{"id":11573,"date":"2025-08-27T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11573"},"modified":"2025-08-26T16:27:54","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T20:27:54","slug":"the-power-of-titles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11573","title":{"rendered":"“The Power of Titles”"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By the time authors finish writing a story, they (should) have a pretty good grasp of its essence. But that intimate knowledge doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019t work for me, even after several prompts.) \u201cMy Book\u201d isn\u2019t much of a title, even with (Finally!) added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last week, Author\u2019s Publish<\/a> <\/em>hosted a webinar, \u201cThe Power of Titles,\u201d in which author Emily Harstone addressed this problem. The most common type of title is what she calls the \u201cplaceholder\u201d or \u201clicense plate\u201d title. It conveys the work\u2019s core idea or theme, but not much more. It\u2019s often the most obvious choice, one anyone might pick if asked to suggest two or three possibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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, \u201cwhat\u2019s the title?\u201d she gives them a blank look. But placeholder titles can work. Harstone suggests The Hunger Games<\/em> as one that manages to be specific and intriguing. The DaVinci Code<\/em> is another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many books may share a one-word title like Witness<\/em>. A quick Amazon search brings up multiple books with just the one word title, an added \u201cThe,\u201d or close variants. John Sandford, though, has taken the one word \u201cPrey\u201d and tacked it onto various other words for a whole series of books, even when the combination doesn\u2019t exactly make sense (coming next April, Book #36, Revenge Prey<\/a><\/em>). Doesn\u2018t matter\u2014you see that word \u201cPrey\u201d in big type and you know instantly what you\u2019re looking at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harstone suggests reviewing titles in your genre (Amazon makes this easy if you search for, say, \u201cbest-selling thrillers\u201d) 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 \u201ccommunicate an idea you want readers thinking about.\u201d Good examples of this last would be All the Light We Cannot See<\/em> or We Begin at the End<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Titles that suggest the book itself will plow overworked ground are generally not of interest to me. That would include any starting with \u201cThe Woman Who . . .\u201d or, worse, \u201cThe Girl Who . . .\u201d They make me think (possibly unfairly) that the authors are trying to ride the wave of other books\u2019 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\u2019s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo <\/em>or 2018\u2019s The Seven 1\/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle<\/em> (another Evelyn with same last initial). One such book I read at the outset of this trend, which I recommend highly, is 2017\u2019s The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley<\/a><\/em> by Hannah Tinti.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having so many words, these titles risk violating Harstone\u2019s 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\u2019m thinking of The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All <\/em>or The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.<\/em> Both memorable. At the other extreme was the brilliant Dodgers<\/a><\/em> 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<\/em> a \u201chelium title,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another example is Exposure<\/em> by Ramona Emerson about a Din\u00e9 crime photographer and a series of deaths, out of doors in the wintertime. Exposure clearly has two meanings here. My short story \u201cThe Queen\u2019s Line,\u201d set in 1884, might make you think of the London Underground (the Circle Line was completed that year), but no, it\u2019s about the death of Queen Victoria\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you have any tips based on how you develop titles for your own work, please share!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By the time authors finish writing a story, they (should) have a pretty good grasp of its essence. But that intimate knowledge doesn\u2019t necessarily lead to a good title for the work. Sometimes too much knowing just confuses things. As … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[174,311,120,29],"tags":[2293],"class_list":["post-11573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-draft-blog","category-novel","category-short-story","category-writing","tag-book-titles"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-30F","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11573"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11575,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11573\/revisions\/11575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}