Earlier this week I emailed a book off to Penguin. It was contracted in 2004. It’s taken a while to actually finish, for various reasons.
I supplied it with a working title – the final selection is the publisher’s prerogative, by contract. The marketing departments usually have the most input, when all’s said and done. It’s not easy. A good title has to:
1. Sum up the whole book in two or three words – maybe with a subtitle, if it’s non-fiction, to qualify the snappy phrase.
2. Capture the reader’s imagination instantly.
3. Be memorable.
The point being that in this day and age, when it ‘s possible to self-publish, the burden of meeting those criteria falls squarely on the author.
My tips for doing it are:
1. Derive it from the log-line – er, you DO have a logline…don’t you?
2. Try two or three combinations – let them sit for a few days before finalising.
3. Don’t be afraid to get advice from beta-readers.
Something usually floats in. Usually. Do you ever have trouble finding titles for your material?
Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013
Coming up this weekend: ‘Write it Now – part 8′ – and watch for my take on Russell Crowe’s UFO.
No idea what a ‘logline’ is – we may have a different term for it in the UK!
It’s one sentence that describes the essential theme of the book or story, e.g. ‘Servant girl has to learn confidence by attending the masked ball, winning the heart of the handsome prince’.. Often used in the movie industry to pitch scripts to agents or film-makers – but it works for books too and is a handy tool both for figuring out what the book is REALLY all about, before you start writing it – and for deriving the title.
Aha, we call that the elevator pitch. Thanks for the reminder.
Titles are the hardest. Especially for collections.
They are indeed – it’s hard enough to identify a title for a book with single theme…collections compound the difficulty.
I find a title usually comes to me while writing, usually in reference to the main theme of the book. (Though, I can’t say I’ve ever used a logline. They seem very cheap, to me.)
The title I have currently is ‘Treasonists’ – my working title was ‘Whitemask’, after one of the characters, and my first ‘real’ title was ‘Tyrants, Traitors & Treasonsits.’ Everyone started just calling it ‘Treasonists,’ myself included, so I shortened it – It’s much better, in my opinion, and probably the one I will stick with; it’s short and catchy, very thematic, and a relatively uncommon word – so searching for it will be easy, and it will strike peoples interest inherently.
‘Treasonists’ – sounds intriguing. And that, of course, is the essence of a good title!
I think it’s fun to work up titles although most of my working titles are pretty straight forward. After I read a book, I will look at the title to see how well it fits the story. Some work very well and others…not so much. One word titles, in particular seem difficult to reconcile.
Most of my books go through title metamorpohoses – even after going to the publisher. The biggest problem I have is that the title favoured by marketing departments often doesn’t correlate with the actual content of the book, but publishing contracts always sign away the titling right. I get credited with the title nonetheless – and here in NZ the history field is dominated by viciously closed shops of which I am not a part, and whose hostility gets worse the more I publish in their territory. The result that the mis-written title becomes yet another lever with which these people can publicly deny my worth. It’s happened more than once. Difficult to get around.
Titles are the part I hate the most. I feel like writing is so easy, but summing the book up or giving a taste of the mood or story is so hard! I usually just leave it until the end, hence a lot of stories on my hard drive called “untitled+character name.” Thanks for the tips.
Thanks. I agree. Titles are astonishingly difficult to work up – but also well worth it in the end.
Titles are so hard! I went through six or seven titles before I settled on Imminent Danger. Some of them were awesome but deemed too complex for my target audience (“Space Chattel”, “The Reluctant Xenophile”), and some were just silly (“Starry Eyes”).
My first book was a light history of policing in Wellington, New Zealand. I remember tossing round so many ideas for a title at the time, and finally settling on a title that I still wasn’t wholly happy with – “Capital Coppers”. At least, though, this title was mine and mine alone – I had full freedom to choose it.
I later contributed to another policing history book. This time the title was up to someone else. They chose a name taken from part of the police oath – “With Confidence and Pride”.
Trite though the title “Capital Coppers” might have been, I much preferred it to the rather bland (I thought) “With Confidence and Pride”.
And that is my entire experience of naming books – I’ve never written any more since!
[...] by Lisa England for JourneyCraft. Lisa shares tips on how to manage your time as a writer. “Sixty Second Writing Tips: Getting the Right Title” – Article by Matthew Wright. Matthew gives us some tips on how to come up with the right [...]