Book Titles—Trends and Formulas, Brilliance and Duh

The Title Starts The Journey

Let’s make an experiment that could lead you to choosing an excellent title for your own novel. Prize winning book titles can be all over the map (or the language, as it were). There are certainly times when we are beset by a formula. Take one of my least favorite—books titled [Profession]’s [Relative], e.g. The Bookie’s Illegitimate Nephew. Yes, I made that one up. Here’s a list starting in 2005, an 11 year sample. There are some great writers on the list, but they fell into the pattern.

• The Alchemist's Daughter by Katharine McMahon (2005)

• The Professor's Daughter by Emily Raboteau (2005)

• The Gravedigger's Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates (2007)

• The Blind Astronomer's Daughter by John Pipkin (2016)

• The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter by Theodora Goss (2017)

• The Mapmaker's Daughter by Katherine Nouri Hughes (2017)

• The Clockmaker's Daughter by Kate Morton (2018)

• The Surgeon's Daughter by Audrey Blake (2022)

• The Physician's Daughter by Martha Conway (2022)

• The Soldier's Wife by Joanna Trollope (2012)

• The Winemaker's Wife by Kristin Harmel (2019)

• The Clockmaker's Wife by Daisy Wood (2021)

• The Blacksmith's Son by Michael G. Manning (2012)

If you want to be really discouraged by repetition, search Amazon the Devil for the titles holding the word “Daughter.” I’m betting 350, but I got bored and quit before I reached the end.

Lesson learned—don’t follow this pattern. In the coming weeks we’ll consider the Pulitzer list, the Booker list, and the NYT Best Sellers list looking for the following categories:

Obscure sentence fragments and sentences; Place; Person’s name; Profession or classification or stereotype or archetype or perjorative; Season, weather, or climate; Organization or event or activity; Cultural name or reference; Adjectives or Adverbs, Years, dates, or time; Things.