What are Comp Titles in Cookbook Publishing?
When writing a cookbook proposal, you’re often asked to include a section called “comp titles.” Comp titles are published books that are comparable to the book you are pitching to publishers.
In her excellent book The Business of Being a Writer, Jane Friedman calls this section of a proposal “competitive title analysis.” Essentially, these are books that are already out in the world that are comparable to yours in some way. These books are after the same readers or are covering similar topics. In this portion of your proposal, your goal is to show that a topic you cover is part of a popular or growing book category, that your book is better/different from the titles that are already out there on the subject, that the books that exist on the category are good but limited because of xyz. Or all of the above.
Early in the proposal-writing phase, it’s worth spending time studying the books that are similar to your future book to understand where your idea fits in the cookbook market. If you were writing fiction, you would be asked what genre you’re writing in. Science fiction? Mystery? Young Adult? Romance? Comp titles for fiction books usually come from the same genre. Cookbooks sort of have their own form of genres, too—there are baking, home cooking, single-subject, restaurant books, and many more. Within those categories, there are a lot of off-shoots. Understanding the market will help you position your book when you’re pitching it to agents and editors. (Remember: a proposal is one part art, one part business plan.)
Publishers use comp titles in various ways. They prefer to publish books on subjects that have proven track records so they can project sales. They look up how many copies of a similar published book were sold to estimate how many copies a new book on the subject may sell. They also use comp titles to help explain the book internally—i.e., to marketing and sales teams at the publishing house.
You can still break new ground on a subject that hasn’t been covered much, but even if your book diverges from what’s on the shelf today, you still need to make a case for how your book fits into the existing book marketplace.
In this post, I’ll go into how to leverage comp titles effectively in a cookbook proposal.
How to Find Comp Titles
Go to bookstores and libraries and browse for titles that cover similar topics. You can do this in person and online; it’s good to do both if you can. See where these books sit on the shelf. Is it in the baking section? A Southeast Asian section? Look inside the book: how is the table of contents organized? Look at the recipes. How complex are they? Do they fit on one page or do they go on for pages?
Browsing in cookbook-only shops, like Omnivore Books, Book Larder, Now Serving, and Bold Fork Books is an even better way to do research. When I go into one of these shops, I like to ask for what they have in specific categories and what they like about certain books. You can do this online if you don’t live near one of these shops and see what they’re excited about. You can also browse through Amazon’s cookbook subjects to see how many new titles have come out in a category and what’s selling well ( look at the Amazon ranking).
Seek out books that are popular. Be wary of including obscure books as comp titles because it may indicate that your book is also obscure and may have trouble finding a large enough audience for a traditional publisher to take interest. And look for contemporary books that are still in print. If you’ve never heard of the book but it covers similar ground as yours, Google the book and see what kind of media coverage and/or reviews it received.
If there isn’t any book that approximates your subject, look for books that are similar in style or scope, even if the specific subject matter is different. If your book is about the cooking of Mexican grandmothers, offer a cookbook about grandmothers from another country as a comparison. If the book is all about tortillas, you don’t have to include only books about tortillas. You can look for single-subject cookbooks that have parallels, like books about flatbreads, as well as cookbooks that include tortillas as a chapter.
Doing this exercise may help you hone your cookbook angle just as much as it helps round out the proposal.
Too Many Comp Titles
If your potential book covers a popular subject and you’ve found 100 similar books, it’s time to see what you can do to modify your idea to ensure it’s unique to you.
If you are trying to sell a general book about Italian cooking, for example, maybe your research will tell you that there is a lot of competition in this space. This may mean you have to work harder on your angle.
Examples:
Can your book be about regional or seasonal antipasti platters for easy entertaining?
Is it a book on desserts that goes into the history of gianduja in Piedmont in one chapter and marzipan in Sicily in another?
If your book was about Italian baking, what about focusing on a specific baking subject, like bread?
Is your book about a city that you know all about because you live there? (Kristina Gill use this angle to great effect in Tasting Rome.)
Could you tackle the subject of the vegan Italian kitchen, which takes traditional flavors and gives it a modern take?
After honing your idea, find comp titles that are in line with this new angle.
Not Enough Comp Titles
If there aren’t any cookbooks that are similar to yours, you have to work even harder to show that there’s a market for your book—unless your book is about a trend that publishers are actively seeking out. If that’s you, great! If it’s not, don’t worry!
Here’s how things work on the publisher’s side. An acquisitions editor (someone who brings new books into a publishing house) will not think: “Gosh, we have no cookbooks on that subject. We need to fill that void!” Instead, they’ll think: “Our competitor published a book on that subject in 2001, and it only sold 2000 copies. No one has touched the subject since, and there might not be enough interest in this subject for us to spend resources publishing a book like this.” Breaking new ground is never easy. You can prove publishers wrong, and authors do every year, but be prepared for a challenge. Also be prepared to modify your book to make it more attractive to a larger audience. Example:
Instead of a cookbook dedicated to New Jersey summer vegetable gardens, consider a subject with a national focus. Maybe the book is written by a New Jersey author and celebrates summer, but the focus is all about tomatoes. The hook is could be how Alice Waters once proclaimed that New Jersey grows the best tomatoes.
This happened to me while writing the proposal for Lavash. We originally wanted to call the book “Armenia,” but the book sounded too niche and we had a hard time finding comp titles that had been published traditionally in the past 5 years. By having a big focus on bread, however, we could have comp titles that highlighted bread in some way.
Just because there are too many or too few books about your topic doesn’t mean you’re doomed. You might think that every cookbook on Paris has been done, but new ones come out all the time with different angles and find ready audiences with people who love Paris. It also happened with Instant Pot books. There was so much interest in the appliance that there was room for a lot of authors to write books that sold upwards of 100,000 copies each. It’s kind of like when you see three coffee shops on the same block and all of them are packed. It shows that this block is now a destination for coffee, so more people come to that specific block. And if there aren’t any books on your subject, look to ways you can align yourself with successful books to show that the cookbook world is becoming a more diverse place every year.
How to Include Comp Titles in Your Proposal
In the marketing/promotion side of your proposal, list a handful of comp titles (say, 5) and then describe what the book is about and how yours differs because of your approach, type of recipes, etc. Include the title, author(s) name, publisher, and date the book was published. Describe the scope and style of the book and then suggest how your book differs or builds on similar themes. If I were including A16 Food + Wine as a comp title for a book about vegan Italian food and wine, I would write something like:
A16 Food +Wine, by Nate Appleman and Shelley Lindgren with Kate Leahy, Ten Speed Press, 2008. Under the title, I would spell out what this book is about and how my book differs/advances similar themes/etc. This doesn’t have to be more than a paragraph. You can say how your book will be better than a comp title, but don’t bash a book. You may be pitching your book to an editor who worked on one of the books you have in your comp title list!
For a proposal outline, see my earlier post, How To Write a Cookbook Proposal
Bottom Line: When looking for comp titles, it’s important to know the cookbook market and where you fit in it. Describe comp titles in such a way that makes your book a compelling addition to a publisher’s portfolio of books.