Book titles are one of those things that I struggle with sometimes. Trying to find the right balance of being interesting, but not giving to much away is not always easy. Take for example my current work in progress. At the start I was going to name it Grellnot, after one of my antagonists. I liked the idea of it, and the mental image I had of the cover was really cool. However, as I began working on the book, I realized that the title, as cool as it was in my head didn’t accurately describe what the book actually was about. So I made the decision to change it. As the first book was called ‘Bridgefinders‘ I based on the story so far and thinking I knew were it was going to go, I came up with ‘Bridgebreaker.’
Which is a bit self-explanatory, but still it works. All that being said, with the work taking a decidedly different turn than I had originally thought I may revisit the name again. Remember as I’ve said before I’m a ‘gardener’ as the might George RR Martin describes it. I have an idea, a single sentence for the start of the book and let it grow, I don’t outline, create flash cards of notes or plot points, none of that. Which again knowing me is rather amusing, I’m a logical person and love structure and systems, but not here, not in this.
As a result sometimes the writing takes me in a totally different direction than I had expected. In the book under development, the Bridgefinders find themselves and Cendan in particular in a very bad place. Unexpected allies, new knowledge, and somewhat dangerous characters have appeared in ways I hadn’t even thought of before.
I guess the questions are:
- If your a writer/author/indie, whatever you call it.. do you title the book when your all done? Maybe in progress? Does it it even matter to you?
- If your a reader, how much do you want the title to ‘give away’? Have you ever not bought a book because of the title?
Other News:
After some success with the audiobook for Bridgefinders, I decided to go back and put up Project: Perception as an audiobook. Now, for Bridgefinders I had a bear of a time getting people to audition for it at first. I’ve not had this issue at all for Project: Perception, in fact my main issue is I’ve had 7 auditions so far. One is someone I reached out to personally as they auditioned for Bridgefinders but I ended up going with a different reader. It was a very close call between the two of them, and I wanted to give the guy another chance.But some of these auditions are really really good. So it’s going to be interesting picking one!
That’s all for today, need to write some more of the sequel, and work on a few other things. I’m very curious as to how other’s deal with book titles, so please leave a comment below!
