As they sift through all the information we give them on new
titles, booksellers say that “good comps” are their best tools for deciding
what and how to order. But like
everything else in the book industry, it’s complicated.
We put our
house up for sale this week. When it
came time to land on a price, the process had some surprising similarities to
bookselling. It turns out that no matter
how unique and special your house may be (and ours is naturally spectacularly
unique and couldn’t be more special), the most relevant factor is the comp, which is to say the price at which similar homes in
the area have recently sold.
“Price is a
moving target,” our real estate agent and neighbor Tammy explained. This means that no matter how much intangible
charm you’ve got, no matter how much debt you’ve gone into to fix the place up,
and no matter how much every amateur armchair real estate expert says it’s worth,
it’s actually worth what similar nearby houses happen to have sold for very
recently.
It’s a
frustrating business to have to reduce a much-loved residence to a check list
of features: square feet, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms (one-yikes),
yard (or not), condition of kitchen, garage, school district. All of the other factors count (Twenties
arts and crafts bungalow with one of a kind details! Gorgeous boulevard! Cool little eyelid windows in the attic!) But
not as much as a solid comp.
So what’s
the book connection? Like a unique home, the one of a kind
text is also a commodity, and thus reducible to a checklist of features: subject, author, page count, illustration
count, price. Before saying yes, the
bookseller wants to know what other books she has sold are “like” the new
book I’m presenting.
Reps and
publishers spend lots of time and energy preparing these comps. To be effective they have to be accurate, not
wishful thinking. And they have to be more
than the result of an Amazon subject search.
The importance of this key piece of information predates the digital
age, but now that a bookseller can simply click on comparable titles as we move
through the catalog, noting how well they did, it’s essential. A truly great comp is the Holy Grail.
But I have
the nagging suspicion that we sometimes rely too much on comparable titles, that they sometimes lead us from the essential uniqueness of every book.
Five types
of comps are especially reliable: the
previous cloth edition of a new paperback ; the previous editions of a new
edition; a previous title by the same author; other biographies on the same person; volume one of the volume two which is new this season;
But even
these seemingly ideal comps can be problematic.
When
I started in bookselling a paperback would routinely sell twice the number of
hardcovers, but that formula is now long obsolete. Much can change between editions of a
reference book in terms of sales, especially since the advent of the
internet. An author’s previous books, which would seem
to be a good rule of thumb to predict sales, are often on subjects so far
afield (or are so old) as to be
meaningless.We routinely pitch biographies with handles like “first book on Mr.
X in 75 years.” No comps there, .And even
using sales on volume one to predict sales on volume two isn’t as reliable as
it once was. (Ask your bookseller how they did with the follow-up to last year’s extraordinary Letters of Mark Twain
vol 1)
-
The gold
standard for truly reliable comps might be something like the Whitney Biennial Catalog, which Yale publishes every two years.
A bookseller who checks sales on the 2008, 2010, and 2012 editions should
have a pretty good idea of what to do with 2014 Though even in a case like this, fluctuation
in art book demand makes it a guide, not a mandate.
Like the
comps for my house, book comps can be misleading, or at least incomplete. A comp might
reference other books on the same subject which had a similar number of pages,
similar selection of illustrations, and similar price point- with no measure
for whether it was actually a better book or not! But this is one thing the rep is for.
If a comp is
good enough, I’ll sometimes make it the centerpiece of my pitch. When Yale UK Sales Manager Andrew Jarmain
described his approach to a new biography by saying “Sutherland does for
Whistler what Ellman did for Oscar Wilde,” it was a twofer- a concise handle
and a good comp.
But chasing
comps too desperately can be a kind of fool’s errand. There are so many caveats and specific
circumstances in the sales life of any book that comparisons seem more like a
wish than a science. The shelf life of a new book now six to
eight months. The precise demographic that wanders into the store and sees the new book is never
exactly the same as the one that bought the similar title two years ago.
We have a
great new biography of Stephen Crane on the spring list. The previous biographies are pretty old and
nobody will have a useful sales history on them. So I suggest checking sales on Red Badge of Courage, his best known work. But is
that really a good comp? Maybe.
The Americanization of Narcissism, also on the spring Harvard list, has one perfect, appropriate
comp: Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism. This book was a sensation when it came out
decades ago, and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. But the title draws a blank with many younger
booksellers, and it’s often fallen out of active backlist and hasn’t sold
recently. So my most effective comp is
worthless.
Like real
estate prices, comps are a moving target- I add and subtract from my list as I
go through the selling season. And
booksellers are an excellent source of new comp ideas. I rarely get through a season without
stealing a few original ideas for comps from one bookseller and using them on
another.
Sometimes a
comparable title pops into my head like an earworm. Saskia Sassen’s new book Expulsions somehow
brings to mind Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine every time I start talking about it,
but it’s not similar enough to suggest it will sell that way. A new title about Josephine Baker’s bizarre
attempt to assemble a “rainbow tribe” of multi-racial adopted children all but
screams Michael Jackson’s Neverland, but I’m reluctant to cite MJ (what book?)
as a comp. Yet the first bookseller I
called on this season said it’s the first thing he thought of when he saw the
book.
Use of
superstar, freakishly successful titles as comps for much quieter titles that
happen to be on the same subject is to be discouraged. Malcolm Gladwell has been so over-used as a
comp that I hesitate to bring him up even when we actually do have a title that
resonates with his. Our Professor Anonymous
may have the better book but we don’t have the Gladwell Inc publicity machine.
Sometimes
good comps can be plotted geometrically. The Harvard series of Annotated Jane
Austen’s continues this season with Northanger Abbey. One comp axis contains the other active
editions of Northanger Abbey so the store can gauge customer interest in that
title; the other axis contains the six previous Harvard Annotateds of her other
titles, the format of which is identical so should have a similar sales pattern.
Sometimes a
great book really is incomparable, such as the forthcoming Why Architects Still Draw by Italian architect/poet Paolo Belardi.
In this case the most useful comps remind booksellers of how well MIT
Press does in this genre.
Extraordinarily
prolific authors can present their own issues.
Terry Eagleton has a very long list of successful titles, so the trick
is to find the comp among them that is closest to his new book. Note that this sometimes means resisting the
impulse to just list the best-selling prior book!
My favorite
comps are unexpected, and come at the book from off-stage rather than
full-on. I like comps that help us to
think about a book and imagine its reader more than comps that promise some
slavish repeat of a sales pattern.
One of my
favorite new spring books is Poilu, the World War I diaries of a French soldier. It’s utterly unique but the universe of
potential First World War comps is massive.
So my colleagues and I came up with various literary references- Paul
Fussell, Vera Brittain, e.e. cummings- that have little to do with replicating
a sales pattern but, together, really help to bring the book into focus.
Literary
references can crop up in unusual places.
In Bleak Houses: Disappointment and Failure in Architecture, the author
argues that the best writing about buildings is found in novels- specifically,
Elizabeth Bowen and Alan Hollinghurst. I
love mentioning Eva Trout and The Stranger’s Child as comps even
though on a purely metric level they don’t qualify.
Talking of
novelists, the apt literary comp is especially useful for relatively unknown
writers. For the fantastic but obscure-by-design
Margellos World Republic of Letters series, which introduces works in
translation to English audiences, having a few good comps is essential: Rodrigo Rey Rosa will be of interest to
Roberto Bolano and Paul Bowles readers, and Can Xue evokes Kafka, Borges and
Bruno Schulz.
One of our
collective rep favorites this season, Alon Confino’s A World Without Jews,
faces the challenge of a massive pool of potential comp titles on World War II
and the Holocaust. We narrowed the list to
a few essential historical texts like Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners and Hitler’s Furies, along with Confino’s earlier works. But I loved it when my colleague Patricia
added Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, and when my other colleague Adena
finished Avi Shavit’s profound new book about Israel, My Promised Land, and rightly suggested it
belongs on the list. The horror Confino describes makes Shavit’s young
Israel seem inevitable.
I suppose
the most extreme form of book comparison these days is found at ground zero for
extreme everything - Amazon. Here you
can easily generate price lists of the identical book offered by re-sellers at
a bewildering variety of prices. In an
odd way, it undercuts the idea that comps predict sales or value, though "value" in A-world is a meaningless concept..
So back to
the house. I’m hoping that we find a
buyer who approaches comps on our home the way smart booksellers approach comps
on our books- as information, good to know, but in no way replacing the
unique object, which stands alone on its merits.
