Ch-ch-changing. Titles and names, that is.

First and foremost, I have a new book out. It's The Blood Knife, the vampire novel that had been in a box set for three weeks. That fundraising promo is over and I've put the book up as a standalone. It'll go up in formats other than Kindle this weekend.


Ch-ch-changing.
Title and name changes. You knew I'd have a story about that. When I subbed my first book to Berkley, it went in as Enemy Within. Marketing didn't like that title. So, they asked for a name change. I wasn't thrilled, but I was eager to play nicely with the big kids. So I sent in a list of twenty possible other titles. Many blessings upon my ever-patient critique group(s) who helped brainstorm those, cause I was stuck after about five. Titles are so not my super power. Anyway, I sent the list. Marketing brought their own list. Not a single one of them stuck. After a week of wrangling, marketing went back to the editor and said, "Leave it." You know the rest. The book went out with the original title. I'd have loved to have been a fly on the wall at that marketing meeting. I really would. It would have been fascinating to hear what criteria made a good title versus a bad one. With that information, I might could have given them a better title option, but alas. I was not invited.

The only change that DID happen was in the name of the aliens in the book. The major bad guys are the Chekydran. Well. That's what they *became* because when I first conceived of them, their name had far fewer vowels. My point at the time was that not every species humans and humanoids ever encounter are going to have names that we can say. My agent at the time, who convinced me to buy a few vowels, argued that it didn't matter humans and humanoids were always going to name aliens something they could say, so I might as well throw my poor readers a bone and make the Chekydran readable. I'm glad I did. I can't even remember, now, how I had them spelled originally. So it clearly didn't matter.

Frankly, if I need to change a name, that gets caught in draft when my critique group catches that all of my character names start with the same letter of the alphabet or something. I've been lucky thus far. Editors haven't asked me to change anything I feel really strongly about. I expect that's just a matter of time, though.

The Best Title That Never Was

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week concerns the reality of having to change names. We're asking the crew if they've ever had to change the name(s) of a character or place in a book after we'd drafted it? Who is the character who will forever go by their "unpublished" name in our minds?

For me, it wasn't a character. As far as I can recall, I've never had to change the name of a character or place in a book. If I did, it never mattered enough to me that it stuck in my head. I *have* had to change titles, however, and the one that has never left my head is for the book that became ROGUE'S PAWN, book one in my Covenant of Thorns trilogy.

This was my first published novel - released in 2012 - and was the story that invaded my dreams and wrenched me from a nonfiction career and into fiction. It was, in fact, fantasy romance, but I didn't know what to call it then. I started writing it in 2005, querying it in 2007 and it took me YEARS to sell. 

All that time, I called it by another title in my head: OBSIDIAN.

The title has a lot of shades of meaning and symbolic layers in the story. That book is forever OBSIDIAN in my head.

Unfortunately, by the time Carina Press bit on the book and published it in August of 2012, Jennifer L. Armentrout's book of the same title had come out in May. My editors at Carina said that wasn't the reason for the title change. Instead I sunk my own ship by first publishing the Facets of Passion books with them. Those were erotic BDSM contemporaries, also with one-word jewel titles: SAPPHIRE, PLATINUM, and RUBY. (Ironically, book 4, FIVE GOLDEN RINGS, was supposed to be called ORO, the Spanish word for gold, but Carina thought readers wouldn't get it. I'm still sorry about that retitling, too.)

It was a newbie author mistake. Had I realized that one-word jewel titles wouldn't work for two different series, in two different genres, from the same author at the same publisher, I would have cheerfully changed the Facets of Passion titles instead. Alas!

I'd love to get this trilogy back from Carina someday - largely because I've never liked these covers, either. Would I change the title back? I don't know... I wouldn't want readers to think I'm trying to trick them into reading something new that's actually old. 

What would you say?

    

Titling Purgatory

Titling novels is a magic I do not possess. My stories are all filed under the character names. Even after they're published.

I swear to you, there is this paranormal historical thing I did last year - finished it. Subbed it. Got the rejection letter. There's a series name. But the book title? The manuscript went out without a title because I got nothing. I think it said Book 1 of Artifacts of the Aegean. The file folder still says 'Sinclair', which is the hero's name. Now granted. The book has a few fatal flaws that have to be corrected before it sees the light of day again. Maybe it'll find its title somewhere in that process. But this is me. Not holding my breath.

Yes. I did come up with the title for Enemy Within. Don't ask me how or why that title volunteered. It did and attached itself to that story. Berkley's marketing folks didn't like it, though. So we went through the titling motions, which look like this:

1. Email from your agent saying 'marketing would like a list of title options.'
2. You cry.
3. You call your friends, beta readers and anyone who is tangentially aware of the story being a thing that exists to ask for suggestions.
4. You try to come up with a list of 20 title options.
5. You fail at number 8.
6. Your TRUE friends get on line with you and in a chat window, they throw out title suggestions based on your characters, the theme(s) in the story, and/or whatever black magic happens on their sides of the chat windows.
7. You email your list of 20 to your agent, who forwards it on to the editor.

The marketing team then picks one of your title suggestions or comes up with one of their own. Or. In the case of Enemy Within, the editor comes back saying 'we're sticking with the original title because no one could come up with anything better.' 

Nice.

Makes it easy for the rest of the series, though. All of the titles will be Enemy something. That doesn't help my poor, forlorn historical paranormal weird series, though. And I somehow don't think my chances of getting better at titles are very good. My stories start with characters, not concepts, and I tell myself that the people who are good with titles are the concept people. Please don't shatter my illusions.

All the Truly Nasty Titles I've Thought Up

Okay… titles, huh? I’m going to have to punt on the expertise here because I’ve never successfully titled a work. Let me explain.

I have two books out. The first was a cyberpunk romance featuring a BladeRunner-type android assassin, and in my overwrought newbieness I called it On the Squeeze. Note the singular lack of cyberpunk or romance imagery there. To my ever-patient editor I submitted more than twenty terrible titles, each terribler than the last. Don’t believe me? Feast your giggler on these gems:

• Lost Things
• Hard Drive
• Hard Wired
• Guardian Machine
• Full Metal Seduction (<-- Seriously, I sent this. Amazing SFR author Cara Bristol had just done a poll on Facebook asking readers what words in a title were appealing for romance, and "seduction" was the clear winner. So I guess I thought I was being marketing savvy or something. Am blushing with embarrassment now, though. Pretty sure this was not the context the voters had in mind.)

Finally, in the last batch via email, I said, um, maybe Wired and Wanted?

At that point, either I’d worn down my editor with the sheer volume of badness or that title was close enough to what we needed. She switched it around to Wanted and Wired, and voila.

But wait! The follow-up book was going to be even more fun to title, for both of us. And by “fun” of course I mean agony. My working title for book 2 was Claws in Chrome, which, again, wasn’t super romancey, but at least it had a cyberpunk feel and called out the robot cat, who is a pivotal character in the story. (I had in my mind the cover image of a shirtless cowboy facing away from the camera, a la Daniel Craig on that hot Cowboys & Aliens movie novelization cover by Joan D. Vinge, only with a creepy robot feline peering over his shoulder, possibly in full ears-back hiss mode. THIS IS WHY VIV DOES NOT DESIGN COVERS.)

My poor, poor editor. 

None of the titles I suggested were even close to suitable, and just in case you don’t believe me, here’s the complete list I sent with the launch paperwork:

• Fire and the Fall
• Desire and the Desperado
• Spurred and Smitten
• Trust and Treason
• Tampered and Tempted
• Bliss and Bravado
• Riled and Ready
• Claws in Chrome
• Evils and Angels
• Passion and Power
• Outlaw and the Oratrix (<-- OH YES! Clearly targeted at readers who always have a dictionary handy!)
• Shadow Trust
• War and the Wild Things
• Fire of Forever
• Best of the Beasts

The title we ended up with, Perfect Gravity, has nothing to do with the book, but lordy is it better than anything I submitted. We may have gone back at revisions and added a couple of lines about the pull of gravity, or the heroine’s magnetic personality being like gravity or something. Regardless, it’s a pretty cool title.

That I would never in a zillion years have thought up.

So that's my unimpressive track record so far. The third book in the series has a working title of … (wait for it)…Bits of Starstuff. And okay fine, I love it and it’s so appropriate for my noncorporeal, sentient-chatbot heroine Chloe. So what it isn’t romantic. So what no stars actually explode in the story. So what it’s punny with “bits” having two meanings, and no one likes puns.

We’ll have to see what happens with that book, but hey, if you have title ideas, please feel free to pass them along. They can’t be worse than the crud I’ve thought up.

Titles: A Story in 5 Words or Less

Tell me a story in five words or less. That was the first bit of advice I got on how to title a book. A little tidbit about me: I struggle to keep a query letter under 250 words and the back copy of a book under 200. Now you want me to do it in FIVE? FIVE? Are you nuts? No. It's sound advice, a great starting point.

It's not really how I do it, though.

Instead, I opt for what makes the novel...novel. Does it work? If by "work" we mean "drives sales," I have no idea. No reviewer has ever said, "I bought this because of the awesome title." Similarly, no one has said, "I skipped it because of the crappy title."

For my high fantasy series Fire Born, Blood Blessed, each book is named after a god/his eponymous nation. The titles are also the path our heroine takes on her journey. While each book is/was easy to name, those names do not tell a reader unfamiliar with the series anything about the book. I hope the made-up nation names at least hint that the book is fantasy. It certainly doesn't meet the SEO standard that Jeffe mentioned on Sunday (though SEO bears consideration in future naming efforts); however, the series name might.

As for my Urban Fantasy series The Immortal Spy, I went for the classic naming convention of adjective + noun. There will be seven books in that series, and the first four were easy to name because I already knew the rough plots. The titles reflect the spy for whom our protagonist takes up the mission that drives the plot. The titles also stay within a certain character limit (as in number of letters, not body count) so I don't dork up the layout of the cover.

The Burned Spy, The Plagued Spy, The Captured Spy, The Hanged Spy

I opted for straightforward naming with the UF and went weird for HF because I think the genres support them. I kept the titles short to be easily remembered and allow the cover art to hold greater presence. I used the series names to supply information the titles didn't and cover art to fill in where the words failed.