The Irritability of Medium Things

I hate thinking of titles for manuscripts. I'm terrible at it! When I'm working on a project, I generally refer to it in my notes as "So-and-So's story" or by something that figures into the plot, such as "goats!"

Eventually a phrase from the text pops out that encapsulates the story for me, and I go with it as a title. But that doesn't mean it speaks to anyone but me. It might be bland. Or obscure. Or boring-sounding. And I have to go back to the drawing board.

(Understand that I only obsess about this stuff after all the heavy lifting is done—when I've revised as much as I can revise and I'm about to send it out into the world.)

Anyway, when my latest manuscript's working title was deemed non-grabby (true, alas), I did lots of brainstorming and came up with dozens of titles that were even worse than the first one! I also futilely Googled for novel-naming advice—futilely because there's no magic Book-Naming Fairy that lives on the Internet and just tells you what to name your book.

I did turn up a few fun/interesting sites worth sharing, though:

• Naming Your Baby: How to Choose a Selling Title - Straightforward advice and techniques for brainstorming and choosing a title for your fiction or nonfiction book.
• What's in a Name? Titles for Your Novel - This article is tailored to fantasy novels, but the various techniques can be easily adapted to any genre.
• Title Your Novel in Three Easy Steps! or, The Abstraction of Abstraction - Why not name your novel something completely vague and abstract? Everyone else is doing it! (I owe this one a chuckle and the title to this post.)
• Lulu Title Scorer - This "scientific" web toy will predict the probability of your novel becoming a bestseller, based on its title alone!

As for my manuscript—well, I did think of a new title eventually. Unfortunately, I can't swear it's any better than the old one. But according to the Lulu Title Scorer, it has a 79.6% chance of being a bestselling title! (The old one? A lowly 55.4.)