Judging a Book by Its Title
We often get asked about our book titles and we do have some fun with them. The Sparkle Abbey books sport titles such as “The Girl with the Dachshund Tattoo” and “Fifty Shades of Greyhound” and the Mary Lee Ashford books, “Game of Scones” and “Risky Biscuits.” As with most traditionally published authors, we had no guarantee that the publisher would keep the titles we’d created but in almost all cases they did.
Still, in this new world of hybrid publishing and ever more complicated methods of discoverability, we got to wondering about how much impact a title has for readers in finding the books they like to read.
Over time there have been different trends such as the X Y format – two word titles – “Demon Copperhead,” “The Maid” or “Gone Girl.” And then there’s the really long book titles. For example: “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” or a children’s favorite of ours, “Alexander’s Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day.” Or the lovely, “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.” There also seem to be some new trends with cross-genre type titles and a surge of retro-sounding titles. Though some of these are specific to particular type of books or sub-genres, most seem to cross the lines.
And as with all things in the publishing world, title trends are ever changing. So we’d love to hear your thoughts.
Do particular types of titles appeal to you? And how much impact does the title of a book have on whether you would buy it or maybe at least stop to take another look?
Sparkle Abbey is actually two people, Mary Lee Ashford and Anita Carter, who write the national best-selling Pampered Pets cozy mystery series.
They are friends as well as neighbors so they often get together and plot ways to commit murder. (But don’t tell the other neighbors.)
They love to hear from readers and can be found on social media or contacted via their websites:
