Those Comparisons

When you write a book, you get asked what books you woud compare your book to. I wrangled with the answer to that one. I came up with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Subtle Knife, and Miss Peregrine's Home for Unusual Children. None of these felt exactly right to me, but they were close. Yesterday, when I was at the MLK Street Pod, joining a vendor fair, several young people who purchased my books (or whose parents bought them for the kids), told me they wanted my books because they reminded them of the Percy Jackson books.

Out of the mouths of the kids. Maybe I should have been asking young people all along. When I thought about it, this made a lot more sense than the comparisons I had come up with. The appeal of the Percy Jackson books is definitive, especially to the age that my books is geared toward. My characters should be relatable in the same way.

I'm excited to make these comparisons and market them in the same way, and hopefully start appealing to that same crowd. These young people were shy, quiet kids who passed my table several times, or stared from a distance. I had to reach out to them or ask them questions to get them to approach me and then they opened up and got excited. Since my books are about a character who ix excluded for his differences, and there is a neurodivergent character in the second book, it just makes sense that this is the group I need to connect with.

Here's to the kids who taught me yesterday how to appeal to the readers I want to find. To the kids I wrote these books for.. I'm coming for you. I am searching for you, and trying to get my books to you.

I hope Percy would be proud.