Is Your Book Like No Other?

Mirror, mirror, what do you see?
I think I look like Harry P.

A tweet from literary agent Amy Boggs has got me thinking, lately. She said: "When a query says: 'I haven't seen a book involving this before,' I can usually think of 3 such books off the top of my head."

The notion of "comparables," in pub biz parlance -- those (preferably bestselling, famous) books that are enough like yours, but not too much like, has been occupying me lately, and also occupying both of my crit partners. One partner's agent asked her for a list of comparables, and she had a hard time thinking of any. The other, who is in the process of querying, is worried that her novel is too much like another (bestselling, famous) one with a similar subject -- so her job is to set it apart. In literature, of course, there's nothing new under the sun, and there's not a thing wrong with that. But the notion of comparables when it comes to marketing is particularly slippery -- because what, precisely, are we comparing?