Everyone says don't compare yourself to others. Bullshit. How in God's name can you read everything with words on it, and not compare? And why on earth would you not want to compare. Will doing so damage your fragile ego beyond repair?
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Comparing your writing with that of other writers is normal, and impossible not to do. It's also a good thing, unless you're so fragile it makes you want to stop writing, rather than making you want to get better.
I’m one of the sensitive fragile ones, so I’ve learned to shift from ‘direct comparison’ mode to ‘learn and adapt’ mode. Writers who are ‘better’ than me and who are ‘worse’ than me, all have things to offer. Lessons of what to do and what not to do and how. And you do this and you take what suits you, adapt it to your personal style, and move on.
I shall now drop names which were popular a quarter of a century ago among a minuscule demographic: When Venom appeared, people called them Motorhead played badly, but history proved these people wrong. Venom are Venom. When Iron Maiden appeared, people thought this was a sad clone of Thin Lizzy. It turned out to be one of the first giants of a new style. Then Slayer appeared, and people called them Venom and Iron Maiden played wrong. Again, these people were incorrect. Slayer is Slayer, not “Iron Maiden played wrong”. Then Cannibal Corpse and Carcass appeared, and again, to some they were “Slayer played wrong”, but they turned out to be pioneering giants of a legitimate new subgenre.
So try to not view yourself as "writer X but played wrongly”—view yourself as YOU—who uses techniques developed by others, in order to produce a personal style. Because for every band that used the techniques developed by Slayer in order to create something really new, there were ten thousand bands that
really were sloppy copies of Slayer. I vote for making a conscious choice of creating a personalized style, instead of forever trying to be a pale copy of a shining original. No one can out-King King. No-one can out-Ludlum Ludlum. No one can even copy the style to the extent of being
merely as good as King or Ludlum. A copy is always a copy. Learn from others but be you, be an original.
Final example. Every city that is not in a starving or war-torn part of the world has at least a few hundred young musical prodigies who are almost virtuoso level, but will never, in the end, make any impact, and will spend their lives playing in inconsequential cover bands. While the world class musician may be a hundred time ‘worse’ at their chosen instrument than the nobody virtuoso, but has the drive and focus and ideas, to create a great (or at least popular) work of musical art, even if it’s based on two chords. Cough, post-punk, cough, pop music, haaak, cough, barf.
Unless, of course, your objective is to become a good cover band musician. Then go ahead and copy others. In the wake of every great hit about davinci codes and alpha werewolves and boy wizards and mockinjays and games of tits and swords there’s always enough quite solid crumbs for a whole crowd of imitators. And there are also whole conservative subgenres—the galactic marine or the zombie apocalypse, for example—where being like everyone else can be an automatic selling point.
Some readers want 'stability', in the sense of predictable plots presented in predictable styles. But for this to work out, you'll have to admit to the mirror: "I'll always be second-rate, and I don't mind. I'll still be in the top percentage when compared to the talentless multitudes. And now to write the chapter where the new space war recruit learns about camaraderie." In this case you're not a 'cover band', or a 'rip off artist', but rather a 'flame keeper', who dedicates his strength to keeping more or less alive a specific sub-strain of jazz, for example, in spite of knowing that you'll never be one of the giants, but enough people will appreciate your efforts at keeping the music more or less alive. And then, whatever the level, there are the groupies, of course...
