Some literary agents request "similar works". This is in addition to your two standard "comps" (comparables) that are always part of a query letter.
I just polished up a list for my book 1, The Emissary and the Time Bomb from Outer Space: Day One, Discovery. I began with the two comps from my query letter, then went on with others that felt similar in some way.
If you are trying this yourself, see if you can find a list of what you've read over the years. See if your library or e-reader keeps that info. It helped me to page through my Read list on Goodreads. I forget what I've read over the years.
This was a fun exercise. Also, it helped me expand my comps to books that I had wanted to use, but couldn't, because they were older books. Comps are supposed to have been published in the past 5 years.
Similar works (500 words)
Lovers of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary will enjoy my book’s references to real-life science and the thrill of first contact.
While I can’t promise Richard Power’s dazzling prose, my plot’s structure resembles The Overstory’s. The misunderstandings of eight characters grow and resolve as their lives increasingly tangle up over environmental disputes. I can, at least, promise humor and a happy ending.
A professional environmental writer and poet (Catherine Young, Black Diamonds) compared my draft to David Rhode’s Driftless. Both use a rural Wisconsin backdrop where several oddball characters rub shoulders. Driftless also features a main character experiencing an unexplained vision. While everything in my book is rigorously science-based, I have one exception: main character Jim is introduced with a mystical vision which unites four characters at the end. (My critique groups wanted to know if Jim received an alien transmission, but as in Driftless, I’m letting the vision remain as inexplicable as life itself. I felt that if I defined Jim’s vision as, say, a class-five telepathic episode or a precognitive astral occurrence, that would lessen its significance.)
Carl Hiaasen’s ecofiction humor inspires me. Like Skinny Dip, Wrecker, Squirm, Scat, and Hoot, the fate of the wilderness is always teetering, driven by friction between the haves and have-nots. Where Hiaasen’s Florida beaches and everglades are at risk, my temperate north woods and Lake Michigan waters are threatened by tourist pressure, development and factory farms.
I love Becky Chambers’s hopepunk. Generally, Chambers’s cozy interactions in her Monk and Robot series encouraged me to craft pleasant character-driven interludes between scenes with higher tension. In particular, Chambers’s A Closed and Common Orbit gave me a gift. Because her spaceship was an unforgettable character, I felt free to turn my lost alien machine into a character, too. The longing of my alien power generator to reunite with Ship and Pilot and to communicate with lonely farmhand Pascal is one of my favorite subplots.
I was lucky to attend a workshop with Shelby Van Pelt (Remarkably Bright Creatures). She gave actionable advice on writing from the unusual viewpoint of my alien machine, who, like her octopus, is being held against its will and has trouble communicating with its human captors.
Bright Morning Star by Simon Morden is a lovely book that has some similarities to my book. Morden’s book is told from the childlike viewpoint of a machine. A portion of my chapters are also from the viewpoint of a machine. I also love that Morden, a scientist, made his book strictly science-based, something that I strived to do as well. His book suggests a credible scenario where world peace could happen, and I wanted to preserve that hopeful feeling in my book.
I adore the dry, subtle humor of authors like Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Mick Herron, and Steve Hockensmith. In trying to learn how they manage to tickle me so, over many years, I’ve filled notebooks with observations on their humor techniques. I’ve put these observations into practice in my book.
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