Book Titles—Trends and Formulas, Brilliance and Duh
- Scott Archer Jones
- Jun 7
- 2 min read
Obscure Titles
What utilitarian role does a book title provide? I would contend there are four that I look for in my own titles:
1. Grab the Reader—choose more like Demon Copperhead than I Was A St. Louis Steampunk Zombie.
2. Portend the Major Theme—if your book is about spies, then choose by global conflict and not by thing (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy rather than Peanuts and Eggcups).
3. Deliver the Book’s Aesthetic—if you’re writing a book about punk music and sexual exploitation (think, Visit from the Goon Squad), then don’t pick Joyce Carol Oates’ voice. If you are writing an historical fiction (War and Peace), then pick big and sweeping.
4. Cleverly Foreshadow the Ending—my current project has a working title The Disappearance of Benjamin Phereson. Maybe not so clever.
Now it’s your turn – these are all prize winning best sellers. Send me your rankings of title quality in the comments below.
Here are fifteen books based on Obscure Sentences and Sentence Fragments:
All That Man Is, David Szalay
Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Madeleine Thien
Get in Trouble, Kelly Link
Imagine Me Gone, Adam Haslett
Everything Under, Daisy Johnson
In the Distance, Hernan Diaz
There There, Tommy Orange
No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood
Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan
If I Survive You, Jonathan Escoffery
The Rest of Our Lives, Ben Markovits
Angel Down, Daniel Kraus
Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng
Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens
The Last Thing He Told Me, by Laura Dave
In the coming weeks we’ll consider the Pulitzer list, the Booker list, and the NYT Best Sellers list looking for the following additional categories:
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.
Perhaps the anesthesia from surgery has not worn off. This is what I made of the list.
There There In the Distance, Small Things Like These Get in Trouble. Little Fires Everywhere. Imagine Me Gone. Angels Down. All That Man Is Everything Under Where the Crawdads Sing. The last Thing He Told Me, Nobody's Talking About This.
The Rest of Our Lives Do Not Say We Have Nothing If I Survive You.
Here's my vote -- Best Obscure-Language Title: Get in Trouble. Worst Title: There There