One part of the book proposal that scholars tend to find confusing is the “comps” or “comparable and competing titles” component. (I’ve worked with hundreds of scholars on their book proposal drafts, so this is an empirical observation.)
Here are a few examples of how different scholarly publishers communicate what they’re looking for in their proposal submission guidelines:
Cambridge UP: “An explanation of how [your book] relates to other publications on the topic that have been published recently whether by Cambridge or by other publishers”
Yale UP: “A comparison of your book to others in the field currently on the market, how your book differs from the current offerings, and what place your book will have in the market”
Princeton UP: “Please list a few of the books with which your book is comparable, including title, author, publisher, and year of publication. Include a brief statement outlining how your book differs”
University of Chicago Press: “An account of your book’s relationship to comparable or competing works”
University of California Press: “Describe existing books in this field and discuss their strengths and weaknesses”
University of Michigan Press: “Similar or competing books in the field”
Routledge: “Competing and related titles (including pros and cons vs your book)”
Oxford UP: “Relation to existing literature in the subject area, distinguishing what makes your work unique in relation to existing literature in the subject area”
Maybe these instructions make intuitive sense to people who work in publishing, but they tend not to to scholarly authors. This is because when scholars see “discuss your book in relation to other books in the literature,” they assume they are being asked for a familiar type of writing: a literature review.
In a typical literature review, you delve into the theoretical frameworks and research findings in your field that have paved the way for your own thinking and research contribution. The works you cite may go back decades or centuries. They may be by people who are very differently positioned than yourself in terms of field or career stage. And you may go into pretty specific detail about the nuances of the work and how yours builds on or departs from it.
While some of the people reading your book proposal may care about these nuances of past scholarship, a conventional literature review is not the most effective way to pitch your book to a publisher when they ask you to discuss your work in relation to other books.
What all of these publishers are getting at—but only some of them say explicitly—is that they are trying to get a handle on the potential market for the book you’re proposing. In other words, they want to understand who is most likely to buy your book today (or a couple years from now) and which aspects of your book are most likely to appeal to those readers when making a purchasing decision. They ask you for a list of “comparable and competing works” as an indirect way of establishing that.
Because of this, you’ll make the strongest case for your book’s marketability if you focus on a few things in your comps:
Books, not other types of publications. People discover and access journal articles in different ways than they do books. They expect different things from them. Other books will the closest points of comparison in the eyes of scholarly book publishers.
Recent books. Books where the people who bought them are still alive and conducting research and purchasing current books in the field. Books where the conditions of marketing and distribution were as similar as possible to the ones your book will be facing. Not foundational works in your field from decades ago.
Similar publishers to the one you’re pitching. Different types of presses have different types of marketing and distribution, so if you’re pitching a university press, you’d want to establish a realistic market for your book by listing mostly other university press books. Likewise if you’re pitching a trade press or a commercial academic press.
Broad descriptions of the existing books’ appeal to audiences. Highlight the ways in which your general topic, approach, and field/subfield are comparable or complementary to recent books. Books are not generally marketed on the basis of their theoretical nuances, so you don’t need to get into those here. I find that it helps to think about how you decide which new books to read. You might take the specific argument or intervention of the book into consideration when deciding whether to cite it in your work, but when deciding which books to read or buy in the first place, you’re probably not being that specific. So you don’t need to be that specific in your proposal.
Also keep in mind that many of the people who evaluate book proposals to decide whether a project is a good investment for the publisher are not expert-level scholars themselves. You’ll want your discussions of other books and your own to make sense to people who are not steeped in your literatures.
Understanding that this part of the proposal is concerned primarily with the market should also help you see that you don’t have to slam the other books or say that no other books like yours exist at all. You’ll make a better case for your book if you can show how it is similar to and provides an important addition to books that have already been well-received by your target readers.
I hope this helps clear up some of the confusion you may be feeling when you encounter this item in a publisher’s submission guidelines.