The title is a tough nut: along with your cover, it’s what makes a potential reader pick your book up off the shelf, or click for more information. It generally needs to be short and intriguing, and in some way encapsulate the book (fiction or non-fiction) in a few words. Hah, and you thought the synopsis was hard! Here’s a good article from Writers Weekly on how to approach picking your title, and a personal anecdote about it.
I’ve got a new fiction book coming out in a couple of months, and I thought I would share the brainstorming process with you so you can see just how hard it can be.
Some details: it’s a 85,000 fantasy fiction book, best audience probably YA girls because it is adventure-romance with a female narrator, Rana, and two other female leads, Anura and Amaryths, all teenagers or young adults.
It’s set in a fairytale world, literally in a world where fairytales are true guiding principles and the Fairytale Imperative makes sure that no princess is left for long without her prince showing up to rescue her. Except that Anura’s prince is stubbornly late and a wizard has turned up to murder her – but not if Rana has her way.
The working title for this book has always been ‘Rana’ (I always name my drafts after the lead female character), and the title by which it was submitted was ‘The Frog’s Daughters’ since Anura is descended from the original frog-prince who rescued the golden ball from the well, and the Frog is the guardian angel of this fairytale realm.
However, I’ve never been fond of this title, and my publisher thinks we can do better too. And so…
I started by listing some of the themes, archetypes, and special phrases that spring to mind when I think through the book: wizard, frog prince, fairy tale, crone, Domain [the name of their land], potential, princess, Imperative, light strike [a power Rana has], seeking, puss in boots, spinning wheel, curse, once upon a time, Book, spellbook, enchantment…
The first title that came to me was ‘Rana and the Painted Wizard’. It’s OK. Not too much better than the original title, and if we’re going to give the boys a play in the title, it might very well be ‘Rana and the Wrong Prince’. Plus it implies this is a series, which it isn’t, though I may eventually write a follow-up. In which case, this would be a very convenient title form – this is something genre writers have to keep in mind, what with the trend to hundred-book series these days.
I circled around ‘curse’ for a while: ‘Anura’s Curse’. But a) it sounds like she’s got her period, and b) all three girls are cursed one way or the other, but if any one girl gets the title, it should be Rana. Then there were variations around ‘The Cursed Fairytale’, ‘The Fairytale Curse’, the ‘Curse OF the Fairytale’…but in the end decided the titles around ‘curse’ would give the impression the book is much darker than it actually is. This then is pitching at the wrong audience.
I searched for a long time for something around ‘kiss’, since there are several important kisses in the book and it captures the romantic flavour: ‘The Fairy Tale Kiss’, ‘Kissing Frogs, Hoping for Princes’ [too modern in tone], ‘The Awakening Kiss’, ‘A Kiss for the Princess’. I dislike most of these and just don’t think anything so far has captured the tone.
Another theme in the book is the idea that Anura’s real fairytale has gone astray and she is stuck in this nasty one where a wizards wants to kill her. So I played with notions of ‘lost’: ‘The Lost Fairytale’, ‘The Misplaced Prince’, and so forth, but still didn’t come up with anything I really liked.
I thought for a while about something to do with the Fairytale Imperative or the Light-Strike, but those of these are esoteric concepts that won’t become clear until you actually read the book. They might interest the reader enough to read the blurb, or might turn them off instantly.
Now, Part 1 of the book is called ‘Seeking’, Part 2 ‘Finding’, Part 3 ‘Losing’. So I tried to find something that would feed off that naming theme, and came up with the word ‘quest’. ‘Rana’s Quest’, ‘The Fairytale Quest’. The trouble I am having is that I find all these titles quite dull and generic – there’s a lot of titles every year in fantasy fiction, and I want my title to stand out a bit.
By now I was getting quite frustrated, so I turned to the exceedingly literal title: ‘Rana’s Quest for a Fairytale’. ‘Princess Seeks True Love’. Accurate, anyway.
I tend to have a quite literal approach to titles, but evocative (if sometimes essentially meaningless) titles can work very well in attracting attention. Whoever developed the titles for Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series, The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and The Last Argument of Kings did a marvellous job in this regard, though I can vouch from reading the first book that the relationship between title and story was tenuous.
I did use such a figurative approach for my first book (After the Dragon; the only real dragon makes a one-line appearance and the Dragon of the title is really a metaphor). ‘In the Shadow of the Tower’, or ‘Shadow of the Book’ might work, both towers and books being important figures during the girls’ adventures. ‘By the Spinning Wheel’ is another, since this moment is pivotal for Rana. These titles are more interesting to me but I can’t say how attractive they are to others.
In the end, however, I have had to admit defeat. The only title that gave me even a moment of ‘hmmm, maybe’ was the first, ‘Rana and the Painted Wizard’, and the last ‘By the Spinning Wheel’. I’m waiting to see what my publisher comes up with.
So not too useful for me, but I hope this has helped other genre writers explore something of the process of coming up with title: brainstorming based round themes and events in the story and weighing each title for its interest or impact.
