YOUR TITLE HERE

 HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Here is the world’s most difficult task for all you Reds and Readers today!

I need a title for my new book. Can you help?

Here is a little bit about it.

A mysterious plane crash with two teenaged sisters as the sole survivors.  They are dear friends and pals, they are in it together, they bicker, but they adore each other. 

Many years pass, and one of the sisters, our heroine, becomes a newbie literary agent  and specializes in sooks with happy endings… Since she did not have one herself.  

The other sister, the older one, got married, and now has a precocious and adorable  pre-teen daughter.  The sister is divorced, however, and has become a famous fashion influencer. 

The agent-sister and the preteen daughter are very close, and as the story opens, she and her niece have just finished spending a wonderful fun week together while the mom is taking a little break, and they are waiting for the mom to come pick her up. 

But the Mom does not arrive. 

Thing is, it’s the 11th anniversary of the plane crash. The crash that ruined their family and took their parents from them.  And now the sister is missing.  Definitely missing.

And it seems like the two things must be connected – – plus, there’s a mysterious manuscript, an iffy ex-husband, a series of grisly murders in the Berkshires, and a literary agent who perhaps knows more than she’s saying.

I am being deliberately vague here, for obvious reasons, but:

It’s about mothers and daughters and sisters, it’s about family, it’s about the power of storytelling, about how a story is supposed to end, it’s about a serial killer, and justice, and flying, and it’s about vengeance from the past. 

Throw around some words for me, OK? Any ideas?

Some titles come easily, you know that--ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS had a title before it had a story.   (And now it is an instant USA Today best seller!)

Now this book, publishing in 2026  is essentially finished! But--it does not have the title :-) 

And now that’s up to you.

Rhys on Titles

RHYS BOWEN:  I am just switching into publicity mode for my next book. (When you find yourself doing three books a year there is always a next book looming on the horizon).

It is called THE PARIS ASSIGNMENT and it comes out in August. I love the cover. Completely eye catching across an airport bookstore but I’m not entirely thrilled about the word Paris in the title. It’s true the story does center around Paris and the heroine is sent back to France during WW!! as a spy, so it’s quite accurate. BUT

I find myself asking HOW MANY BOOKS WITH PARIS IN THE TITLE CAN THERE BE IN THE WORLD AT ONE TIME?

A short scroll down the Amazon bestseller list will reveal a whole lot. My publisher and agent’s thought is that Paris sells. See the word Paris and you’ll rush to buy the book. But I worry that readers will have become over-Parised. What if they say “Not another Paris book”?  Time will tell, I suppose. (I DO THINK THE COVER IS STUNNING!)

Titles are hard. Some come to me right away, others I toy with. Some seem perfect only to have my publisher’s marketing team tell me that the title won’t work and we need a new one.  Some have too many words to be read in a thumbnail. Some do not invoke the right image. So now I’m struggling with that very thing for the book I’m close to finishing. Remember during the What we are Writing week I shared a snippet from the book I’m currently calling IN AN ABANDONED PLACE?  I asked you for feedback and got some excellent insights, including Hank suggesting that In An Abandoned… was hard to say. And one thing I have learned—never have a title that the reader does not know how to pronounce. You don’t want to embarrass a reader in a bookstore or they’ll have negative feelings about your books for life! Hence I had to change Naughty and Nice into Naughty IN Nice so that readers would not mistakenly ask for nice…

Now, the new book is about little girls who have disappeared in WWII plus another little girl who has vanished in 1968 and whether these somehow tie together. So THE LOST GIRLS would be logical except look how many books have LOST in the their title.

And even more books have GIRLS! ( See Hallie, I’m using white space. You've got me obsessed now!)

Will my publisher want lost or girls because they sell?  My own feeling is that the world doesn’t want any more lost girls.

I like the feel of the word Abandoned in the title because it is the theme , not just of the village but of the lives of several characters, but there has been a book called ABANDONED, so not that. Deserted, maybe? A Deserted Place? The Deserted Village?

Isn’t it interesting how there is a fashion for particular words in titles: books, bookshops, libraries, words seem to be in at the moment. The Paris Bookshop, the London Bookshop, the Last Bookshop, the lost Library etc etc etc.

A while ago it was daughter/wife/child.  The lighthouse keeper's/butcher’s/bakers/candlestick maker’s daughter/wife/child.  Okay, I did one of them. I confess, but it was Tuscan.

I’m always afraid that if I choose a title with current buzzwords (like Paris) readers will glance at the book and say “Oh, I read that one.”

So, dear Reds: is it the title that makes you pick up a book? Or the cover? Or the author’s name?

And does AN ABANDONED PLACE work better? Any other brilliant suggestions?

Clues in the Crumbs are Taking Shape @LucyBurdette

LUCY BURDETTE: As I write this, I’m waiting for my developmental editor to send back suggestions on the draft of Key West food critic mystery #13, which I handed over to the publisher in early September. (Actually, strike that sentence--those edits have just landed in my inbox!) I remember being pretty pleased about how it turned out, but I haven't looked at it since—so who knows. While I work on the suggested tweaks, I thought you might be interested in hearing a bit more about how the book goes from a Word file on my computer screen to what you see in a bookstore.

I know ahead of time that I’ll be asked for cover suggestions, a short synopsis, and title ideas so I keep a file going as I’m writing. You might remember there will be a big scene on a tiki hut involving Miss Gloria and the Scone Sisters, Violet and Bettina. I could have easily pictured that boat on the cover, but I sent a second idea just in case:

IDEA #1 (My favorite): A tiki hut bar with a pitcher of bilious green drinks and partly filled glasses on the counter, along with the gray tiger cat. The hut is decorated for St. Patrick’s Day—green tulle and shamrocks, etc. Cat might be looking at the dock on which a white ceramic baking pan is in pieces. Also a butcher knife on the ground. Logo on the pan—Bakeware by the Scone Sisters is written in script. Above the writing, two intertwined S’s steam out of the slits cut into the top of a pie.

IDEA #2: Scene of the kitchen where the bake-off is taking place, including beautiful cakes plus the broken crockery, knife and cat.

Here's what came back from my talented cover artists, Griesbach and Martucci:

Now I know the book will look something like that, with brighter colors, palm trees outside the window, and the cat batting a knife instead of a mouse. (Mice in Martha's kitchen--no way!) It will be called A CLUE IN THE CRUMBS, which I quite like because it has a Nancy Drew-ish feel. I was asked in May to send in a list of title possibilities to my team at Crooked Lane—I’m sure some of you made contributions. I’ve learned by now not to put anything on the list that I really don’t like! Here was the list, with my preferences starred:

The Secret of the Old Conch 

The Clue in the Old Conch

The Clue in the Caramel

*The Clue in the Crumbs

*Drizzled to Death

*Baked Off

*Murder Hosts a Bake Off 

The Clue in the Auld Conch 

The Great Key West Bake Offed 

Key West Baked Off  

Baked Off in Key West

Peril in Paradise

A recipe for murder

Battered by Bakeoff

Royally Iced

Blind Baked

And here’s the opening for the book, which I rewrote a million times—and there may be more versions to come...

Chapter One

Since when has a bad restaurant review been a motive for murder? 

That’s precisely what my boss at the style magazine Key Zest texted me when I expressed my rather dramatic reservations about the possible consequences of trashing local eateries. 

Go deeper, she replied. Ruffle some feathers, Hayley! Man up and do your job!

Man up? Really?? As for ruffling feathers, that was easy for her to suggest—she’s baby green bean skinny because she hardly eats, especially not anything greasy, sugary, carb-ish, or otherwise delicious. She doesn’t care about alienating local restauranteurs because she doesn’t dine out.

So now, on the deck of my Key West houseboat, I was deeply absorbed in the article I was attempting to hammer out about whether the Key West food scene was trying too hard to imitate New York. That definitely meant raising questions about prices and menus. Were Key West diners willing to absorb the cost of a 42-dollar shrimp cocktail? Or a required tasting menu to the tune of a hundred dollars a pop? Not the Key West locals, I suspected. Maybe the folks visiting the island would be accustomed to this kind of expense, and clamor for reservations. Maybe they’d be in the mood to splurge, even if those prices stuck in my own craw.

As I was figuring out how to pose these questions without infuriating anyone, either visitor or resident, a cacophony of sirens went off. One of the disadvantages of living on Key West’s Houseboat Row is the proximity to the noise of the fire and police departments. This afternoon, the sirens blew loud and long, and I heard another set echo in response, from further down island. That probably meant that both the fire stations were calling out their men and women. And that could mean a big fire.

So you see it's getting there! Is there anything you've wondered about this crazy publishing business?

(Meanwhile, the ebook editions of The Key Lime Crime and A Deadly Feast are on sale this month for $1.99!)

And ps, if you're looking for an appetizer that is stunning but not too taxing to make, I shared my recipe for gougeres on Mystery Lovers Kitchen...

James R Benn on Road of Bones

 

LUCY BURDETTE: Today we welcome our friend James R Benn, the author of the acclaimed Billy Boyle series. He raises a question dear to all writers' hearts: What to call the darn book? Take it away Jim!

What's in a name? That which we call a rose,
By any other name would smell as sweet.

—William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (Act II Scene ii)

James R Benn: What’s in a name? That’s the question authors confront when choosing the title for their book. The truth is, any other name will not smell as sweet. No matter how good the writing between the covers, the title must grab the reader’s attention. A poorly chosen title—one that is perhaps clumsy or boring—can keep readers from cracking open the book. A title’s job, in my opinion, is to force a question. To stop the browsing reader in their tracks. To arouse their curiosity. 

For me, the title also has another job. It should reflect the theme of the book, to act as a constant reminder of the deeper thread of meaning I am weaving into the story. Some authors may not place so much emphasis on the title in their process. Some may pick the title after the manuscript is complete. But for me, it’s a symbol of what I’m writing about.

So, when I decided to set a Billy Boyle novel in the Soviet Union (thanks to Reed Farrell Coleman, but that’s another story), I began the search for a title as soon as I started my research.

It didn’t take long.

The R504 Kolyma Highway is a road through the Russian Far East, aka Siberia. It’s also known as the Road of Bones.

Title search complete. 

The road, most often called the Kolyma Route, is a gravel track, often covered in mud or ice. It was built by political prisoners during the Soviet Union's Stalinist era. Inmates of the Sevvostlag labor camp started the first stretch in 1932, and construction continued into the 1950s. The prisoners worked in horrifying conditions. Winter was long and bitterly cold, summer blisteringly hot, rampant with swarms of mosquitos. The Kolyma Route extends to Yakutsk, where the coldest temperature ever outside of Antarctica was recorded. 

As prisoners extended the roadway, it was used to bring in more prisoners to camps that comprised Stalin’s Gulag. The Kolyma Route stretches 1,260 miles through desolate, frozen wasteland, connecting Magadan on the Pacific Ocean to the city of Yakutsk, 280 miles south of the Arctic Circle. 

Why is it called the Road of Bones?

The roadway was built on permafrost. It is estimated that between a quarter million to one million slave laborers died in the process. Where to bury all those bodies? The Soviets solved the probably neatly, interring the corpses in the fabric of the road.

If the high estimate of the death toll is correct, that makes for 793 bodies per mile entombed within the Road of Bones.

As Joseph Stalin said, “Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.”

The Mask of Sorrow is a monument located on a hill above Magadan, Russia, commemorating the many prisoners who suffered and died in the Soviet forced labor system. 

Photo credit: Сергей Ковалев, via Wikimedia Commons.

There’s a recently freed Russian political prisoner in Road of Bones—the book, not the route—and his fear of being sent back to the camps is a driving force behind the story. The title helped to focus me on writing about the challenges of existence within the oppressive Communist system, and the chilling effect it had on Soviet citizens.

But wait. There’s more to the story. There’s a ghost. Or a ghostly woman, as The Siberian Times called her in 2018. Spotted at several locations at the southern terminus of the Road of Bones, she walks alone, refusing all offers of assistance, even in frigid winter weather. Her name may be Luidmila. She may be from Kazakhstan, and she may be headed for Kamchatka, a peninsula that extends into the Pacific Ocean. She’s been called a spirit of Siberia and the ghost of a prisoner who died on the road. Nothing is certain about her, so feel free to make up your own answer. 

That’s my story. Now tell me yours.

Everyone, what’s your favorite title?

Here’s my book title of the month. Hats off to Dennis Duncan and this brilliantly clever title:

Writers, how do you select your titles? Does it sound like I’m over-thinking all this, or does something here ring true?

Readers, does a unique or interesting title grab your attention? Or does this sound like a whole lot of folderol?

James R. Benn is the Dilys, Barry, and Sue Feder Historical Mystery award nominated author of the Billy Boyle WWII mysteries. He splits his time between the Connecticut shoreline and the west coast of Florida, with his wife, copyeditor Deborah Mandel.

About Road of Bones:

Billy Boyle is sent to the Soviet Union to conduct an investigation into a double murder. Teamed with a KGB agent, he has to navigate the dangerous currents of life in Stalinist Russia.

***In other business this week, Kevin Tipple is the winner of the Bouchercon anthology, This Time for Sure. Please email me raisleib at gmail dot com with your snail mail address.

***And Robin Coxon is the winner of A Time to Swill. Email Sherry with your snail mail address to arrange the drop! sherryharrisauthor at gmail dot com.

RHYS ON TITLES

RHYS BOWEN:

I am in the throes of writing my historical novel set in Venice in various time periods. And the working title, across the top of the front page, reads:

The Venice Sketchbooks/Inheritance/Legacy/Keys/Secret/ That Year in Venice/Those Venice Years/City of Bells and Birds/ The Bells and Birds of Venice etc etc. 

This shows that I have yet to come up with a title I really like. I’m hoping one will one day strike me between the eyes as ABOVE THE BAY OF ANGELS did. Or In Farleigh Field, which went through goodness knows how many titles first!

I’ve been acutely aware of titles recently. So many seem to be using the same buzzwords, don’t they? How many Daughters and Wives can we have?

So if I were smart I’d get one of my computer brilliant family members to come up with a title generator.

In one column we’d pick from:

Child

Girl

Sister

Woman

Wife

Daughter

Possibly Son?

Apprentice

The next would be a profession:

Shoemaker

Lacemaker

Hat maker

Waffle maker

Baker

Butcher

Beekeeper

Farmer

Soldier

Miner

Etc

The third a place:

Train

Lake

Woods

Sky

River

Cottage

Ocean

Beach

The fourth a word that conjures a mood

Darkness/Dark

Wind

Bones

Lost

Vanished

Abandoned

Light

Bright

Beneath

Above

Behind

Closed

Under

A verb:

Knows

Shines

See

Loves

And maybe a tantalizing question:

Where

When

What

Who

How

Then you run these randomly through the computer and come up with:

The Lost Shoemaker’s Daughter (on a train/In the Woods)

The Abandoned Child

The Wife in Darkness

The Woman under the Sky

What the Wafflemaker’s Wife knew

You get the gist. Do you think I’m onto something here?

Actually I love titles that are intriguing. THE SHAPE OF WATER. Where the Wild Things Are. Dreaming of the Bones (but it does have bones in it) 

When I see a cover with a title I can’t immediately place I have to pick the book up and look at it. So maybe The Venice Inheritance/Keys/Legacy/ etc is just too obvious.

I have to confess with my own titles I've been guilty of the dreaded Child. The Tuscan Child... but that was what the book was about!

Her Royal Spyness was one of my best and has defined a whole series.

And I love the fun titles I've used in that series: Four Funerals and Maybe Wedding

and most recently Love and Death Among the Cheetahs!

What do you think? Writers how do you choose titles?

--> Readers, what draws you to a title?