Posts on titles

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.)

Last fall, at the first annual Kidlitosphere Conference¹, I met Brian Mandabach at the bar before dinner. He told me about his book ...Or Not? (reviewed here). And, tactless nerd that I am, I blurted, "That title is going to kill the library catalog!"²

That's because many—perhaps most—library catalogs use Boolean operators in their search algorithm. Boolean operators include "and" (finds only records that include both search terms), "or" (finds records that include either term), "not" (finds records that include the term before, but not after, the "not"), and a few other such as "like" (which I don't totally understand).

Google, glorious Google, gets us in the habit of ignoring/forgetting Boolean operations because it only recognizes operators typed in all caps (AND, OR, NOT). But library catalogs don't typically differentiate based on capitalization.

"And" in a book title causes the fewest problems; its restrictiveness can only help narrow your search. "Or" in a title is slightly more problematic, in that it may make your list of search results longer than ideal. For instance, if I type in rain or shine, I'll not only find Rain or Shine, I'll also find Sounds of Rain: Poems of the Amazon and Let It Shine: Three Favorite Spirituals.

Then there's "not." "Not" in a book title will kill your catalog search.

How many times has a patron come up to the desk saying, "I'm looking for Bud Not Buddy, which won the Newbery Medal, but it didn't come up in the catalog. Is it possible that you, an absolutely amazing library in every other way, do not have it?" Too many to count. So many, in fact, that at our library we call this "the Bud Not Buddy problem."

Searching for bud not buddy turns up records that include "bud" but not "buddy." This means that searching for that exact title prevents you from finding the book in the catalog. The only way around it is to put quotation marks around the title so the catalog treats "not" as part of the search phrase, not as a Boolean operator.

Unfortunately, this isn't the kind of thing patrons just know—and I don't expect them to! Nor do I expect authors to stop giving their books titles that include "not."³ The most sensible thing, I think, would be for the library catalog makers to go the Google route and only treat "and", "or", and "not" as Boolean operators when they are typed in ALL CAPS—in other words, when the user intends for the words to be treated as operators.⁴

Typing the following titles into my library's catalog search box (without quotation marks around them) will break the search in the Bud Not Buddy fashion, bringing up titles that include what becomes before, but not after, the "not":

• I Am Not Joey Pigza - Catalog won't find titles including "Joey" or "Pigza."
• Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party - Catalog won't find titles including "dinner" or "party."
• Things Not Seen - Catalog won't find titles including "seen."

Even more amusing (in a diabolical way) are titles that begin with "not." The search results will include any title that doesn't include the words following "not," which makes for a very long results list!

• Not a Box - Catalog finds all titles that don't include "box."
• Not So Tall for Six - Catalog finds all titles that don't includeg "so," "tall," "for," or "six."
• Not Just a Witch - Catalog finds all titles that don't include "just" or "witch."

Finally, there are the titles with "not" at the end, which completely break the search engine (which demands that something—though not another Boolean operator—follow "not" in the query):

• Ready or Not - Catalog thinks, "Not what?"
• Magic or Not? - Catalog thinks, "Seriously. Not what?"
• Absolutely, Positively Not - Catalog thinks, "If you won't tell me what, I'm going to throw a hissy fit and not show you anything but a big, fat error message!"

TAKE-HOME LESSON: If you're searching your library's catalog for a book whose title includes "or" or "not" (especially "not"), put quotation marks around it.

¹Register now for the Second Annual Kidlitosphere Conference!
²Saving me from possibly fatal embarrassment, Brian told me I was not the first librarian who had mentioned this.
³However, I'd be hard-pressed to include "not" in the title of any book I write, knowing this.
⁴Or just keeps the cap-lock key permanently on; you can't help everybody.

Who knew Sharon Creech was such a trendsetter when, in 1995, she published Absolutely Normal Chaos? Adolescents are known for wanting to blend in with their peers, but based on middle grade and YA novel titles since the year 2000, you'd think conformity was at an all-time high! I offer as evidence:

• Define Normal, by Julie Anne Peters (2000)
• Act I, Act II, Act Normal, by Martha Weston (2003)
• The Trouble with Normal, by Charise Mericle Harper (2003)
• Looking for Normal, by Betty Monthei (2005)
• Not Exactly Normal, by Devin Brown (2005)
• Deliver Us from Normal, by Kate Klise (2005)
• Far from Normal, by Kate Klise (2006) (partially excused because it's a sequel)
• Chasing Normal, by Lisa Papademetriou (2008)
• Waiting for Normal, by Leslie Connor (2008)

In the same timeframe, in spite of their significantly larger market share, adults haven't been as plagued by individuality:

• Normal Girl, by Molly Jong-Fast (2000)
• Like Normal People, by Karen E. Bender (2000)
• Entering Normal, by Anne D. LeClaire (2001)
• Leaving Normal, by Stef Ann Holm (2005)
• A Piece of Normal, by Sandi Kahn Shelton (2006)
• The Last Exit to Normal, by Michael B. Harmon (2008)

Novels with "normal" in the title published before those mentioned above? There is none. Not in our library system, not at this time, anyway. Any prior "normal" books were apparently doomed to fall out of favor, out of print.

Also for the sake of contrast, novels I found in my library system from the past 8 years with "abnormal" in the title? Just one: My Abnormal Life, by Lee McClain (2005).

Maybe it's not as striking as The [Blankety] [Blank] of [What's-His/Her-Face] trend, but we're talking about a single word showing up with, er, abnormal frequency!

Would it also be unfair of me to suggest that some of these authors set their stories in cities named Normal solely for the sake of a clever title? It's a joke that gets old fast.

In the immortal words of Ramona Quimby's father: "First time is funny. Second time is silly. Third time is a spanking."

Revisiting the trend I discussed here, I've since come across some more recent and upcoming children's and YA book titles entitled The [Blankety] [Blank] of [What's-His/Her-Face]:

• The Secret History of Tom Truehart (Note how the use of "secret" provides instant enticement—sort of like colored sprinkles on a cupcake.)
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Suggested by an anonymous commentor on the previous post, this one technically contains two [blanketys], but it's close enough.)
• The Second Virginity of Suzy Green
• The Totally Made-up Civil War Diary of Amanda MacLeish (Includes a [blankally], but again, close enough.)
• The Potential Hazards of Hester Day
• The Dangerous Days of Daniel X (Subtitled, I understand, How James Patterson Saved Young Adult Literature from Itself.)

I love that there are bloggers out there tracking trends in children’s and YA literature, because a lot of these things slip right by me.

For example, there’s been a lot of blog discussion the past couple years about the trend of novel cover art with photographs of feet, or female models cropped at the chin. Jacket Whys is my favorite blog for following children’s cover art trends.

Then there are more obscure patterns that crop up in terms of plot—patterns that only someone who spends a whoooole lot of time reading a huge number children’s books would notice. Fuse #8 points out many of the year’s bizarre trends in her annual Golden Fuse Awards. For example, 2006 was the year of children getting their arms mangled by machines. In 2007, math was a startlingly prevalent subject for novels.

But some trends are so glaringly obvious even I can’t miss them. And one of them is the basis for this post: the trend of calling middle grade and YA novels The [Blankety] [Blank] of [What’s-His/Her-Face].

Any of these titles ring a bell?

1. The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
2. The Secret Life of Sparrow Delaney
3. The Puzzling World of Winston Breen
4. The Daring Adventures of Penhaligon Brush
5. The Very Ordered Existence of Merilee Marvelous
6. The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp
7. The Invisible Rules of the Zoe Lama
8. The Secret Identity of Devon Delaney
9. The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio
10. The Virtual Life of Lexie Diamond
11. The Secret History of Tom Truehart
12. The Amazing Flight of Darius Frobisher
13. The Loud Silence of Francine Green
14. The Marvelous Misadventures of Fun-Boy
15. The Secret Blog of Raisin Rodriguez
16. The Silver Spoon of Solomon Snow
17. The Midnight Diary of Zoya Blume
18. The Rising Star of Rusty Nail
19. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
20. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing

And that’s just a selection of applicable titles from the past three years. I didn’t even include books called The [Blank]—no [Blankety] —of [What’s-His/Her-Face] (The Invention of Hugo Cabret, The Adoration of Jenna Fox, etc. etc.).

So what’s the deal with this trend?

The matter of the main character’s full name appearing in the title is nothing new. Anastasia Krupnik. Silas Marner. Titus Andronicus. What makes a character’s name a good title? Perhaps, in the case of a character-driven novel, nothing better encapsulates the story than simply the character’s name.

Likewise, “The Adventures of” is an age-old (well, at least, 19th century on) title convention: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh. What’s curious to me is the addition of the qualifiers. It’s not enough that characters these days have adventures (or journeys or flights or what-have-you). They must be “extraordinary,” “daring.” Lives must be “secret,” “astonishing.” Etc.

I suppose the idea is these energetic adjectives will make books more attractive to readers from the get-go. The problem is that I, at least, find myself taking them less seriously. In fact, I feel a bit manipulated. I feel like I’m being told that not only is Edward Tulane’s journey miraculous, so is the book—which, of course, is a matter of opinion. Also, with so many titles (apparently) clamoring to stand out in this particular way, the net effect is diminished.

What if every title were constructed this way? We might have…

• The Blinding Hubris of Oedipus Rex
• The Impossible Dream of Don Quixote
• The Blasé Day of Clarissa Dalloway
• The Heart-Wrenching Trials of Oliver Twist
• The Miraculous Adventures of Jesus Christ (sorry)

Anyway, I’m not passing judgment on books with titles fitting this formula. Many of them are terrific books. And there’s a perfectly legitimate, plot-based reason for The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks to be called that. Ditto Francine Green’s loud silence. Ditto Raisin Rodriguez’s secret blog. And so on.

I’m just saying there’s a pattern I’ve noticed. And if I’ve noticed it, it’s got to be big. And if it’s that big—maybe it’s losing, rather than gaining, impact.

ETA 5/9/08:

• The Secret History of Tom Truehart (Note how the use of "secret" provides instant enticement—sort of like colored sprinkles on a cupcake.)
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Suggested by an anonymous commentor below, this one technically contains two [blanketys], but it's close enough.)
• The Second Virginity of Suzy Green
• The Totally Made-up Civil War Diary of Amanda MacLeish (Includes a [blankally], but again, close enough.)
• The Potential Hazards of Hester Day
• The Dangerous Days of Daniel X

ETA 6/3/08:

• The Latent Powers of Dylan Fontaine (Thanks, Big A little a!)