I’ve been working on a new project: the Adventures of Bruce Manley. It’s basically a story about a rich loser. No, really, it’s about a trillionaire heir in the near future who spends all of his time and money playing a super-advanced video game. He legally changes his name to Bruce Manley, which is his avatar’s name, right before his attorney has him sign some legal papers, forcing his attorney to redo them. Bruce gets kidnapped by rival players in the game because he dominates the game so much, making it impossible for these rivals to make money off their brand. Bruce, being a moron, tries to escape and fails, but gets bailed out anyway because the in-game economy starts to collapse without him spending obscene amounts of money on it.

I’d say more, but I don’t want to give the plot away. Basically, it’s a story from the perspective of a lazy, unlikeable jerk. The problem I am having is that to sell books to literary agents or indie publishers, you usually have to come up with a list of similar books, ideally from within the last 10 years. What I do is come up with a book, write the book, and then search for books that are similar. My problem with this book is that I can’t find any. I can’t find any books from the last 10 years that are like The Adventures of Bruce Manley.

Believe it or not, there really aren’t that many books from the perspective of the bad guy. I mean a genuine bad guy. There are books like Starter Villain or How to Become the Dark Lord or Die Trying, but these books aren’t really about actual bad guys. These are about decent guys playing roles with the label “bad guy.” The other avenue of “similar” books is LitRPG books like Dungeon Crawler Carl, but having read some of those books, I know a lot of those books get into the granular details of experience points, mana points, power levels, and bosses. Bruce Manley is not like any of those. I’ve also learned, having read a lot of LitRPG recently, that outside of Dungeon Crawler Carl, I’m actually not a big fan of LitRPG.

Bruce Manley has literary inspirations. It’s a story from the perspective of the villain. Think American Psycho and The Screwtape Letters. The problem is that neither of those books is recent. This is kind of a problem for me in selling the book. Any suggestions?