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.

Case in point.    The alpha readers for the new book really liked the title I had picked for it.    But they had the book in hand–they knew what it was about, and how the title resonated with the content.  It was short, easy to read and say, and memorable.

It was also,  I found at a choir Christmas party, offputting to some who, asking me what the title of the new book was, recoiled.   OK, I thought, a few people at a Christmas party, big deal.  But then an editor commented that it was “too urban fantasy” (in other words, too noir)  and I realized that in today’s market, with a lot of urban fantasy and (not always the same thing) vampire books out there,  the title had problems.

It’s hard letting go of the perfect title.   On the other hand, if the title is perfect in terms of the text, but keeps people from buying the book and reading the text,  they’ll never understand why the title was perfect and not what they  thought.   Which means it’s not perfect, since one of the tasks of a title is to suggest to readers who will like the book that they should pick it up and give it a chance.

With that said, Blood and Bone is off the table (and the imagined book cover) now, and I’m proposing Oath of Fealty (with a nod to my fencing instructor, who came up with it last night in a group brainstorming session.)    I hope the editors involved like that one (if they have books in production with that title,  of course it will have to be something else.)     But if you read the book later (and I certainly hope you do)  I hope you’ll lay a flower of respect on the grave of the first title, understanding why it was perfect in its way–but its way wasn’t the right way.