When is it time to choose a title for your novel?

So I got this question via email, and I will attempt to answer it here to the best of my knowledge, which is a hodgepodge of 8 years of marketing experience, reading a bunch of Seth Godin's books, reading a ton of novels in general (and their titles, of course) and 1.5 years of writing full time (hey, next May it will be 2!). Oh, and self-publishing since last year, so not much, if you look at it. Anyway. Here we go:

Question: "A big one that has been troubling me and that I've been getting asked quite a bit: when is it time to choose a title? I have not come up with one and I get the impression from some people that I should have one picked out already." 

Choose the title right away. It will change itself if it needs to. I struggled with picking out the title for SIREN SUICIDES (my fist trilogy, a lab rabbit of sorts). I had to name it something, for the sake of naming the Word file, and I kept coming up with these temporary titles, like ALICE GONE BAD and AILEN and AILEN'S SONG and FISHY and whatever else. I kept shifting titles as I changed drafts, to the point of where I got obsessed with the idea of finding the perfect title, and then I suddenly found myself focused on the titles too much, more than on a story itself. The funny part was, people would ask me, what's your novel about? And I'd say, it's about suicide. They'd be like, wow, that's dark! And I'd be like, not exactly, it's actually a fantasy about sirens. The funny thing about this story is that I failed to see what I have read in every marketing book and even applied to my businesses (back when I was still doing start-ups). I failed to see the clear thing, which is, name your product what it is. If you won't, your customers will do it themselves. I was like, wait a minute, this is about suicide and sirens, so, bingo! SIREN SUICIDES was born. Having gone through this pain once, I am now using a much simpler approach to all my future novels. I just name them after the first thing that comes to mind when I imagine the opening scene. I don't plan my novels, I write them from this one initial image, and for ROSEHEAD it was, well, rosehead, which is a type of nail with the head looking like a rose, a perfect name for the main character, a stubborn girl. Same goes for IRKADURA which I haven't even written yet, and for PAGE TURNER, for which I don't even have a page setup on my site yet. So, yes, name it right away. It will change if it needs to, as you start talking about it.

Title your novel something that makes you emotional. This is your story you're writing, and you're writing it for some reason, right? For some reason you want people to hear it, for some reason it is important to you. Well, then your title should reflect that, and it doesn't have to perfect, it just has to be right for you. Based on this, when you start writing your novel, you already know why you're writing it. It's not exactly factual knowledge, it's a feeling that you feel. It's very strong. The title should reflect that. You don't need to finish your novel to know what it will be called. Yes, it can change in the course of you writing it, but so what? Rename it. Here is one more reason why you should title your novel right away. Nowadays, regardless of the fact whether or not you are self- or traditionally published, you have to start marketing your novel before it's published, to get everyone trembling with anticipation. And how exactly can you do this if you don't know what your novel is titled as? You can't. Bingo. I wrote a whole post on  naming your novel . You can refer to it as a guide, but please remember, no matter what I say in there, it has to feel right to you, and if a longer title or a shorter title feels better, do it. For example, look at THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE by Neil Gaiman or EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE by Jonathan Safran Foer. Two super long titles, right? So what? Who cares? If they could do it (getting published through big publishing houses, no less), you can do it. Title it now.

Summarize your novel in the title. Okay, now you will call me crazy, and I totally get why. I have blogged about summarizing your whole novel in your first paragraph. Heck, I even try to summarize the whole novel in the first sentence, like Stephen King did for the entire The Dark Tower series: "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." I will go even further here. Use the novel title as the summary for the whole bloody thing. I mean, think about your name. It's like a summary of you, it means YOU to you. Well, a novel is kind of like a living being on its own, and you have to name it in such a way so that other people will immediately grasp it, will instinctively know what it is about, or if not know, then at least have an idea. Again, because I pick out the single image I start writing my novel from, I pick the title there and then. In my case, the title helps me stay focused. Even titling chapters helps me stay focused. But hey, it might not be right for you. I know a ton of writers who feel the title of their novel come to them in the process of writing. Some even refuse to title it anything until they're done, so please take this with a grain of salt. Try it on. Works for you? Great. Doesn't work for you? Toss it, and try something else.

Oh, and I will write the next blog post on the curious topic of HOW TO WRITE A BAD BOOK. It will be a hoot. Feel free to suggest topics here in the comments.

Choosing fonts for your self-published book

I know it's a boring blog post title, but it's such an important part of your book and it's overlooked by so many indie authors, that I've got to chime in and give you a summary of hours and hours of my research that went into picking fonts for SIREN SUICIDES and involved crawling on all fours across the vast lands of the Internets and the Blogs and other peculiar places where information resides nowadays, including marvelous posts on fonts by marvelous Joel Friedlander who knows much more than me and whose site I suggest you to read from up to down, and from down to up, and from left to right and back. It's worth it. What I will give you here is a quick summary on top font choices applicable to both print and digital book versions for your reference for later, when you don't have time to look for a gazillion smart sources and just want one clear answer and be done with it. At least that's what I wanted and I couldn't find it anywhere in the roomy Internet webs, so here is what I have compiled from multiple sources.

Top choices for book covers. There is an incredible amount of articles on choosing the right font for your book cover, and I'm not an expert to give you the same sort of information, nor would I be able to stand behind it, like I know what I'm talking about, which I don't. What I do know is branding (which I did for work in the past) and what I suggest to you is to pick a brand logo that you like and go with that font, ideally not using more than two different fonts on your covers, best using only one. Sure, it will be simple, but at least it will be clean and readable. You can usually find the choice of fonts for a particular logo by copying and pasting the picture of it in WhatTheFont!

Also, browse through The Book Cover Archive to look at beautiful covers for inspiration. For the purpose of this post and for the sake of simplicity, I suggest you choose among classic fonts, both sans serif (the fonts without the little squiggly thingies) and serif (the fonts with the little squiggly thingies):

• SANS SERIF: Helvetica, Arial, Futura, Myriad, Geneva, Gill Sans, Calibri
• SERIF: Bodoni, Baskerville, Times, Cambria, Minion, Georgia, Didot

Once you have chosen the font for your book and have gleefully put the book title and your name on the cover, make sure you shrink it to the size of a typical cover you see on Amazon and make a desaturated version of your cover. Because, although dark yellow might look awesome on light blue, it will blend into grey when stripped of color and invisible in places where your book cover will be displayed in black & white, which might be an old Kindle, for example.  

Top choices for chapter titles. If you stand up right now, saunter to your bookshelf and open any book you own, you will see that usually the font used for chapter titles (and any other titles, for that matter) is often different from the font used for the actual text. And that's because it gives a book interior a beautiful contrast, and it takes hours and hours to pick the right combinations, because not every font works with every font, they have to compliment each other, not clash. Therefore, all font choices presented in this blog are compatible (they are also cheap or are the fonts that come standard with Microsoft Word or are popular enough to be easy to get). And, for simplicity's sake, I choose to use only sans serif fonts for chapter titles and only serif fonts for book copy. Here is the list I came up with for chapter titles:

• SANS SERIF: Helvetica Neue, Futura, Verdana, Franklin Gothic

Top choices for the actual book text.  I don't know how it's called correctly, book copy, book text, text on the page, whatever the name, it's the font for the main body of your story, and it has to be serif. It has to be. We are talking strictly fiction and novels here, and unless you are writing a non-fiction book, please, under no circumstances, never ever ever use a sans serif font for your book copy! You will look unprofessional and it will be very hard to read. Multiple studies have been conducted to confirm that, so instead of questioning it, let's just go with what those important people have uncovered. From personal experience, I can tell you that I like reading serif fonts better, they are simply more readable. In fact, in one of the studies I read, Adobe Garamond font has been called the most readable font, and since all Harry Potter books were set in it, it warranted enough for me to use it. Here is the list of choices for you:

• SERIF: Garamond, Book Antiqua, Bookman, Minion, Georgia, Palatino, Goudy, Baskerville, Century, Hoefler

If in doubt, choose a tried and true classic font. Fonts mentioned here are very simple and classic, giving you at least a place to which you can refer to (I know I will) in the future for various font combinations to choose from. However, I encourage you to do this trick I did, for picking the fonts for your book. Simply go to a bookstore and look at books. Pick one or a couple that you like, or maybe you have some books you own at home that you like, and look what fonts are used in that book. Preferably, pick a traditionally published book, something either classic or very well known, which will guarantee to you that a team of experts has been working on it.

Once you found the book that you like and that is in the same genre as your book, copy the design! Don't feel bad about it, you are not stealing anything, you are simply copying the formatting choices that have been made by big professional people. All artists do that. Until you have the knowledge or the money to hire your own team, learn from the masters. Think of it as painting a copy of Mona Lisa, to learn how to paint. I can tell you, I did exactly this. I borrowed most of my font and formatting choices from Harry Potter books. Why? Because I love them, and I tried really hard to pick some other font except Adobe Garamond, but I simply couldn't find any other font that I loved more, and that did it. 

NAMING your novel

I've had a very exciting discussion with my boyfriend yesterday, because he told me that... *drumroll* ...he might write a fantasy novel too! Turns out, years before we met, he had this idea while playing WoW, to write about hard core gamers, but never had the time or enough belief in himself to even try. Anyway, we were talking about the premise, the idea, and then the topic of the book's name came up. Which made me think back to a lot of indie books I saw, books that fail to attract people's attention simply because they have not been named properly. Their title is not interesting enough, it doesn't grab people, and I thought back to my branding experience, from my marketing days; thought about my own process of naming books, and, once again, from the light hand of my boyfriend who said I should blog about it, here I am blogging about it. How DO you pick out a title for your book? I'm not a publishing expert, but I did do branding for companies in the past, and it looks like the same principles apply in the publishing business.

It has to be a proper English name or a noun. This is a principle that Marty Neumeier talks in his books, ZAG in particular, one of my favorites on branding. Seth Godin says the same thing. After all, all stories are about characters, or things that act as characters, so you need to get the title of your book as close as you can to a real human name. If you look at the list of all-time best-selling books, you will see A Tale of Two Cities, The Lord of the Rings, The Little Prince, The Hobbit, etc.Notice how they are all nouns, and most describing a certain person, a lord, a prince, a hobbit. Think about Lolita, Harry Potter, Anges and Demons, etc. Now, there are also titles like Twilight. This is a proper noun. There are also exceptions like To Kill a Mockingbird and Gone with the Wind. There are always exceptions to every rule, but since I'm a rookie writer, I will stick to the majority, until I develop enough sense about how to step away from it.

If it's two words, they better be opposite. Okay, this is a bit of a hard concept to explain, but in the simplest terms it goes like this: if you must use two words, which I do in the case of Siren Suicides, combine the words that are typically not used together and come off a bit as a shocker. In my case, a siren is an immortal mythological creature, why on Earth and how would she commit suicide? Doesn't make much sense, but that's exactly why it's grabbing you. You want to know more, it's the first hook of the story, it's also easy to spell and easy to say. Here are other examples. The Da Vinci Code. Why would a painter have a code? Fifty Shades of Grey? That's way too many for such a dull color. The Lovely Bones? How can bones be lovely? Life of Pi? Pi is a number, it can't have a life. There are exceptions to this that are perfectly successful, but I'm not bothering about those right now. I'm going with the general rule for the purpose of this exercise.

The title should have contradiction in it. This is the same idea but turned a bit sideways, in the sense that a certain title just doesn't seem appropriate for the content of the book, yet this is precisely why it's grabbing attention. Let's take a look at Hugh Howey's Wool. How come a sci-fi apocalyptic story can be named something that belongs more in your grandma's cupboard or is sheered off sheep for knitting socks? That's exactly why it's interesting, because it makes you wonder what it's about. Or, look at 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. What kind of a year is that? Where did the number 9 go? Doesn't make any sense, and that is precisely why it's interesting to pick it up and leaf through it in a book store. In this sense, if you have a tale about dragons and call it The Dragon's Tale, I might argue that it's a weak title. It might not have been at the time A Tale of Two Cities was published, but it is now, with the flood of indie books choking Amazon and all other online sites where anyone can write anything, call it a book, and upload it for people to buy. You have to be able to stand out from the crowd, and you have to be smart about it.

The title is the first idea of a story for a reader. It has to be about your story. In a word or two, you have to describe your story, describe what happens there. This is the hardest part, because how can you possibly squeeze your whole book into one word? Into two?!? Or three at the most? You can. Listen to yourself when you tell other people about your book, what is the word you repeat a lot? Before Siren Suicides was Siren Suicides, I wanted to call it Ailen's Song, and still before that Fishy, and even before it... I had several ideas, as you can see. I noticed that when I talked about it, I mentioned the word "suicide" a lot, because this is really what the book is about. You surely have the same, that one word you keep mentioning over and over, that one reason why you write it. That might be a good idea to name your novel.

DISCLAIMER: I have yet to confirm that my assumptions here are true in the publishing business after publishing my books, selling them, and learning from that experience. I also didn't discuss specific genres. This is simply what I'm currently applying to my own book naming process, so hopefully it will help you too.