What's in a name?

A rose, by any other name, would still smell as sweet.

Not if you called them stench-blossoms.

Heh. Simpsons. It's certainly something to keep in mind, though. It would probably be a little awkward to tell your friends your boyfriend sent you a dozen stench-blossoms.

So you have your book. It's been revised, edited, re-revised, beta read, re-edited, and re-re-revised. You're getting closer to publishing and then you hit the one question you hadn't given much thought to yet.

What's the title?

Now, you may have figured that out from the very beginning. It might have popped up half-way through, or you may not have even considered that question until you realized you needed to start working on the cover.

The title is every bit as important as the cover, and it deserves as much thought. That being said, there aren't a lot of rules on what you should or shouldn't do with it. Most books use the direct approach, Condensing the entire story down to a single word or phrase. Stephen King is a great example of this. Cujo, for instance, which centers around the St. Bernard named, interestingly enough, Cujo.

It also goes without saying, you should probably aim for a shorter title, so you're not covering up too much of your cover with letters.

For an example, I'm going to look at my next book, "Hannah", which just went to the editor this week.

The idea for "Hannah" evolved out of an idea of a combination of Cujo + The Exorcist. In that vein, it only made sense to name the book after one of the main characters, a Standard Poodle named Jezebelle.

This thing ain't fitting in your purse.

Wait. What?

Yeah. That was the original name. Obviously, the story has some religious undertones, and I initially planned to reflect that in the names of the characters. Eli, Peter, Abigail, Jezebel. When I decided to take some time to consider the title of the book, though. I decided to try a little test. I went into Goodreads.com and did a search for other books with that title.

There's a lot of books with either the title "Jezebel" or with Jezebel in it. And a lot that have been published in the last few years. Especially if you plan to self-publish, I suggest you take a stroll through the internet and see if any other books have previously been published with the same title you want to use. After looking around a bit more, I figured the best thing to do would be to change the animal's name from Jezebelle, to Hannah, and thus, the title.

Of course, that doesn't mean you shouldn't use a title. But definitely be aware that your book may get lost in a search, especially if the majority of those titles are in other genres. Also, you probably want to avoid using the same name as books which are well known. Try to usurp the titles "Ender's Game", "Cujo", or "The Hobbit", and expect a massive backlash on your work.

You should also try to come up with something fairly unique. I wouldn't worry so much about trying to convey genre in the title. That's what the cover art and blurb are for. Sure, the title could help, but a lot of the ways to make it work that way are wholly unoriginal. I'll tell you right now, I've only ever bought one book with the title "The Haunting of _______" and there's a TON of them out there.

So, I've ended up rambling a bit, but here's my main points.

1. Keep your title short and relevant to the story.

2. Research your chosen title.

3. Unique is better.

4. Don't worry about a genre-specific title.

Of course, this is all just my opinion. Your mileage may vary.

~ Shaun