I had this discussion on Facebook recently, as I consulted with various people on what the title of my upcoming novel should be. On my first book, once “Killing the Immortals” came to me, it was one of those proverbial light bulbs popping up above my head. Maybe literally. I can’t say for sure. But it was fairly bright in the room at the time, so perhaps.
Anyway, I knew right away that was the title. It was striking, a little mysterious, and had a seemingly contradictory nature that I liked. I love forcing readers to ask themselves a question they can only answer by reading whatever it is I wrote. “How can you kill immortals?” Know how you’re gonna find out? Buy my book and read the thing, damn it.
But with this next book, I haven’t had that metaphorical light bulb. I haven’t written a ton of these, but I have a hunch that a-ha moment isn’t all that common with these. Being conflicted and vacillating between multiple options is probably more likely, because pretty much everything as a writer has to be hard, because we’re all tortured souls who drink a lot of absinthe. Or so I hear.
I’ve been going back and forth between “Separation,” the working title I’ve had for quite awhile, and “The Intolerable Isolation of Alessandra,” which is a mite longer, and it just popped into my head recently. Like me, people seem to be about evenly split in preferring one or the other. And then some people have suggested, simply, “Isolation.” That makes me think of a dude sitting alone on a glacier, but I haven’t ruled it out yet. Maybe I’ll just change the whole book to be about a guy on a glacier. Sounds compelling.
Does the title really matter all that much, though? It’s an interesting question. When I think about my own buying habits, do I buy based upon the title? I don’t think so. Though every book these days is called “The Girl blah blah blah,” so there must be something to it, eh?
While I may not buy based upon title alone, I do think the title has a chance to set a tone, hint to the book’s content, and grab the reader’s attention. Yes, the most important factor for getting someone to buy your book is probably the blurb. That’s where you have a chance to tease someone enough that they feel like they simply have to buy your book, or they’ll regret it for the rest of their sad, wistful little existence. That’s where you can give people a reason to think buying your book is worth maybe skipping a tall mocha decaf caramel frappuccino latte tomorrow morning.
So, yeah, that matters more than the title. But people don’t generally browse blurbs. They browse covers, titles, genres, author names and prices. The cover obviously matters. If your cover uses comic sans and looks like it was drawn by a twitchy 8-year-old with a caffeine addiction, nobody’s going to think it’s worth their time to find out how horrible it is.
The title’s part of that cover, though. The font matters. The way it looks matters. The title helps make it all come together. It might typically be a case of “Do no harm,” but I’m convinced a great title can build more intrigue, and get more people to click and check out your blurb. Once you’ve got them there, hopefully your blurb doesn’t suck. Hopefully, once you get them to your book’s page, you’ve got a decent shot at getting them to click one more time and send you some fat cash.
That means that, yes, I’ve come to the conclusion that the title matters. Hell, it all matters. Now, to figure this damn title out. Where’s the absinthe?
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