And An Anonymous Girl from Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, the first couple chapters of which shape up as a psychological chess game in which a girl swipes another girl's invite to a paid research project involving personal questions about moral choices, and in which the psychologist running it knows she was not being honest about how she came to acquire the invite.
Then there's The Girl on the Train (Paula Hawkins) -- unreliable narrator, substance abuse, questionable mental status, blackouts (so maybe she's hiding stuff from herself and us)... but I think there's a risk involved in comparing one's unpublished book to something that's sold quite that successfully. Still, I won't rule it out.
Oh, and I'm still waiting on the arrival of Upstairs in the Crazy House, another memoir from a psychiatric survivor.
If any of these titles or descriptions conjures up the names of other books you think I should take a look at, let me know!
-----
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My third book is deep in tertiary drafts, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
It's not explicitly required by all lit agents and publishers, but some folks advise including a "comp titles" section on any query letter.
I haven't tended to, but it was definitely in my formal proposal (which, in turn, is required by some lit agents and publishers for any nonficton queries, and memoirs are nonfiction), and I had a standalone Comparable Titles snippet I could include whenever it was a part of what was requested.
So now that I've generated at least a rough draft of my third book's query letter (see previous blog post), I've started work on assembling a list of other books that Within the Box has some important resemblance to.
"You may be intimidated or skeptical, thinking either that your idea has to be unique in order to pique their interest, or that your book needs to be similar to others, or else there won’t be an audience for it. The reality here, like with most things in life, is somewhere in the middle", says Kevin Anderson.
Yeah... I'm not aware of any other first-hand account of being in a rehab clinic that turns out to have similarly sinister overtones. Or a genderqueer person's narrative about having their inability to function well socially attributed to their drug-addled mental instabilities instead of pinned to marginalization and society's biases and attitudes. But let's see... books with a lot of internal thought-processing and which invoke a sense of a possibly unreliable narrator who may be more messed up than she thinks she is, in a place or in the care of people who are supposed to be taking care of folks but may be doing something a lot more evil...
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh looks promising. It's a first person narrative from an unguessably different individual, one who seems sharp but perhaps damaged goods in some not fully explained way. Definitely an outsider. She's not institutionalized but works in one (a juvenile reformatory prison). A facility that is at least officially and nominally about doing good but pretty evidently, from the narrator's observation, isn't. A narrator who cares about her interactions with others and is vulnerable on a number of parameters, but not in the usual manner; she's an interesting mixture of impervious and insecure. And Eileen is even more self-immersive than Within the Box -- very little action and events have occurred in the first 60 pages.
Dennis Lehand's Shutter Island takes place in a high security forensic psychiatric hospital. The main character and his companion are federal marshals brought in because one of the committed inmates has gone missing. But readers learn pretty early on that the main character has some hidden agenda of his own involving a murderer who killed someone in his own family, a murderer committed to this same facility. And he may not be wrapped as tightly as he likes people to think. Something's totally up with the shrinks running the place, too. They're not playing honestly with the agents; the marshals don't believe the inmate could have escaped without assistance from at least some staff members, perhaps highly placed ones. And now, 50 pages or so in, I'm seeing signs that they may be doing conscious and deliberate things to manipulate their federal guests... or is it the narrator's paranoid imaginings?
I'm also 45 pages into A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. The first person narrator is the younger sister of Natalie, a brilliant high school student who created entertaining stories but whose imaginings are going very dark and twisted. Natalie is clearly suffering -- she says so -- and her behaviors are impacting others in her family negatively, making her situation different from that of a person who may merely be perceived by others as deranged.
You get more of that from A. Mark Bedillion's Psychiatric Survivor. Or that's my expectation at any rate. I haven't started it yet, it just arrived in the mail. But it's billed as "from misdiagnosed mental patient to hospital director", and it clearly comes from the critical perspective that we call the psychiatric patients' liberation movement or the anti-psychiatric movement. So it is unlikely that the author will position himself as believing he needed to be in the facility, and equally unlikely that the people running it will be portrayed as agreeing with him.
Another couple books I picked out as prospects are Good as Gone by Amy Gentry, which a brief inside peek revealed itself to me as a suspense tale in which a daughter returns after years of being missing, but the mom actually isn't at all sure that this girl is really her. That creates the worry that the situation may be a dangerous one for her family. And An Anonymous Girl from Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, the first couple chapters of which shape up as a psychological chess game in which a girl swipes another girl's invite to a paid research project involving personal questions about moral choices, and in which the psychologist running it knows she was not being honest about how she came to acquire the invite.
Then there's The Girl on the Train (Paula Hawkins) -- unreliable narrator, substance abuse, questionable mental status, blackouts (so maybe she's hiding stuff from herself and us)... but I think there's a risk involved in comparing one's unpublished book to something that's sold quite that successfully. Still, I won't rule it out.
Oh, and I'm still waiting on the arrival of Upstairs in the Crazy House, another memoir from a psychiatric survivor.
If any of these titles or descriptions conjures up the names of other books you think I should take a look at, let me know!
-----
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My third book is deep in tertiary drafts, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts