What's In a Title?

Paul
Stansfield

Like probably a lot of authors, I sometimes have problems coming up with titles for my stories.  Often I complete the tale first, then give it a title.  It’s a tricky thing—you don’t want to use a name that’s too obvious, or too boring, or too obscure, or too pretentious.  It can be an awfully fine line sometimes.  For my first ebook (Dead Reckoning), I made another mistake—I chose an extremely common title.  A check on Amazon reveals dozens of other books by this name.  For my second release, then, I chose a much rarer name—I couldn’t find any other books called Kaishaku, at least in English.  Kaishaku is the historic Japanese practice of a friend mercy-killing another friend who’s committing ritual suicide, or seppuku.
Anyway, thinking about this made me start to consider titles in general.  The results of my (admittedly limited) research are as follows.  They include original titles of famous books, titles taken from other literature, and funny and/or strange titles...

Read the entire article in the Dec./Jan. issue of InD'Tale magazine.

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