Choosing a Title (When You’re Not Royalty)

Maybe you found this blog post because the title piqued your interest. As an author, that’s what we try and do. Amazing as it may sound, selecting a title consisting of only a few words for a book can be almost as difficult as writing it.

Choosing a title is a tough proposition. The object is to have the title reflect tone or content in some way. You’ve spent hours, days, or months agonizing over one. You finally distill what you think is the perfect name, only to do an internet search and find that one or more books already carry that label. Sigh. It’s back to the drawing board.

If I had it to do all over again, I would have named “Surrender of Trust,” the first book of my Surrender series, differently. I like the name, and I think it is appropriate to the content. The reason I would have chosen another title involves a different kind of trust: reader trust.

I’ve been told by a few readers that, based on the title, they thought the story would be more within the Christian romance genre. The novel, a historical set in the extended Regency time period, contains some very mild sexual content, which, while not graphic, still takes it squarely out of that category. The name, for some, set up a different expectation as to how the story would be written, which in turn, violated their trust.

Bearing that in mind, I made a departure from the title I initially intended to use for the second book of the Surrender series. It is now called “A Gentleman’s Surrender,” and is due to be released January 1, 2016.

Will I ever rename the first book of the series? I don’t know. I’ve toyed with the thought, but it was hard enough deciding on the title in the first place without trying to create a new moniker. Besides, I’m a boater. Mariners are a superstitious lot. We all know that changing the name of a boat is really serious business courting disaster and bad luck. So, with that thought, I think I’ll just leave it the way it is.