Making the Most of Small Spaces

Shout Lines, Comps, and Queries

Sep 05, 2024

You know when you’re looking at books online or in the Kindle store, and there’s a little bolded section describing the premise? That quick pitch for impatient shoppers to quickly decide yes (keep reading) or no (keep scrolling)?

Turns out that thing has a name. It’s called a shout line, and all books have them. (Who knew?! Probably everyone except me.) It’s a distillation of your novel into a punchy, attention-grabbing sentence or two.

I have one of my own now, YAY! My editor wrote it in advance of Tell Them You Lied going on presale. He sent me a draft a few weeks ago, and I think my mouth dropped open when I read it. It’s a strange sensation to have another person describe your work back to you, even a person who has read and reread and commented on that same work. It’s a very different feeling than being edited. Everything goes from the granular to the expansive—like spending a few years looking at a map through a magnifying glass, only to stand back and see the whole globe.

Here is what my editor wrote:

Two New York artists’ tumultuous friendship gets turned on its head when one of them goes missing and the other may be to blame. A riveting debut novel for readers of Bunny, Luckiest Girl Alive, and “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?”

My first impression: Oh, yes.

The plot structure of *LGA*, the prose of *Bunny*, the buzzyness of “Who Is the Bad Art Friend”—what more could I possibly ask for?

The first line is super straightforward, all about the basics:

Two New York artists’ tumultuous friendship gets turned on its head when one of them goes missing and the other may be to blame.

In one sentence we find out—

the main characters (two artists)

the genre (“tumultuous friendship” + missing person = thriller)

the setting (New York City)

the major dramatic question (What happened to the friend?)

the hook (Did the other friend do it?!)

That is a lot of information for 24 words, and it is totally spot-on.

The next sentence is all about comp titles—three of them, which I have come to believe is the magic number. This is the part that really tickles:

A riveting debut for readers of Bunny, Luckiest Girl Alive, and “Who is the Bad Art Friend?”

Hold on. I need to break that down.

Luckiest Girl Alive is not surprising as a comp since TTYL, like LGA, is a dual-timeline thriller that grapples with dark themes and sexual violence, and I used it in my own query letter. It is a direct and literal comparison. It tells the reader what she’s getting into with TTYL, plot-wise, character-wise, and structure-wise. LGA also a big, recognizable title: it was a major breakout bestseller when it came out in 2015 and was made into a Netflix movie almost a decade later. Most readers (at least, most readers of female-centered thrillers, i.e., my readers) have heard of it.

But Bunny? Bunny is a whole different animal. (sorry.)

Mona Awad’s novel, also a best-seller but a niche one, is a fever dream of a book about an insular cohort of young women in an MFA writing program. Not visual artists like the characters in TTYL, but ambitious, toxically enmeshed creatives all the same. Surreal, unsettlingly funny, magically violent, and —

Aha. I see what you did here, editor.

This is what I’m going to call a vibe comp. It is all about voice and language and theme. It tells you how you’re going to feel (hopefully) reading TTYL (unsettled, surprised, insert big eyes emoji here).

The final comp in my shout line isn’t even a novel; it’s a three-year-old viral New York Times article about writers who use other people’s real life stories and talk a lot of shit as they do. I absolutely devoured this story when it came out, but it did not occur to me that it was anything like my book. And it is niche too, way more so than Bunny.

So why is it part of my shout line? It took me a minute, I will be honest with you, but I found the connection. “Bad Art Friend” is at its core about toxic creative realtionships. The conversation that built up around the article had people taking sides (it was positioned to become viral, brilliantly, with the title question). The article lays out the facts and then nudges the reader to determine who is the perpetrator and who is the victim.

Y’all, that’s exactly what I tried to do in my book.

This is what I’m calling the zeitgeist comp: if you liked reading and dissecting and discussing this topical and buzzy thing in pop culture, then you will also like this other, new thing.

i know i misspelled zeitgeist but I cannot make myself go back into canva just for that

You know what this whole experiment reminded me of, more than anything else?

My query letter.

After all, a query letter is trying to hook a busy (read: overworked) agent just as a shout line is trying to hook a busy (read: overstimulated) reader. I decided to go back and read the first paragraph of the first email I ever sent CeCe to see if I was correct.

My debut novel, ALL AMERICANS, is an 87,000-word literary thriller that follows a group of ambitious young artists after the disappearance of one of their own. I was encouraged to write to you after seeing your tweet about Susie Yang’s WHITE IVY. ALL AMERICANS, like Yang’s novel, explores themes of obsession, lust, and class through the lens of a complicated female protagonist.

Not bad, three-years-ago me, but how does it compare to my shout line? The first line, “the meta data,” as CeCe calls it:

My debut novel, ALL AMERICANS, is an 87,000-word literary thriller that follows a group of ambitious young artists after the disappearance of one of their own.

26 words to my editor’s 24. In terms of information, I only get 3 points out of 5: the main characters, the genre, the major dramatic question. My editor managed to get the setting and the hook in that first line, too.

Now for my comp sentence:

I was encouraged to write to you after seeing your tweet about Susie Yang’s WHITE IVY. ALL AMERICANS, like Yang’s novel, explores themes of obsession, lust, and class through the lens of a complicated female protagonist.

Oops, just one comp title here, and it’s mostly a vibe comp. You can tell by the dreaded note about “exploring themes of….” (If I were writing this today I would change this to avoid using that phrase. Something more specific like: As in Yang’s novel, the protagonist of ALL AMERICANS is an outsider seeking acceptance within an elite social group.)

At the end of my query, after the plot paragraph, I added more comps—DON’T DO THIS; I am only showing you what I did and did not know:

ALL AMERICANS marries the eccentric friend-family of Donna Tartt’s THE SECRET HISTORY with the coming-of-age turbulence in Jessica Knoll’s LUCKIEST GIRL ALIVE.

I have two very large comps— The Secret History and Luckiest Girl Alive—yikes. Minus points. If I were to write this now, I would know better, of course. I would pick one of the big, literal comps (LGA, most likely, since it was just a movie), and add a zeitgeist/niche comp, if I could find one. A podcast maybe. (Once Upon a Time at Bennington College, anyone?)

I would love to hear your thoughts on all this! How do you feel about comps and shout lines? Does anyone want to share/workshop their comp titles in the comments? Let’s crowd source!

This Debut Life

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