While at work at Barnes & Noble the other day, my co-worker came up to me and started complaining about overused words in book titles. He said that his biggest peeve was when fiction writers used any variation of "rise" in their titles. He wanted to write a spoof book entitled something like "The Rise of the Arisen Arose", only it was a lot longer than that. I've actually always had a problem with Romance titles. Most of them, I find, are variations on the same thing. My peeve titles are anything with the words "seduce", "duke", or "highlander" in them.
I confess that I do tend to judge a book by its cover. If it looks like your typical David Weber Sci-Fi or Robert Jordan Fantasy cover art, I won't touch it. But I also judge a book by its title. Titles that attract me are generally short, sometimes hint a little at what kind of story it is, or that is very unusual. The word that catches my attention the most is "shadow." That's partly how I found The Night Angel Trilogy, one of my favorites. All the titles have "shadow" in them--Way of the Shadows, Shadow's Edge, and Beyond the Shadows.
So I wonder, how do writers entitle their books? Before they wrangle with their editor about it later, I mean. Is it based on personal preference? What's popular, unusual, or never-before-used? To my writers out there, what is your style? To my readers, what to you look for?
I don't like long titles. They're annoying. I like for the title to have something to do with the story; to give me a little tidbit of what's inside. Cover art is more important to me. I love a beautiful book cover. I also look for a familiar author's name on the cover.
ReplyDeleteAs a writer and a reader I think tittle and covers play a very important part of the book. The tittle gives a penitential reader clues to what the book is about. If the title is bad it may mean the book is bad or that the writer/editor did a poor job expressing the story of the book.
ReplyDeleteThe cover draws attention of the reader to the book. It needs to grab the reader and hint, as the title does, to what the book is like.