When you write a book, people want to know what it is about. And when you are trying to land a literary agent, one way they get that info is to ask for comps, or similar books that your book can be compared to.

I don’t know why this has been so hard for me, but it has been. The best I have come up with is this:

My book has the coming-of-age and overbearing authoritarian government world of Sabaa Tahir’s Ember in the Ashes series, but with some of the grittiness found in Brent Weeks’ Night Angel trilogy (especially the first book of that series, The Way of Shadows). There are also strong religious features akin to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and some revenge fantasy aspects from the Kill Bill movies.

Yet nothing quite seems to fit right. Maybe other writers feel this way, too? (If so, please comment below.) I don’t want to sound arrogant, but one of the reasons I wrote what I wrote is because it was a story I wanted to read and there was nothing like it out there. If my story was already out there, I would have read it and loved it. But it wasn’t, so I had to do it.

And yes, it contains similarities to other works. There are elements that put it in the same genre as Sabaa Tahir’s brilliant Ember series, or would make readers/viewers of Shadow and Bone interested in it. I think the paragraph above does as good a job as any in describing it.

Then, I thought that maybe I should do my comps like a Venn diagram. It would be a little more visually interesting, and allow me to show some intersections among the comps and why they are there.

So I came up with this:

What do y’all think? Is the Venn diagram better than the paragraph of words? Are they complementary? If you are writing comps, what helped you? Thanks!