Picking a Good Book Title

We get the most spectacular sunrises this time of year. I'm not sure why. All that mysterious meteorology stuff.

I've been noticing something interesting since Sapphire came out. One word titles suck for tracking.

Not that I don't love that title – I do. It was my title all along and Carina let me keep it. It matches the cover nicely (or vice-versa) and reflects a crucial aspect of the story itself. Now, it was counter-productive in a way I didn't expect because I now have to change the title of my novel coming out in July, formerly known as Obsidian.

I know, I know – me and my one-word precious and semi-precious gem titles. I don't know what my damage is there. At any rate, Carina said I should retitle Obsidian, because it would sound like a sequel to Sapphire. Since the novel is a totally different story, genre and heat-level, there's no case for that. I saw their point, brainstormed a list of titles and we'll see what the marketing team decides.

I'm interested to see what they decide on.

And I hope it's better for tracking.

See, I have Google alerts set up for mentions of my titles. And Twitter columns set up for those searches. Correction – I have Twitter columns set up to watch for "Petals and Thorns" and "Feeding the Vampire," but I only lasted about a week with the "Sapphire" column. Seriously. Do you know how many mentions there are of Kate Middleton's sapphire ring? Or of some credit card? There's also a Gentleman's Club (which apparently markets ALL THE TIME), a fancy mall in Istanbul, a watch, a "nettop" computer and a surprising number of people celebrating their 65th wedding anniversaries.

In short – finding mentions of my book is like wandering through a supermodel convention hoping someone will tell you you're pretty.

Just ain't gonna happen.

Not to mention that there just happens to be a kind of famous author named Sapphire who hogs all the Amazon searches.

So, I'm extracting a lesson from this one. I know we don't always have control of our titles, but so far, everyone I know at least gets to send a suggested list. I wonder how people with even more common one-word titles like "Fallen" or "Fated" do. I would think it's even worse. (Though, for the record, "Twilight" totally rocks the Google search at this point.)

So my whole list of really fab one-word titles? Eh. Send those to circular file #13.