Feed the birds

A few weeks back a robin built her nest on my front porch. I razed it at first because she built it on top of a lamp beside the door and that just wasn’t going to work. She quickly rebuilt the nest in a corner, laid four eggs, and settled in to experience motherhood.

“What ugly babies,” I would say as I walked past the nest. Their little beaks would peak over the mud-covered walls of the nest, begging for food from mom and dad.

This morning the whole family departed and the babies are somewhere in the neighborhood learning to provide for themselves.

Now, to pivot into a writing metaphor. In the writing world, an important marketing task is to study your comps. One might think that “comp” means competition, but it actually means comparable titles. Among writers there’s much more cooperation than competition, and that’s because readers are like baby birds. They want to be fed, and it’s hard for a single writer to feed them.

Other comparable writers need to step up and feed the babies until the next book or story is ready. Otherwise, these particular baby birds will fly the nest and move into another genre or medium or activity, like watching TV or touching grass.