Paksworld

Titles are tricky.   What a writer thinks is the perfect title may not be what the editor/marketing director/publicist/bookseller…or reader…thinks is the perfect title.

The ideal title for fiction you want someone to buy is easy to read and say, and short enough to remember easily and tell someone else.     Very long titles occasionally work, but usually require more push by publisher and bookseller.   “Split Second” would be a better title than “A Brief Unit of Time Subdivided and How Important That Can Be in a Horse Race.”

It should resonate with the book (and, in a series, lend itself to working with other series titles–so it needs to resonate with the series, too.)    If it “chimes” (same or similar words) with other books by that writer, that must be intentional.  In series, chiming can be a powerful hint to readers that “Murder in Zanzibar” belongs with “Murder in Moscow” and “Murder in Beijing”, but if writing in more than one genre, the titles for each should be different enough that readers don’t pick up  “Barbarians at the Gate”  (the author’s time-travel military SF) thinking it’s related to “Gatekeeper’s Dilemma” (in the same author’s light-fantasy series about a college admissions committee in a world with faerie influence.)

The title, in other words, needs to attract the readership that’s most likely to enjoy the book, and repel the fewest possible “fringe” readers who might pick it up if the title isn’t a turn-off.

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