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.

Choosing Titles

Titles are a strange beast in this business.  On some level, they're immaterial to the book, in and of itself.  The title is there for marketing purposes, a quick and easy way to set the tone of your book.  The shortest version of your elevator pitch.

But on the other hand, I think about them for a long time.

Almost every one of my books had some working title that didn't survive contact with reality. The Thorn of Dentonhill was just "Tools of the Trade" in draft.  The Holver Alley Crew was "The Fire Gig".  An Import of Intrigue was "The Little East".  And many times that working title is definitively and only a working title, one that I knew even then was not for public consumption.  Imposters of Aventil was merely "Wingclipper", as the original one-paragraph concept focused more on one of the antagonists. 

About the only one that lasted all the way through: Lady Henterman's Wardrobe.  For some reason I always knew that was the title of the second Asti & Verci story.

I've mentioned that the books up to People of the City (original working title... is a spoiler) marks the end of Phase I of Maradaine things, and if you know me, you know I'm a planner, and yes, I do have a plan for Phase II and Phase III.

And those Phase II books have tentative titles.  They still may change between now and when they are written and released, but that's the plan for now.

So, how about a little contest?  Below I'm going to put eight hints for eight prospective Phase II Maradaine Novels. And so we're on the same page, these titles each would represent Book Four and Five of the four respective series, but I've mixed up the order so it's not completely obvious what's what.

Email your guesses to me before AUGUST 1st, 2018.  The entry that is the most correct (or, barring that, most entertaining in incorrectness) will win an ARC of THE WAY OF THE SHIELD, limited to mailing in US and Canada.  Sound good?  Here goes:

The Q_____ G_____
The A_____ of C_____
The S_____ of the C_____
An U_____ of U_____ M_____
The C_____ of the C_____
A P_____ of P_____
The N_____ K_____ of R_____ S_____
A_____ and D_____

Happy guessing!

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.

Coming up with Titles

I am remarkably indifferent about book titles. I like something that makes a point and is hopefully catchy, but beyond that...Meh.

Some of the best titles on books I've worked on come from Charles R. Rutledge, my frequent author and good friend.  We've done three novels together and I love every title. BLIND SHADOWS, CONGREGATIONS OF THE DEAD and A HELL WITHIN. He came up with all of them and he has even found appropriate Bible quotes in all cases. He's good like that.

My first boom was called UNDER THE OVERTREE I thought it was catchy and it correlates to the name of the lake in the story, Lake Overtree.

SEVEN FORGES, THE BLASTED LANDS, CITY OF WONDERS and THE SILENT ARMY are all titled from the main focus of the novels. Really, that's about as crazy as I go. Not a lot of research, etc. Currently I'm working on BOOMTOWN, SPORES and the first draft of AS WE KNOW IT.

Those titles are subject to change at a moment's notice.

Coming Up with Titles: the Pain and Glory

Spring has sprung here fully into summer and the flowers are so lovely! This is my pink anemone clematis that I'm training to climb up the grape vine in the arbor. Love how it's coming along!

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is "How do you come up with your titles?"

I might have as many answers to this question as I have published (and unpublished, for that matter) works. And a single work can have multiple titles by the time the final one goes on the cover. So much so that I can have mass confusion looking through my various files and documents for versions of stories. I'm pretty organized, but that can get crazymaking, especially keeping things consistent between email folders and those in Dropbox.

So, the short answer is I often choose titles initially on instinct. Some of them come to me before I start writing. Like "Wyoming Trucks, True Love, and the Weather Channel" was a title I thought of first, then wrote the essay, and then we ended up calling the entire essay collection that. Sometimes I write on a book for a long time before I figure out the title. Some are called "Story" for a significant amount of time.

One cool trick I learned is to pull the title from a line or phrase in the story. Grace Draven likes to draw from poetry, which is how we came up with "Amid the Winter Snow."

When you work with a traditional publisher, they very often want to change the title. So, here's a story about the title of the first book in the new trilogy I'll be doing with St. Martin's Press, out August 2019.

I called this book "New Story" for about a week while I worked my way into it. Once I had a handle on it more, I started calling it "The Slave King." That lasted about a month until I apparently decided my heroine needed to share top billing. Then it became "The Slave King and the Flower Queen." I had those images for the hero and heroine, which resonated with the core idea I worked from. When I sent my agent, Sarah Younger, the first rough fifty pages, that's what I called it. We have a number of back-and-forth emails with the subject line "TSK/TFQ." Which should've been a hint right there that it was a cumbersome title.

By the time we went out on submission, Sarah suggested taking "The Slave King" out of the title. I get that descriptor for him in the story, but she was concerned that it would be possibly offensive as an email subject line out of context. She proposed

Throne of Flowers, Throne of Flesh
Throne of Flowers, Throne of Fire
 Throne of Thorns, Throne of Fire
 Crown of Thorns, Crown of Ore

I came back with (inspired by her) "Throne of Flowers, Throne of Ash." She polled everyone in her agency and they voted for that.

And sold it to St. Martins! (along with two sequels to be named - literally, as we still haven't titled those...)

Once we signed the contracts and started digging into what my editor, Jennie Conway, envisioned for the series, she relayed that the SMP marketing thought that my title would get lost in SEO. (That's Search Engine Optimization for the lay people - and means that they worried my "thrones" would get lost with all the other "thrones" terms people might type into Google.)

She suggested:

Book 1: A Throne Veiled by Orchids
Book 2: A Throne Bound in Shadow
Book 3: A Throne Carved from Embers

Sarah riffed on that, coming up with:

Book 1: A Throne Masked by Orchids
Book 1: A Throne Hidden in Orchids
Book 1: A Throne Built by Orchids
Book 1: A Throne Shadowed by Orchids
Book 1: A Throne Covered with Orchids
Book 1: A Throne Disguised by Orchids

Book 2: A Throne Bound in Shadow

Book 3: A Throne Carved from Embers

Marketing came back with a No on anything starting with "Throne," because of how SEO works, and also avoiding the words "ice," "fire," and "ash," as they're overused with "throne."

After a lot more brainstorming, we all finally settled on THE ORCHID THRONE as the title for Book 1. You can no doubt see the evolution of that. As for Books 2 and 3, we decided to wait until I wrote more of Book 1 and saw how the story was developing.

So there you have it! My answer in this case to "How do you come up with your titles?" is "over months of effort and with a bunch of really smart people weighing in."

Paying It Forward Is On My Mind

Not the Author. Also I never wear suits any more.
This would only be an accurate depiction of my Author talk if I was presenting Jeffe's spreadsheets!
DepositPhoto

What’s been on my mind this week is the talk I’m giving tomorrow to a local writers group. They invited me to speak about six months ago and I said yes, because May 2018 seemed a long way off. Surprise, now it’s tomorrow! I get very tense prior to doing a talk or a panel, I have huge FUN during the event – I ride the adrenaline – and I’m always glad I did it when it’s safely over. (I also have chocolate.)

I also always say I’ll never do another one…and then eventually I do.

They left the topic up to me although they did say maybe I wanted to touch on scifi romance. I decided no to that one. It’s not a romance group – it’s a very eclectic critique group ranging from poets to nonfiction to fiction. Given that, I figured the best way for me to stay interesting enough to keep everyone awake would be to briefly discuss my own journey to publishing and then give a few insights or guidelines about being an independently published author nowadays.

DepositPhoto

Kind of funny, I thought I had an hour. Nope, thirty minutes. EEK! So I revised and revised. It’s so tempting to go way deep into a rabbit hole on any one of the zillion things I could talk about with them and I had to make myself pull back to just the 100,000’ level on all of it.

One of the first things I plan to say to them is that there is no one right way to do things, no one right answer. Of course there are exceptions to that rule, as with everything else in life, but it’s a good thing to keep in mind.

When I got into indie publishing, I had so much help and advice from authors who came before me, and so I feel a strong drive to also ‘pay it forward’ to others.  I think right now is a tough time in the industry for many reasons, including scammers, trolls, trademark issues (which were on my mind a LOT this week but I'm not going there), a mature marketplace, pressure to do frequent new releases…so I struggled a bit with this talk. I didn’t want to be depressing or daunting in speaking to them, because I love being a fulltime author and would never give it up. Do I miss the gold rush days? Sure! But those days won’t be back and I still very much love writing my books and putting them out there for readers to (hopefully) enjoy. I don’t want to crush anyone’s dreams in the least. Just add a smidgen of realism…it’s not all tea parties and movie contracts out here.

So I settled for advising them to develop a thick skin, remember it’s a BUSINESS, not to compare themselves and their journey to anyone else’s and to stay true to their own voice. Plus some other more tactical stuff about covers, blurbs, editing and promo. And ergonomics.

I hope I get questions because that’s where the fun conversations often spring up! I probably should be more basic and hope anyone even shows up on Mother’s Day weekend!

The other thing on my mind right now is that I got my next book back from the editor and I need to disappear into the revisions so I can get the book out there in the wild and crazy marketplace…

Faith in Humanity on My Mind

What's on my mind? This'll shock you. Not at all.

Cats. And the near mortal blow taken by my once shining faith in humanity.  Let me introduce you to Fluffy. (Don't @ me. I did not name him. I inherited this stunning lack of imagination.) Fluffy is 15 and he lives outside, among the rocks and mangroves beside Tampa Bay where he was dumped by someone years ago.

Yes. I'm back to feline rescue. I met up with a group who manages this colony of cats. All of them dumped. Because several of the dumped cats weren't fixed before being abandoned, there's now a generation of truly feral (and spectacularly gorgeous) cats on site. Someone dumped a seal point Himalayan queen. She produced a glorious long-hair tortie and a stunning short-hair calico with blue eyes. All three are fixed now. And once a day, one of the colony managers goes out to put out food and fresh water for the crew. We have about twenty cats and a group of 6 people who work with the colony.

This is where faith in humanity is restored. Because this is where these cats live: In elevated shelters built by one of the men who originally began feeding these cats. That's Rocky on the shelf. There are two of these shelters. These shelters and all of the cats weathered Irma without a hitch.

We run a constant TNR (trap, neuter, release) program at this colony, because just as we reach 100% fix rates, some git comes along and dumps a litter of kittens. This happened late last year. My co-managers had trapped three of the four kittens. Three of those kittens were taken into rescue and homed. They all have human slaves of their very own. But we had one wily panther (solid black coat) who for WEEKS avoided our efforts to trap him. I was lucky enough to get him with a drop trap last Sunday. He was neutered, vaccinated, and returned to the colony on Wednesday evening.

 But that same Wednesday evening, not a mile up the road from where these fluffs live in the rough, I was accosted by a charming 6-7 month old, solid grey kitten. Obviously male. He is ultra-friendly and charming. I was at a beach bar and the staff told me they had a bunch of cats. I identified myself as one of the managers of the colony down the road (everybody knows it because of the excellent houses) and asked for permission to get on property and trap the cats. The general manager said, 'yes please.' I'm heart-broken that someone would dump such a love-hungry kitten when there's a perfectly good Humane Society with a robust foster program in the area. Surrendering an animal isn't a death sentence here, damn it. Abandoning them IS. So if anyone near FL wants a young, handsome gun metal blue kitten, hit me up. I have no idea how many cats are at that colony. I have no idea whether any of them are fixed or sick or  . . .  But I will find out.

The thing that preserves my faith in humanity is the number of people who stop when they see us taking care of the cats and telling us how much they love the cats and appreciate that we're looking after them no matter the weather. People bring us cat food. Some offer to help defray vet bill costs. It's really heartening.

The little grey guy is every bit as friendly as my sweet peach and white friend, above right. This is the one I would take home in a heartbeat were I not contractually obligated to only have two cats (on pain of losing my place to live.) He's looking for a sofa of his own, too. But here. The star of our friendly cat show is Rocky. This guy walks up to everyone who stops, shakes hands and says, "Welcome! Skritch my chin!"

If you obey his commands and rub his chin, he'll drool all over you in reward. Yes. We're actively looking for a home for him, too. He needs a human to boss around, don't you think?