How do you balance originality against fitting the market in your comps?

Short answer: Donovan Levine’s advice: Use comps to show where your book fits, then add a line or two on why it fits and what sets it apart, so it reads as filling a market gap, not copying one.

Answered by Donovan Levine, Associate Literary Agent, Neighborhood Literary.

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The agent’s answer

The hardest part of comping, for Donovan, is threading the needle between originality and having a place in the market. Comps let a writer lean on an established premise, but the book must not feel like a carbon copy or a rehash of genre tropes; the writer has to show what makes it different. He invokes necessity is the mother of invention to push writers toward articulating a market need, what is lacking in an oversaturated space, even while acknowledging most writers are not deeply versed in their own market and that the agent is better placed to define it. His recommended move is to position the book as X meets Y but with a distinguishing twist, character, or underexplored angle, and to add a line explaining why each comp fits, since he often receives comps whose relevance he cannot see.

In Donovan’s words

If you're using comps to lean on an already established premise or market, you also don't want that book to be a carbon copy.
Donovan Levine, 26:57

Source: Synopsis & Comp Titles.