This is number 123 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
LAST WEEK, I got an interesting email from SOL reader Johnny: “Oh, I pass this to you as I think you would do a much better job of presenting it than I could. The topic is creating a title and description that attracts readers. Forgive me if you’ve already written on this. I’ll claim Alzheimer’s.”
Don’t imagine that I never listen to my readers! This email hit me at the perfect time. Just as I was trying to get the perfect blurb for Forever Yours! I don’t know if I nailed it, but it’s better than what I originally thought up.
Back in the old days when my business partners and I started the boutique publishing house LongTale Press, we started receiving manuscript samples and blurbs from a lot of aspiring authors. Most of them were really crappy, so we were invited to several different venues to talk about and coach people on creating a title and perfect pitch for their novels.
There are five levels that I want to talk about.
1. The Title
2. The Logline
3. The Blurb
4. The Description
5. The Synopsis
Each of them deserves a lot of consideration on the part of you, the author. Let’s start with the title and we’ll see if this is a one-week post or two weeks, or more. It’s really a big topic!
Sometimes we get the perfect title when we first think of the story. That is what happened to me when I was struck by the title Living Next Door to Heaven as I was parked on a beach in Alabama in March of 2014. It was perfect and I could immediately imagine the complete story line that would cover some ten or fifteen years. Well, it turned out to be a great series name, but covering that much time and detail, it ended up being nine different books and I needed to come up with an actual title for each of the books. Bummer.
More often, the perfect title comes long after the first—and sometimes the second or third—draft is finished. That was the case with Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose) first published novel. We released it as part of an anthology of NaNoWriMo books in 2006 with the title Security and Exchange. Since the anthology was released as a fund-raiser for libraries during Microsoft’s Giving Campaign, a lot of people asked me if it was about protecting email servers. ????
Four years later, when it was released as part of the launch of LongTale Press, it had been extensively edited, rewritten, and retitled: For Blood or Money. That title reflects the contemporary noir mystery that the book actually contains. Much better, and a good seller.
Today marks the commercial release of my newest novel, Forever Yours, in both eBook and Signature Edition paperback. So, why not use it as an example? This book started out with a working title of “Sisyphus, a Modern Myth.” Thrilling title, isn’t it? It was more a reminder to me of how I perceived this contemporary story. I would retell the ancient Sisyphus myth—the guy condemned to roll a stone up a mountain that would roll back down each day for eternity—with my own twists on the story.
After that first draft was completed, which followed my outline exactly, I realized that not only was the title boring, the story was less than interesting. I went out to a nice brunch with my friend and alpha reader Les and his wife, and we talked about what I wanted to do with the story and how the whole thing was really about artificial intelligence and the prospect of creating a singularity in which man and machine were somehow united.
But I was struggling with a title for the new work.
Les had read the entire first draft and a particular phrase stuck out to him: Forever Yours. It was the name of the AI program that became the protagonist’s singularity. The title immediately struck me, not only as a good summary, but also as a guiding light as I re-wrote the novel.
Forever Yours is available as an eBook at ZBookStore. The Signature Edition paperback is available at my own Ingram Spark bookstore.