It’s a knack

Here’s a post at Kill Zone Blog: Do You Have the Title Gene?

[L]et’s talk about one of the most important things you need to succeed in this business. Forget talent, forget perseverance, forget craftsmanship. Even forget luck. I’m thinking today that what you really need is The Title Gene.

There are times I agree! Titles, urgh. Either you’ve got that knack or you don’t. Same with a knack for one-sentence summaries of a book. Double urgh for that.

PJ Parrish says: Our first book Dark of of the Moon began life as The Last Rose of Summer (Yuck…and too romancy) and mutated into Circle of Evil (not bad but a little heard-that-before) before I found the Langston Hughes poem “Silhouette” that inspired it. The line was: “Southern gentle lady, do not swoon. They’ve just hung a black man in the dark of the moon.”

Right on all counts. The Last Rose of Summer is definitely a romance title. Oddly, I only see ten or so books with that title at Amazon. I would have expected a hundred. But, however books may share this particular title, I would bet (without checking) that they’re all romances. As a thriller title, nooooo.

It’s a long and pretty decent post on the topic. But frankly my basic suggestion is: if you happen to have a serious knack for titles, hang out your shingle, charge five bucks a pop, and I bet you’d do pretty well.

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