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A standard component of proposals (and query pitches) is the "Similar Titles, and How Mine is Different" overview.
In what fashion do you agent-folk make use of that? I have been assuming that you want a sense of the genre — what other books are similar in terms of what they cover, subject matter, approach, etc (nonfiction) or deal with similar themes, plot types, worlds in which the story unfolds (fiction) ?
But maybe what you want instead is more akin to "what is the current competition? What is being sold right now that is similar to this work that you want me to look at, and how is yours different?"
The first interpretation can yield a list of titles published over a fairly large course of time. "The classic book that came to define the ecological-warning genre was Carson's Silent Spring, (Houghton Mifflin 1962)... then in 1982, Progress as If Survival Mattered taught us ... more recently, Ecological Intelligence by Daniel Goleman (Crown 2010),... "
The second interpretation sort of implies that older titles are useless distractions and that we, as authors, should constrain our list to contain ONLY modern, extant titles.
What say you? When you get to this section of proposal or pitch, do you want a broad flyover of the genre that the author thinks the work fits in, or should the list only contain titles that are taking up space in the front New Books displays of the bookstores?
In what fashion do you agent-folk make use of that? I have been assuming that you want a sense of the genre — what other books are similar in terms of what they cover, subject matter, approach, etc (nonfiction) or deal with similar themes, plot types, worlds in which the story unfolds (fiction) ?
But maybe what you want instead is more akin to "what is the current competition? What is being sold right now that is similar to this work that you want me to look at, and how is yours different?"
The first interpretation can yield a list of titles published over a fairly large course of time. "The classic book that came to define the ecological-warning genre was Carson's Silent Spring, (Houghton Mifflin 1962)... then in 1982, Progress as If Survival Mattered taught us ... more recently, Ecological Intelligence by Daniel Goleman (Crown 2010),... "
The second interpretation sort of implies that older titles are useless distractions and that we, as authors, should constrain our list to contain ONLY modern, extant titles.
What say you? When you get to this section of proposal or pitch, do you want a broad flyover of the genre that the author thinks the work fits in, or should the list only contain titles that are taking up space in the front New Books displays of the bookstores?
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