Finding A Good Title

We finally found a title for our debut novel that we feel encompasses the themes of our novel while not being a rehash of other things. But the process to get to the title we landed on, which the title will be announced closer to launch, was not a quick or easy journey.

What makes coming up with a title easy or difficult? While we can’t answer the question definitively, as it varies from author to author, we can give our experience with the struggles we encountered with it. The first thing some may think of when coming up with a title is that it needs to be perfect, so that it can describe (and sell) your book as succinctly as possible. While we think this to be true, we found it to be something that we did not spend too much time on in the beginning of writing our novel. We felt that once the novel was completed, it would come to us easily. Well, we were wrong.

So, how did we come to find/create a good title for our novel? One word: spitballing. We threw everything that came to our heads out there and ideated on what did and did not sound like the story we were telling. We tried to spitball titles a few times over the course of a couple of weeks with no success. However, when we were out at dinner this past weekend, we had another session to ideate on a title. After some twenty minutes of things that absolutely did not work, M gave something that sounded good. However, we both knew it was not quite there. Then lightning stuck for V, with a slight variation on M’s idea for a title, V gave what we ultimately decided would be the title of our novel.

After a few minutes of letting it set in, we both agreed it was the title that answered our own question of what can we name our novel while describing its themes in as few words as possible. V was in awe for at least ten minutes at what we had accomplished, as it was a title that was sitting in front of us the whole time! Even though it took us so long to finally step back long enough to see it, we found not just a good title, but our title. While it is subjective if a novel’s title is good or not, we like to believe that when someone sets our novel down after finishing it, that they may at least smirk and think the title was spot on.

-MV