Find Books Like Your Own and See Who Published Them (HOW??)

Yeesh, that is an interesting quandary.

Another "fictional commune" book I can immediately think of is Walden Two, by B.F. Skinner, though I'm not sure if that's much of a help either.

I don't think you need a book that covers the same subject matter. You need to find books of a similar genre, tone or style. I'd start by looking at Amazon categories. It's a broadbrush tool and will throw up some false positives, but it will give you an idea.

I know a writer who declared that "if books like mine already existed, I wouldn't exhaust myself to write them in the first place".

andiwrite said:

I'm seeking an agent.

I keep reading that you should "find books like your own" and see who published them/agented the author.

The question is, HOW?

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Identify your genre. Your themes. Your plot. Use your Google-fu to find a similar book(s), or go to a library / bookstore and ask the staff.

TheNighSwan said:

I know a writer who declared that "if books like mine already existed, I wouldn't exhaust myself to write them in the first place".

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andiwrite said:

That was basically my thought as well. I wrote the story that I desperately wanted to read and couldn't find anywhere.

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In both cases, I think you are just looking in the wrong places.

andiwrite said:

I'm seeking an agent.

I keep reading that you should "find books like your own" and see who published them/agented the author.

The question is, HOW?

I've tried every book-finding service out there, and I just can't find anything. The only book I know of that has a similar feel to my own is "The Beach" by Alex Garland, but every time I've tried to search for similar books, the searches tend to take me away from the areas of "The Beach" that are similar to my own. For example, one search kept directing me to books about Thailand where the story is set. My book isn't in Thailand. It's similar in that it involves a commune of offbeat, pot-smoking vegetarians trying to make their own society. At its core, it's really a story about a man exploring the world and trying to figure out who he is. He's an adult, so it can't be young adult, unfortunately.

Every time I try to search for things like "commune," "marijuana," "homestead" etc all sorts of non-fiction comes up--usually stuff about the hippie movement in the 60s. My story is set in modern day. I don't know how to find a fictional book like this, or if there even is one....

Any ideas? It took me 7 years to write the freakin' book and now I have no idea how to go about finding the right agent.

*confusion*

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Finding books like yours doesn't, in any way, mean books with the same plot points or setting.

Stephen King writes horror. Dean Koontz writes horror. I don't think Koontz books are usually set in Maine. I don't think King books generally involve spiritual dogs, or whatever. Koontz books don't generally exceed 400 pages. However, someone who repped one might be interested in repping the other (were that they both unknown, unrepped writers), as they both write horror.

Wish I could help, but this doesn't sound like any genre I'm familiar with (mostly speculative fiction and romance).

Modern-day story without SF elements or romance, about a man exploring the world and finding himself. Contemporary? Literary?

I think you really have to do this from your own knowledge. Because you are not just showing where your book fits in the market, but that you know it fits there. Even if you are triangulating f4om three rather different types of book to do this. E.g. one with similar themes, one with similar writing style, another with similar themes and message.

andiwrite said:

I'm seeking an agent.

I keep reading that you should "find books like your own" and see who published them/agented the author.

The question is, HOW?

I've tried every book-finding service out there, and I just can't find anything. The only book I know of that has a similar feel to my own is "The Beach" by Alex Garland, but every time I've tried to search for similar books, the searches tend to take me away from the areas of "The Beach" that are similar to my own. For example, one search kept directing me to books about Thailand where the story is set. My book isn't in Thailand. It's similar in that it involves a commune of offbeat, pot-smoking vegetarians trying to make their own society. At its core, it's really a story about a man exploring the world and trying to figure out who he is. He's an adult, so it can't be young adult, unfortunately.

Every time I try to search for things like "commune," "marijuana," "homestead" etc all sorts of non-fiction comes up--usually stuff about the hippie movement in the 60s. My story is set in modern day. I don't know how to find a fictional book like this, or if there even is one....

Any ideas? It took me 7 years to write the freakin' book and now I have no idea how to go about finding the right agent.

*confusion*

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I think the advice to look for books like your book and look at the imprint on them, is unhelpful nonsense.
Go to agent query. If you think your book is literary (a strong focus on beautiful language and style, often including a lot of philosophical or psychological reflections ) search under literary. If your book focuses more on just telling the story, search under commercial.
Your book comes under the category of General Fiction rather than horror or any other specific genre. An adult man "exploring the world and trying to figure out who he is." comes under General Fiction category.
On agent query you have the option to choose genre and they have the general categories there Commercial and Literary as opposed to horror etc... and I think you should choose one of those two. I think you should choose one of those and present your novel as General Commercial Fiction or Literary Fiction (depending on tone which I don't know as I haven't read it.) However you will need to find an exciting hook to present to your agent in your query.
If you want to search for publishers that you can submit to direct ,google "submission guidelines" novel or "submission guidelines" literary. This will help you avoid the vanity scam publishers who employ people to use Black Hat SEO (search optimization techniques) to find people to scam.
If you Google something like "find a publisher" the vanity scams will come up.Also avoid all Google ads that come up with the word publishing, which are mostly scams too.

Have you asked your betas or editors what they think, and if they can think of similar books to yours? Sometimes we are too close to our own work to see it in proper context.

andiwrite said:

My book isn't in Thailand. It's similar in that it involves a commune of offbeat, pot-smoking vegetarians trying to make their own society. At its core, it's really a story about a man exploring the world and trying to figure out who he is. [...]

Every time I try to search for things like "commune," "marijuana," "homestead" etc all sorts of non-fiction comes up--usually stuff about the hippie movement in the 60s.

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As others have said, you're looking for the wrong stuff.

Stop looking for "commune," "marijuana," and "homestead"; look instead for "a story about a man exploring the world and trying to figure out who he is". That's going to be far more helpful.

gingerwoman said:

I think the advice to look for books like your book and look at the imprint on them, is unhelpful nonsense.

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It's really not.

andiwrite said:

There is sex and romance in the story, but I guess you have to follow a certain formula to be "romance," correct?

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Yes, you need a happy-ever-after ending (or happy-for-now, depending on the publisher) and there has to be significant interaction between the characters who fall in love. If the main concept of the story is a man finding himself, it's unlikely to be a romance.

andiwrite said:

The main storyline follows the love and relationship from the point he meets her on. I would consider it to be a central part of the story. The only part that has him finding himself as the main theme are the first few chapters, while he's on the trip to go to the place where he meets her. That's kind of the point--she shows up and completely derails his plans. It has a "happy-for-now" ending. Does that change anything?

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This is just my take on it, but I think for it to be a romance, she'd need a strong role in the story too. Her own goals and dreams, in other words. It couldn't just be her impact on his life.

Plus, if I picked up a book that was labelled "romance" and had to read a few chapters at the start where the hero was on his own trying to figure out who he was, I'd be annoyed. In a romance, I like the hero and heroine to meet as soon as possible so their relationship can kick off - I don't mind a little teasing and prolonged anticipation, but not a few chapters' worth of that. Looking at the romances on my keeper shelf, there's only one (Lorraine Heath, Always to Remember) where the heroine doesn't appear until Chapter 2.

gingerwoman said:

I think the advice to look for books like your book and look at the imprint on them, is unhelpful nonsense.

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I think this statement is unhelpful nonsense.

There are many reasons why I think it is not very helpful advice.
Look at it this way. If you are going to get an agent, are you going to write to the agent and say "I went to the bookstore and a book like mine was published by Harlequin Nocturne" or are you going to say "I have written a paranormal romance"?
I think it is far more useful to have an strong understanding of different genres and categories because your agent is most likely to take the lead in finding the actual publishers that your book will be submitted to based on a combination of your needs and the contacts she has.
If you understand what your genre is you can search for agents on places like agent query using their genre pull down list. You can google search "submission guidelines" horror, or search on the submission grinder.
All of which I believe will get you the information you want a lot faster than wandering around a bookstore looking at the imprints on books.
In addition mergers happen frequently, the name of a publishing imprint you find on a book in a bookstore may have already changed because of a merger or the imprint may no longer exist at all.
What would you do with the information when you found a book like yours and looked at the publisher? I hope you would not then send off a manuscript to them. You would need to check their submission guidelines. (I'm sure most people here know that, but I see people giving that advice to teens, or other people with little knowledge, and they then try to just send the manuscript off to the name of the publisher they find in a book. Of course the most likely thing that will happen if someone does this is that they will never get a response because they did not even check if the publisher takes unagented submissions, or if the imprint they found even exists as a publisher any more.
Even the advice to check a book like the Writers and Artists Yearbook is better advice than "just try to find books like your book and look at the imprint" in my opinion.
However I would have to agree with people who say those books may already be somewhat out of date.
The danger of using google to find your publisher is that vanity publishers employ people who know how to use black hate SEO (search optimization techniques) to make their vanity presses appear on the early pages of google so you when using google to find publisher and agents, you need to choose your search terms very carefully to get the best results. But if you choose your search terms wisely, and you know your genre, you can find the most up to date info on publishers suitable for your book a lot faster.

Ginger, you seem to have lost track of the OP's question. He isn't trying to find out which imprints to send his book to, which is what you seem to think: he wants to find an agent.

The advice to look at books similar to his and then see who represents those authors is spot-on in this instance, and it would have the added bonus of helping him to work out which genre his book falls into if he's not already certain.

While I have your attention, do you think you could add blank lines between your paragraphs? It would make your posts much easier to read.

Sorry I did not think that exactly. The thread title is "Find Books Like Your Own and See Who Published Them" I've heard that advice a lot and that is the advise I didn't think was particularly helpful in finding an agent.

Of course you are right that it would be very useful to find out the agents of authors who wrote books similar to yours. But I think tracking down who agents which authors is a much more time consuming process than typing your genre into agent query and finding a dozen agents? Perhaps you know a fast way of doing it.

I know people say to look in the acknowledgments section of a novel, but often the author does not specifically say "to my wonderful agent so and so" and I always suspected that was because most agents get enough queries without authors doing that?

andiwrite said:

I'm seeking an agent.

I keep reading that you should "find books like your own" and see who published them/agented the author.

The question is, HOW?

I've tried every book-finding service out there, and I just can't find anything. The only book I know of that has a similar feel to my own is "The Beach" by Alex Garland, but every time I've tried to search for similar books, the searches tend to take me away from the areas of "The Beach" that are similar to my own. For example, one search kept directing me to books about Thailand where the story is set. My book isn't in Thailand. It's similar in that it involves a commune of offbeat, pot-smoking vegetarians trying to make their own society. At its core, it's really a story about a man exploring the world and trying to figure out who he is. He's an adult, so it can't be young adult, unfortunately.

Every time I try to search for things like "commune," "marijuana," "homestead" etc all sorts of non-fiction comes up--usually stuff about the hippie movement in the 60s. My story is set in modern day. I don't know how to find a fictional book like this, or if there even is one....

Any ideas? It took me 7 years to write the freakin' book and now I have no idea how to go about finding the right agent.

*confusion*

Click to expand...

I think you're taking that advice way too literally. You need an agent who deals with mainstream fiction. Most agents do.

Here's a better method. Make a list of writers you admire. Find out who their agents are. (Check Acks in books, or "Who's Who in American Writers".) Query those agents, because they like what you like.