To begin, find five comps. These comps should have the following characteristics:

• released within the past one to five years
• have some level of public validation, such as reviews
• are within the same field as the one where you create

Follow the following process to find these comps

1. Begin with landmarks

Start with the big prominent names in your field—the people who everyone knows. Go to the marketplaces where this work is shared or sold. For books online, go to Amazon or Goodreads. For physical books, go to libraries or bookstores. Find landmarks in your field whose work you feel has some relation to yours. Take note of how the marketplace categorizes works such as yours.

2. Find guideposts

Find people who have found some success but haven’t had massive breakout hits.

To find guideposts in Amazon:

1. Go into Amazon and type in the names of the authors you have identified are landmarks.
2. Scroll down to the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section and click on each book.
3. Keep scrolling to see all of the books Amazon displays here. Amazon provides similar features that may be useful, such as “What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?”, “Frequently Bought Together”, and even “Sponsored Products Related To This Item.”
4. Look for those that were published within the past five years, which have some reviews (at least twenty), and most importantly, that you feel resonate with the work you create in some way.
5. Write down the names of the books and authors whose work resembles yours in some way; note why that is the case.
6. Seek out other authors who write in the same topic or genre as you do. Show up to their events, email them, support their work. Be curious about their readers. Ask them questions about what they love and why.

3. Obsess about the voice of the reader

If you already have an existing audience, you have to talk directly to at least five of them and ask them questions that would help you better serve them.

Alternatively, you can do research by reading the reviews your comps got in Amazon. When doing your research, be mindful of the following:

• Note what readers liked about the book.
• Note what they didn’t like and why.
• Pay very close attention to the language they use. Look for trends in terms of phrases or focus.
• For each of the comps you find, identify how others categorize them. You can look at the Amazon category rankings
• Review how the artist describes their work. Look for phrases that resonate.
• Look for mentions of these comps anywhere you can find it—blogs, podcasts, within major media, and well outside of it.
• When seeking examples to help guide you, the question you want to ask yourself is, “Who is doing work that matters and is succeeding at it?”

If you want to get deeper, you can perform individual Google searches on each comp you find. The challenge here is to get as deep as you can and to challenge your assumptions.

References

Blank, Dan. Be the Gateway: A Practical Guide to Sharing Your Creative Work and Engaging an Audience. WeGrowMedia, 2017.