What makes a good book title?
It's a question a lot of authors have to consider at some point during their journey to publication (whether it's their first journey or their thirty-first).
It needs to be something "hooky" – something that grabs the attention. It needs to not be too long – or too difficult to spell or pronounce, so people can find it on Amazon and in brick-and-mortar bookstores.
Just recently, though, I've been noticing other potential book-titling problems.
A title needs to fit with the book both in genre and theme – I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd be a little surprised if I picked up a book called…for example…Death Stalker, only to find it was a sweet humorous romance about a florist and a chef and an adorable puppy. It wouldn't matter to me that it made sense because the puppy's name was Death Stalker – what would matter to me was that the book was dressed up in the wrong clothes.
Although I haven't so far picked up a sweet romance called Death Stalker, I have seen other books that seem similarly ill-titled. Sometimes they have an upbeat, contemporary sounding title even though they're science fiction. Sometimes they have a really depressing-sounding title – which for a romance, even a dark one, is a bit of an immediate turnoff. Sometimes they're just really bland. Sometimes they're clunky, like a mini-synopsis of the whole book. Actually, sometimes that can work (The Millionaire's Virgin Bride, for instance.) but there's still such a thing as too clunky!
Some of my favorite Samhain titles are Mari Carr's Erotic Research (totally does what it says on the tin!) and Serenity Woods' White-Hot Christmas. Also Tatterdemalion by Anah Crowe and Dianne Fox.
What titles work (or don't work!) for you?
