By the time authors finish writing a story, they (should) have a pretty good grasp of its essence. But that intimate knowledge doesn’t necessarily lead to a good title for the work. Sometimes too much knowing just confuses things. As frustrating, a title that would fit perfectly might be overused. Another one doesn’t convey much of a first impression. Still another might cross genre boundaries and provide little clue to the content. AI advocates suggest letting the machine review the story to come up with a title. (Didn’t work for me, even after several prompts.) “My Book” isn’t much of a title, even with (Finally!) added.
Last week, Author’s Publish hosted a webinar, “The Power of Titles,” in which author Emily Harstone addressed this problem. The most common type of title is what she calls the “placeholder” or “license plate” title. It conveys the work’s core idea or theme, but not much more. It’s often the most obvious choice, one anyone might pick if asked to suggest two or three possibilities.
A disadvantage of generic placeholder titles is they may be forgettable, so when your cousin who reads and loves your book talks about it with her friends, and they ask, “what’s the title?” she gives them a blank look. But placeholder titles can work. Harstone suggests The Hunger Games as one that manages to be specific and intriguing. The DaVinci Code is another.
Many books may share a one-word title like Witness. A quick Amazon search brings up multiple books with just the one word title, an added “The,” or close variants. John Sandford, though, has taken the one word “Prey” and tacked it onto various other words for a whole series of books, even when the combination doesn’t exactly make sense (coming next April, Book #36, Revenge Prey). Doesn‘t matter—you see that word “Prey” in big type and you know instantly what you’re looking at.
Harstone suggests reviewing titles in your genre (Amazon makes this easy if you search for, say, “best-selling thrillers”) and seeing whether your prospective title fits in with current trends, since a good title supports marketing. She says titles generally have to: convey a unique aspect of your book, convey the genre (in partnership with the cover art), and/or “communicate an idea you want readers thinking about.” Good examples of this last would be All the Light We Cannot See or We Begin at the End.
Titles that suggest the book itself will plow overworked ground are generally not of interest to me. That would include any starting with “The Woman Who . . .” or, worse, “The Girl Who . . .” They make me think (possibly unfairly) that the authors are trying to ride the wave of other books’ popularity, rather than coming up with their own ideas. Well, there are lot of books out there, and I need to make choices based on some criteria, even flawed ones. A trend possibly near its tail-end that Harstone notes is the use of numbers in titles. Examples are 2017’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo or 2018’s The Seven 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (another Evelyn with same last initial). One such book I read at the outset of this trend, which I recommend highly, is 2017’s The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti.
Having so many words, these titles risk violating Harstone’s advice that a title should look good on a cover, that is, not too long. Yet, we can all think of successful books that do have lengthy titles. I’m thinking of The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All or The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Both memorable. At the other extreme was the brilliant Dodgers by Bill Beverly (2016), about young men on a cross-country criminal mission (dodging the law) who were massive fans of the LA Dodgers. When I see that title, the whole book comes back to me. Harstone might consider Dodgers a “helium title,” one that adds another layer, making it more than it first appears. They are more common in short stories (and poems) because shorter works are more focused. Novels do a lot of things, and a title generally picks only one of them.
Another example is Exposure by Ramona Emerson about a Diné crime photographer and a series of deaths, out of doors in the wintertime. Exposure clearly has two meanings here. My short story “The Queen’s Line,” set in 1884, might make you think of the London Underground (the Circle Line was completed that year), but no, it’s about the death of Queen Victoria’s son Leopold from hemophilia and the rumors about her genetic line that ensued. So, the title not only gets at the essence of the story, it conjures an era. At least to me.
If you have any tips based on how you develop titles for your own work, please share!