Name That Title Week: Jeanne Estridge

The McDaniel students are in the last class of the first year of the program, publishing. This module is on Agents and Editors and their assignment is the query letter; next module is marketing. For both of these, they need strong titles for their books, and I offered up Argh Nation as very experienced and truly excellent title brainstormers. So for the next week(s), some of the students are posting their descriptions (usually the second graph of their query letters) to you all in the hopes that you’ll find the perfect title.

Here’s a cheat sheet of title advice:

• One word titles are generally not memorable; you need at least two words because the juice is in the relationship between the words, the spark that jumps between them. Temptation is a lousy title; Welcome to Temptation is one of the best of my books.

• Familiar titles, aka songs and movies, generally make your book sound run of the mill, not to mention hard to google. Maybe This Time, my book, comes up fourth on an google search after “Maybe This Time,” the song, you tube video, lyrics, and Wikipedia entry. Welcome to Temptation is the first google entry.

• If possible, the title should should like something one of your characters would say, or at least be in her or his voice. (Phin says, “Welcome to Temptation” when he meets Sophie. Nobody says, “Maybe this time” in the book.)

• If possible, the title should reflect the crackle of the conflict or the romantic juice of the story, anything that strikes a spark when you read it. This is even more important in the digital age when you often don’t have a cover, or at least a cover bigger than an inch, to draw the reader in.

• Avoid theme at all costs. Nobody ever picked up a novel and said, “I can’t wait to find out about the theme.”

• Keep it clean if you want it in a lot of stores.

I have great faith in you.

And now here’s Jeanne’s novel:

The Wager is a darkly comic romance of 100,000 words. When a smart remark at the poker table lands the demon Belial in hot water with Satan, he tries to distract his boss by scamming God into revisiting their ancient wager over free will. God accepts the challenge, naming Dara Strong, a young widow who runs a free clinic on the Florida-Georgia border, as his champion. But Belial’s ploy backfires when Satan assigns him the mission to seduce and destroy the woman. Belial has been corrupting humans for millennia, but Dara–smart, strong-willed and raised by demon-fighting grandparents–is more than a match for him. If Belial is successful, he’ll become the most powerful demon in Hades, but if he fails there’ll be hell to pay.