I’ve been starting my research into comp titles to try to figure out what kinds of covers work for my genre. The problem is that I found a genre on Goodreads that seems to be a perfect fit – Heroic Fantasy – but does not exist on Amazon (what the heck? I thought Amazon owned Goodreads. . .) So, now I’m trying to place where those heroic fantasy novels from GR really fit on Amazon.
So far, I have identified that they seem to fit in Action & Adventure Fantasy, Sword & Sorcery, and Epic Fantasy. These are all genres that appeal to me as a writer and are the kinds of books that I want to write, but they’re also super competitive, so ranking in any of them is going to be a challenge.
Today, I started going through Action & Adventure fantasy and looking into any of the top 100 titles that fit my goal. There’s a lot of urban/paranormal and other romance crap clogging up the list, so narrowing it down to high fantasy and then to indie authors really knocks the list down to just a handful (interestingly enough, all of the indies also seem to have their own imprints, which is something else to note).
This is going to be a slow process, but it should be helpful in the long run. I should also be reading all of these books eventually before truly identifying them as comps to make sure the stories are in the same vein as what I want to tell.