What’s in a Name? How to Find the Perfect Book Title.

I’m struggling… Well, I’m not struggling, I’m just undecided what to call my Clearwater short story collection that I am planning to bring out before Christmas. I’ve contacted Andjela with ideas about the cover, and she has begun work on the image. I was able to give her my visual ideas, and a subtitle, but not the actual title, and she’ll need it soon. So far, I have:

Untitled

The Clearwater Tales Volume One

Jackson Marsh

Obviously, we need more than that, so I thought it was time I reminded myself of what makes a good title for a book, and for that purpose, I turned to the New York Book Editor’s checklist of tips for creating a good book title.

Remember, your book title is one of the most important marketing tools and can draw in a reader or send them away. Therefore, a good book title needs to have key elements. One of my favourite titles is ‘Deviant Desire’, so I’ve taken the NYBE’s list of recommendations and compared them to that book, the first in the Clearwater Mysteries series. These notes are my observations of my own work, and I might be overblowing my own trumpet, but here goes…

Attention grabbing.

Deviant is a ‘power word’ as they call attention-grabbing words. Mind you, Desire is also pretty provocative because it suggests sex, while Deviant suggests naughty or illicit sex, so ears are already pricking up.

Easy to understand
It’s only two words, and sums up what might have been a book title in the days the story is set (1888). ‘Men with Unnatural Desires who are Considered Deviants Battle with another Deviant Intent on Killing Them.’ (Victorian writers were known for being over-wordy, and that extended to titles in some cases.)

Easy to remember
I suggest Deviant Desire is easier to remember than ‘Men with Unnatural Desires who…’ It’s also alliterative, a trick which aids memory.

Unique
I always run a check through Amazon and Google to see if my book title already exists. Sometimes it does, but the other book is completely off my topic, even so, I might think about changing it. Sometimes, my title is also the name of a music album or something else, but as long as I am not aping the brand or product, it’s acceptable.

For the current work in progress, I wanted to call the book, ‘My Old Man,’ because the story concerns the Victorian music halls and that is a famous line from a famous music-hall song which just happens to relate to much of the story. However, it’s also the title of an autobiography by the British former Prime Miniter, John Major, so I changed my title to ‘Follow the Van.’ That’s from the same song, ‘My old man said follow the van…’ and it’s also appropriate to the story. Phew!

Fits genre

Deviant Desire fits the genre of MM romance with a little light steam (Desire), and Victorian mystery (Deviant). My problem has always been staying in one niche, which is why I write mashups. Actually, I did it because they are more novel (get it?) and more original than traditional MM romances. ‘My Favourite Boy,’ ‘Hid Daddy’s Best Friend’, and ‘College Jock After-Game Love-In’ might be suitable for trad MM romance; Deviant Desire, though, does not suggest a budding romance between a shy teenager and the high school gym coach. I hope.

More appropriate to my story, the word ‘Deviant’ was one used in the past to describe gay men and gay sex. Homosexuals were deviants, and that theme continues in the following books which also use words for gay men in their titles. ‘Twisted’ Tracks, ‘Unspeakable’ Acts. (The phrase was often used in newspapers when reporting court cases of gross indecency.) ‘Fallen’ Splendour, as the word Fallen referred to prostitutes.

Simple

Yes, well, it’s only two words. Deviant Desire. Yet they refer to the (then) deviant behaviour of one man loving another, as well as the villain’s deviancy in murdering people, and the couple’s desire to love, plus the villain’s desire to kill.

Series and sequels

As mentioned, I used similar word combinations in the following three books, all of which have an adjective followed by a noun. Twisted Tracks, Unspeakable Acts, Fallen Splendour. I was going to end things there, but (luckily) carried on, and the titles then changed.

When it came to the second series, The Larkspur Mysteries, I was more aware of my titling and went for similar wordplay combinations.

Guardians of the Poor. That’s what those who ran the workhouses were called, and it is what the two main characters are doing; they are paupers guarding the welfare of themselves and other paupers.
Keepers of the Past. The ‘keepers’ are antiquarians (archaeologists), and that is what Joe is becoming, while the villain is keeping to the rites and killings of his tradition’s past.

Agents of the Truth. This refers to the investigators, archaeologists (who uncover the truth), and those who deliver the facts to solve a case.

I could go on, and I usually do, but I think the point is made.

Provocative
Hopefully, the words Deviant and Desire work together to provoke a sense of illegality mixed with longing.

The original cover for Deviant Desire. Note the original title.

Also…

This short post wasn’t intended as a way for me to say how perfect my titles are, because like all things in writing, a title can always be improved; at least until you get to the point where fiddling any longer will ruin it.

Just to prove I’ve not always been good at titles, the original title for Deviant Desire was going to be Deviant Lamplight. Say what? What does the lamp light do to make it deviant? Creep unseen from its carriage-lantern casing, and, entwined with the mist of East London, find its way into people’s homes and steal their candles?

Now there’s an idea for a fantasy novel…

For more chat about book titles, try my two previous posts:

What’s in a Title?

Making Your Book Titles Count

What’s in a Title?

What’s in a Title?

I am currently working on the first draft of the second Larkspur Mystery, and I’ve still not landed on a title. Titles usually come to me easily, but not this time. So, I thought, today, I would chat about some of my titles, explain where they came from and perhaps, that will give me inspiration for Larkspur Two, as it’s currently called.

Early Titles

Years ago, when I was young and everything was in black and white, I wrote a story. I was unemployed waiting for a new job to start, but the start date was delayed, and I had three months sitting around in a garret room (honestly) with very little money, so I sat and wrote all day, in longhand. It was a simple story about a young man running away from home and discovering London, falling for another young man who turned out to be a rent boy, and the friendship and eventual love affair that ensued. Towards the end, the pair went to Kent, had the best time of their lives, then came home, and a tragedy happened. I called that story ‘In From the Garden’.

Why?

No idea, really. It just felt right, but later, I realised that the two MCs had in fact come back from the garden of England, as the county of Kent is known, so maybe it came from there.

Gay erotic romanceSimilarly, the title of my first published book just came to me, and because I liked the phrase, I kept it. ‘Other People’s Dreams’ is about a rich man hiring four young, cute gay guys to crew his boat around the Greek islands. The job comes with a generous package of benefits and pay, but there are ‘certain strings attached.’

The inspiration for the story came to me when I was sitting on a beach here on Symi. I was on holiday here then, on my own, and was watching a yacht coming into the otherwise deserted bay. As it came close, I saw the crew were taking down the sails, and then I noticed they were all naked, and they were all men. ‘That’s someone’s dream,’ I thought, and suddenly, I not only had an idea for a story but also its title. That boat and the boys aboard were someone else’s dream. Simple.

The Mentor Series

Setting about a series of books that took older/younger and coming out as the key themes, I thought up another story that was mainly based around sex. This was another person’s dream, that of Camden, the MC, who is hired to mentor four younger gay men in a deserted house. His role is to help them develop their writing and personal skills, and overcome sexual inhibitions. I wanted the location of the story to be somewhere out of the way, and the title to reflect this, and that’s how I came up with The Mentor of Wildhill Farm.

Then, I thought, I’ll write a second one in the non-related series. (They are similar in theme, older/younger, coming out etc., but not with the same characters.) I knew it had to be The Mentor of… something and realised I had three words to come up with. One describes the atmosphere (wild), the second is a geographical feature (hill), and the third is the location of the story (farm). So, I made a list of suitable adjectives and locations.

  1. Remote, barren, lost, alone, distant, private…
  2. City, village, moor, wood, forest, marsh…
  3. House, estate, hall, ridge, castle, abbey…

From that brainstorming exercise, I came up with three titles for three more Mentor books, the Mentor of Barrenmoor Ridge (I wanted to convey a barren landscape and rock climbing), of Lostwood Hall, and of Lonemarsh House. Each first part of the location reflects the younger man/men of the stories; wild, lost, alone, abandoned.

I was rather pleased with the subtlety, but I didn’t plan it.

Deviant Desire

What was more planned, and what took longer to arrive at, were the titles of the Clearwater novels, and of all of them, Deviant Desire took the longest to drop into place.

I think it started out as ‘Deviant Gaslight’ or something equally bizarre. I wanted to convey the Victorian era, shadows and deviancy, but then I wondered how the light from a gas lamp could be deviant. I sifted through all kinds of ideas as I was writing it because titles often come to me during the first draft. I must have entertained Dark Shadows, and then remembered it was a TV series, and how can shadows be light? I have my notes beside me, and in them, I see I also considered Deviant Lamplight, which was its title at the end of draft one. The word ‘deviant’ was clearly important, and as I went through the second draft, I asked myself what and who was I talking about? Silas was deviant (any gay man then was considered deviant), and he had a desire for sex, later for Clearwater, and their love would have been called a deviant desire, so that made sense. But the villain also had a desire for revenge and a desire to kill, and that, of course, is also deviant. By the end of draft two, I’d settled on ‘Deviant Desire’, and I am pleased to say, it is my best-selling novel to date.

Like the Mentor titles, the Clearwater series started out with a formula. In this case, an adjective and a noun, and I wanted all the forthcoming titles to have an adjective on the same theme as ‘deviant.’ I have a list somewhere, cribbed from a thesaurus or two, and from that list I came up with the words which best suited the story.

Twisted Tracks refers to the deviancy of both hero and villain, the laying of a tempting trail into a trap, and the climax which happens on a moving train.

Unspeakable Acts was a gift because I wanted a story set around a theatre, and chose the Royal Opera House, where not only were entertainment acts performing, but where the star couldn’t speak what he’d been ordered to speak by the villain. The villains were also involved in what Victorians called ‘unspeakable acts’, i.e. gay sex, and the Cleaver Street brothel. (Based on the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889.)

Fallen Splendour came about because I wanted to base the mystery around a poem used as a coded message. One of my favourites is ‘The Splendour Falls’, an insert into a longer poem by Tennyson. He was alive at the time the story is set, so I dragged him into the story too. I liked the word ‘fallen’ because its reference to ‘fallen women’, as they were known then. Silas is a ‘fallen man’, you might say, and if the truth about Clearwater was known, he too would ‘fall’ from grace.

And so it went on.

Bitter Bloodline is about an ancient, bitter feud and Bram Stoker (in my world, then working on the beginnings of Dracula). Bitter also refers to the taste of a certain wine from the region of Transylvania, which plays a part in the story.

Artful Deception revolves around a piece of art and also refers to the way the characters outwit each other with theatrical devices.

From then on, the titles change. Things had happened in the series, and issues were resolved (no spoilers, but if you have read them, you might remember who has left the stories by then), and so, I was freer to play with the titles.

Home From Nowhere came to me during the writing and still gives me the same chill when I read the title as I felt when I wrote a short scene between Jasper and Andrej (Fecker). Fecks asks where Jasper is from, and Jasper tells him his background.

‘You come from everywhere,’ Mr Andrej said. ‘But you come from nowhere. Like me.’

That led to the title, and I wanted to use it at the very end of the story. However, watch out for doing this because it is such a cliché. It’s as much a cliché as characters in film repeating themselves for emphasis. ‘I know, son…(beat)…I know.’ Eek! Cringe, don’t do it. Similarly, finishing a novel with its title gives me the same creeps, so I changed it slightly for Jasper’s final speech.

‘I feel like I’ve been nowhere all my life, but now I’ve come home.’

Bless Jasper. He and Billy are each one half of a pair, and that’s how One Of A Pair came about. There is another play on words in there, and you will understand when you read the book.

At this point in these reis, I sidestepped to go backwards and explore how Silas and Fecker met. I reckoned a clever title wouldn’t be right, so I went for the simple Banyak & Fecks, their nicknames for each other. The title gave me the structure of the book. The nicknames come about during the story, but they are not the characters’ original names. Thus, the first quarter of the book is titled ‘Andrej’, the second, ‘Silas’, the third, ‘Andrej and Silas’, and it’s not until we come to the last quarter we get them fully-fledged as ‘Banyak & Fecks’. By then, they have become an inseparable pair, forever locked in a bromance, avoiding the Rippe’s knife and unknowingly about to step into Deviant Desire as two of the main characters.

In book nine of the series (not counting the prequel), I returned to the formula of the start of the series with Negative Exposure. The title refers to several aspects of the story; photography, posing naked, the risk of being found out… And in book ten, the only one without a figure on the cover, I couldn’t think of anything better than The Clearwater Inheritance. That was because it reflects not only to the main plot, the inheritance but also suggests something is coming after, and that something is the Larkspur Mysteries.

The Stoker ConnectionYou know, I’ve waffled enough for now, and still haven’t explained the Stoker Connection, The Blake Inheritance or Curious Moonlight, but I hope, by now, you’ve had an insight into how I come up with my tittles.

Except, it seems, for Larkspur Two.

Standing stones, ancient symbols, disappearances, a deaf main character, the wilds of Cornwall… There has to be something in there. I’ve just not got it yet.

Oh… By writing this, the word ‘signs’ has dropped into my head as a frontrunner, but Signs what or what Signs…? This is how my mind works, and I’ll leave you while it hopefully works some more, and I find the title. I am up to 80,000 words in the first draft, and I’ll tell you more about it soon. For now, I’m off.

Have a good week.

Jackson

You can find all my titles on the Jackson Marsh author page on Amazon.