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Recently, I listened to an episode the Writing Excuses podcast on the use of describing your book in terms of other stories. Normally, when I see books advertised this way, I think of them as cheap knock-offs, so I was intrigued to hear that comparative titles are most valuable in pitching your book to publishers instead of readers. A publisher wants to know what the audience for your book is; if you introduce it as ‘such-and-such a story meets this other story’, you’re saying that your potential fanbase lies where the fanbases for both those stories overlap.

I tried coming up with comparative titles for my stories. None of the ones I thought of for individual books sounded right, but I think ‘Brandon Sanderson’s cosmere meets Narnia’ is a good fit for my fictional universe, the Domidium. Sanderson and Lewis were the two biggest influences on me when I started outlining the Domidium, so that makes sense.

I’m interested as to what others on Story Embers think. When you hear a book advertised in terms of other books, does that intrigue you or make you write it off as copycat storytelling? What kind of works would you compare your stories to?