Wednesday, January 11, 2006

What's In A Title?

A title has to grab you from the get-go. If you're walking past a book store and you've just broken up with your lover who's dying from cancer because they have a fetish for sex with uranium exhaust pipes, the title has to make you turn your head and bump into someone walking the other way.

I've been using LOVING THE LAW as a working title because it suits the story and is alliterative. But it's somewhat dull.

Lately I've been thinking about a new title, one that can be extended into a distinctive series title. Sue Grafton's alphabet novels and Janet Evanovich's number novels come to mind as good examples.

I thought of going the whole hog and naming the novel something like DANNY: VOLUME 1, and that got me onto the possibility of including the word DANNY in every title of the series. The story is something of a balance between comedy and tension, so I think this could work.

Or I could just write a children's mystery series.

Here's some titles I came up with, some of which would be more suitable for later novels in the series:

  1. NOBODY LOVES DANNY
  2. DANNY: THE P.I. THAT SMILES BACK
  3. DANNY HAWAII: P.I. IN TRAINING
  4. BETTER LIVING THROUGH DANNY
  5. GET SERIOUS. GET DANNY.
  6. DID SOMEBODY SAY DANNY?
  7. WOULDN'T YOU RATHER BE DANNY?
  8. DANNY GOES STRAIGHT TO YOUR HEAD
  9. DANNY WITH A SILENT D
  10. DANNY DROPS ONE
If anyone has a fave, leave me a comment and I'll tally up the total of three votes I get.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Speaking of titles, check out the book title scorer-thingy at Lulu. It's harmless, and highly unscientific. I think The Da Vinci Code scored around 30%.

http://www.lulu.com/titlescorer/

Good luck on the rewrite. I'm in the same boat.

Daniel Hatadi said...

Thanks for that, Jamie. Interesting tool. I think the highest I got was about 45%, for title number 2, but I didn't test them all.

Good luck to you, too!

Mary said...

I still really like "Loving the Law". That really appeals to me for some reason?? It seems to work with the Danny Hawaii character.

Daniel Hatadi said...

Yeah, I'll probably leave it that way. Let the publishers deal with it.

Anonymous said...

Ditto on "Loving the Law".