Entitled 2: Giving your book a title to remember by donalee Moulton

 

Visit donalee Moulton's BWL Author page for book purchase links

Last month we talked about giving your story a title. Unlike article titles, book titles are usually the domain of the writer. This may be because the writer has a closer connection to the topic, the editor wants the writer to do the work, the writer and editor see it as the author’s prerogative. But just because the book writer usually develops the title doesn’t mean the editor will accept it. They will tell you if they don’t like it – and why. They will tell you if it won’t work – and why.

Let’s look at what constitutes – usually – a good book title, and then I will use my recent BWL book as an example.

Because book titles are one of the first things a potential reader sees, they need to hook that reader. It’s recommended the title give away a little something about the plot and the nature of your book. It is going to be action-packed, romantic, whimsical.

Here are the three main ingredients in a strong title:

Ingredient#1

Length. Shorter is better. Shorter needs to be more memorable, more powerful. Some experts advocate for the one-word title, but one-word titles are more limiting for search engines. Fewer examples are found. The recommendation: three or four words.

Ingredient #2.

Impact.  The title should draw the reader in because it is evocative, it speaks to what lies within the pages of the book. It sets the stage for what they can expect.

Ingredient #3

Uniqueness. Titles that we can remember, titles that stand out from the crowd are winners. This may be a play on words, a pun, a jab, a literary reference, a phrase that speaks to mind, heart and spirit.

In short, titles are essential to the sale of a book. And they are not easy. Let’s look at one title I’m very familiar with.

My newest book is Hung Out to Die. It’s a murder mystery. The main character is CEO of a cannabis-production company in Elmsdale, Nova Scotia. As I was writing this book, a funny aside started to take place involving a word the main character had never heard before: Chunderfuck. In my mind, that became the title of the book with asterisks replacing two of the letters in the last syllable. I then built on this concept. Future books would have similar fun but profane titles: Numb Nuts, Dick Wad…. You get the idea.

It was not meant to be. As I was starting to shop around my book, I realized the title might lead agents and publishers to conclude the book would be darker, edgier, grittier than it is. Indeed, it’s actually funny. I also didn’t want to turn off publishers before they even read the book. I went with a working title instead: So, A psychopath walked into a bar. In my mind, the book would still be called Chunderf**k, an issue I would raise with my publisher as soon as I had one. Which I did. My publisher – BWL – was more than open to changing the title. But not Chunder, and not for the reason you might think. Search engines don’t pick up asterisks.

Dammit.

So the book is called Hung Out to Die. It’s a play on words, drying plants is linked to cannabis, and the victim dies by hanging. It’s short, it’s got some oomph, but let’s face it. It’s no Chunderf**k.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on titles. And asterisks.

BWL Publishing Inc. New Releases for June 2023

 

US Park Service investigators Doug and Jill Fletcher are dispatched to Hawaii when the bodies of two hikers are discovered near the Kīlauea volcano.

Initially reluctant to accept the assignment, Doug becomes intrigued when he learns that the investigating ranger’s report of lost hikers overcome by volcanic gasses disagrees with the autopsy findings. As the investigation progresses, the Fletchers find themselves entangled in more than the investigation of the death of two park visitors.

Click to Purchase Peril in Paradise

“Where do I belong?”

In 1912, Mary Louisa Appleton is 27 years old and a domestic servant in Cornwall, England. She sees no future there, so she accepts employment with a family returning to Alberta, Canada. It is the land of unlimited opportunity, or so she has heard.

 

Once in Canada, Mary faces the dilemma of all immigrants – where does she belong?

 

She is conflicted: her body is in Canada but her heart is in England. She longs to return to England but wars, marriage, children, the Dirty Thirties, and economic circumstances conspire to keep her in Canada.

 

Then Mary faces a crisis, and she has to decide where she belongs.

 

Searching for Home is the story of the author’s maternal grandmother and her journey to learn that home is as much a place in the heart as it is a place on the landscape

Click to Purchase Searching for Home

The Summer Vale Ranch once flourished with old Duke Barlowe at the helm, persevering despite his troublemaking neighbours, the Sutherlyns. And then circumstances, age and stubborn pride took their toll.

 

Duke’s grandson, Hayden Barlowe, was the ranch’s heir apparent. Hayden had been set to wed the lovely Naomi Martel, both families delighted with the match, when he balked and called off the wedding. Naomi was brokenhearted when he took Mary Rae Sutherlyn for his wife instead.

 

Hayden was banished from the ranch when he chose a bride from the enemy camp, but now, twelve years later he’s back, divorced and ready for a fight. And a fight is waiting. 

Click to Purchase Barlowe Pride

It’s the 1990s, and big business is lending support to growing animal and environmental conservation movements. First year college students Tad Gist and Linda Tassel are invited to a party celebrating industrial giant Garmon Chemicals commitment to preserve wildlife. Things go well until Dr. Kent Milton, a university professor who has been working with Linda on the project, makes unwanted advances. Suddenly, there’s a blackout. When the lights come on, one of the guests discovers her famous emerald necklace is missing. Dr. Milton has disappeared and may have been murdered. And Linda is the prime suspect.

 “well-paced, engaging… with likable characters.”— Goodreads Review

 “Recommended for anyone who is interested in mysteries and learning more about Native culture.”— Long and Short Reviews 

Click to Purchase Stolen at the Wildlife Refuge

Write one, knit one

 

Write one, knit one

by Priscilla Brown

 

 

 http://books2read.com/Hot-Ticket

 

          Lawyer Olivia is  familiar with her calculator, 

and would barely know what to do with a knitting needle.

Callum knows his way around a kitchen, 

does complicated arithmetic in his head and knits without a pattern.

💕💕

 

 Writing contemporary romance fiction and knitting whatever appeals to me at that time are my most important creative pursuits. With the ambitious aim of saving time, I started working on these almost simultaneously, in that I handwrote the story in a notebook when pausing the knitting of an adult broad-brimmed hat at the end of a row. I am an experienced knitter, but knitting a hat is of course not like, for example, the unshaped part of a sweater's back. I find working on these two needs more concentration than I allowed for, and calls for frequent coffee stops. So writing and  knitting, while not of course precisely simultaneous activities, for me are both works in progress. 

My current romance fiction on the computer awaits resolutions to assorted dilemmas and attention to the 'villain' of the piece, while the wool yarn in its basket shows promise that it will end up like the hat pictured on its pattern. Fortunately I don't have official deadlines, though I do need to get the hat out into the craft shop which sells my textile work because this is a cold winter in my area of inland Australia and head wear is a good idea.

If you have a work in progress whatever it may be, then good luck for its successful outcome. 

Warm regards, Priscilla.

https://bwlpublishing.ca

 

https://priscillabrownauthor.com 

Labels: knitting, writing, contemporary romance fiction, hat, wool, creative pursuits, works in progress

Change of Heart by Eden Monroe

 

Visit Eden Monroe's BWL Author Page for Purchase Information

 

In Barlowe Pride, Hayden Barlowe chose the wrong bride when he married Mary Rae Sutherlyn, and paid dearly for his youthful lapse of judgment. Not surprisingly, divorce was eventually necessary after the five-year marriage had completely unraveled. Now, seven years later, he’s back in Naomi Martel’s life.

Dealing with the subject of divorce made me curious about how dissolving the bands of matrimony has played out through history, so I did a little digging. When it comes to marriage, the institution that creates the option for divorce, there are any number of obscure reasons why couples decide to get hitched … besides love. And so conversely the motivation for ending the union, if that’s the way it goes, can be just as varied.

So here’s my little peek over time into a change of heart from the perspective of divorce.   

In Ancient Rome if a woman was caught making a copy of the household keys her husband could divorce her. Given the dominant male culture in many of those early societies I was amazed to learn that around the second century women were also given the right to divorce. However there had to be sufficient grounds to do so, no matter which partner initiated the action, and in ancient Rome those ranged from infertility and drunkenness to what is probably the most common reason even today: adultery.

Most divorce proceedings were kept private in ancient times, such transactions not a matter of public record. Nevertheless in Rome at that time there were rules that had to be followed regarding the dissolution of a marriage, and it could only become official if done in front of seven witnesses.

So it seems that as long as there is marriage there will be those who change their mind about their spouse and seek a divorce. In one country in particular we have an interesting assessment of the latter. According to Statistics Canada in a fifty-year analysis of divorces (1970 – 2020), there was an actual drop in the number of divorces. The aging of the married population is cited as a likely factor in that trend, as well as young Canadians deciding to live common-law rather than choosing traditional marriage.

COVID-19 also played a role during the time of this study. There were 25% fewer divorces during the first year of the pandemic in 2020 as compared to the previous year, no doubt due to public health measures in place at the time. Still, in 2019 Canada had the second lowest crude divorce rate among G7 countries. Internationally speaking, it seems Canada has “relatively few” divorces.

And how do divorce rates stack up for Canadians in general? Between 2016 and 2020, Yukon and Alberta had the highest divorce rate while Nunavut and Newfoundland & Labrador had the lowest.

 

No matter the geographic location though, the reasons for divorce can be pretty individualistic, such as a wife wanting out because her husband talked too much and couldn’t keep secrets; a woman upset that her husband voted for Trump; similarly a woman who wanted to divorce her husband because he went to work for Trump. And then there was the wife who spooked her husband so badly by levitating that he was done with the marriage, and a Nigerian woman who sought divorce from her husband because of his … well … oversized appendage that made intimate relations “a nightmare”. Another woman cited her reason for wanting a divorce was because her husband left dirty dishes in the sink, and a man who finally saw his wife without make-up and wasn’t impressed. There was also a woman who divorced her husband because he refused to provide her with a proper indoor toilet (she was tired of relieving herself in fields) and lastly, at least for this rather conservative list, a woman filing for divorce because her husband refused to shower for eight weeks.

A ten-year Swedish study revealed that couples with longer job commutes (involving one or both partners) were 4% more likely to call it quits compared to those working closer to home. And how about the power of influence? In a study published in Social Forces, participants were 75% more likely to divorce if a close friend or family member ended their own marriage, and if a friend of a friend got divorced, that number dropped to 33%.

Also, sixty years of US Census data indicates that if the first-born child is a daughter it leads to divorce more often than if the newborn is a son, and a University of Washington study says if a first baby of an unmarried couple is a boy, they are 42% more likely to marry.

Remarriage is common across time, however most people obtain a divorce before they revisit the altar. But not a man from New York City identified as Fred Jipp. According to The New York Times he was finally apprehended at the age of fifty-three and eventually convicted of bigamy and fraud. Jipp said I DO to no less than 104 women, and possibly 105 (he said he met most of them at flea markets), between 1949 and 1981. There is no mention of divorce from any of his wives, although it was reported he married some of them more than once.

https://www.bookswelove.com/monroe-eden/

How We Saw Tina & Ike - Or, Once Upon a Time in the 70's

 

FLY AWAY SNOW GOOSE BY

JULIET WALDRON &

JOHN WISDOMKEEPER,

a Canadian Historical Brides

Northwest Territory Story

AMAZON

Kobo

Barnes & Noble

Smashwords

In the '60's, I was a typical white college kid who hadn't heard much of what has been called Black music, except for the groups like The Temptations, The Crystals, Martha & The Vandellas, Ronettes or the Shirelles, the ones that made it onto rock'n'roll stations. (The only exception to this being Calypso, which I'd danced to during my high school years in the West Indies.) 

When I arrived at college in the States, I got to know new kids, ones that came from big cities, like New York, Philly, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago and D.C. This new cohort arrived with plenty of Rhythm and Blues and Soul mixed with their Folk and Rock L.P.s weighing down their college-bound trunks of indispensable stuff from home.  

Some years later, married, mother of two, I imagined I'd found the BFF I'd never had in my HS. I'd always been an outsider, for different reasons in the different places. I had a poor self image and secretly I'd always wanted to be "in with the in crowd" despite my own insistence upon being the nerd in the corner of the room. This new friend was young, glamorous and had three little kids, more or less the same age as my two. Her husband was a junior hot shot salesman who'd been a popular member of his fraternity. They couldn't have been any more different from us, but as young marrieds at the beginning of our lives, from marriage to parenting--not to mention work--we shared a lot. 

This was the early 70's and we were young, still wanting to play. Fresh out of college as we were, "fun" meant that the women cooked dinner--something simple, like sphagetti and a salad. Then we'd drink jug wine and listen to (and critique!) the latest rock LP because we were a generation who'd grown up listening to "our music" on the radio. We also told one another the usual get-acquainted stories about our origins. From childhood, we shared tales of raising kids and usually ended with how we were going to escape having the same lives as our parents. Our own kids ran around the house or out the yard, deep in pretend or hide and seek.

This extroverted couple took us to places my husband and I would normally never go--like a Rock'n'Rhythm review in a nearby city to see Ike & Tina Turner. My girl friend, with an urban background, told me that she'd read that Ike sometimes beat Tina. In those days, such a story was between us, woman to woman, as we all knew that physical abuse was but one of the hazards of being born female.  

The audience, when we got there, was a riot of color, some black, some white and some brown. I'd not been in such "mixed" company since living in the West Indies. Some were dressed to kill, with spangled mini-dresses, big hair, and high heels; others just wore jeans. My girlfriend had, of course, decided that we should dress for the occasion. She let down her blonde hair and wore open toed heels and a floaty hippy dress--white, gauzy, short, patterned 

with cherubs and long church choir sleeves.

She'd explored my meagre closet and come up with one of my mother's decades-old cast-off cocktail dresses. This was hot pink and rose red with a fitted bodice, boat neck and full swirling skirt.  She also discovered a ridiculous pair of heels from England, with pointed toes and extravagently high heels. We decided that a pair of bright green stockings would really proclaim that though the dress was thrift-shop retro, it wasn't the 1950's anymore, baby!

Our entrance, just as my girlfriend had foreseen, was majestic! We couldn't have felt more far-out.  Naturally, we got some put-down comments, but such was the price of our utter coolness.  ;)

Soon, music blasted into the auditorium, as a girl group warm-up band took the stage, to be followed by Ike and Tina. He watched her like a hawk, his dark eyes full of calculation, as he checked out the size of the crowd. He made certain we all would all notice that she was his, hands on her waist and then on her shoulders, but she appeared to want to get down to business, stepping forward and giving us all a flash of her white teeth. She waved the chord, freeing the mike, while everyone cheered and jumped and whooped. The band's name might have still been "Ike and Tina Turner," but it was plain who we'd all come to see. 

For over an hour, Ike and Tiny rocked us. They sang their oldies, as well as covering newer hits. Here's a few that I remember from that memorable night.

https://youtu.be/sTM17bmV4wg  ~ Honky Tonk Woman

https://youtu.be/FwaxT7zL7kA  ~ Fool in Love

https://youtu.be/bpuf6AmQH4M ~ Nutbush Avenue

https://youtu.be/uj0wPrN_Y_4  ~ River Deep Mountain High

It was over far too soon. We left, drenched with sweat and totally hoarse, as you are after a great concert. 

Time passed; friends departed. We moved and moved again. Tina vanished for a time from  pop radio, but then she was back, without the abusive, controlling husband, and better than ever. Many even bigger hits followed. My favorite is the heart-wrenching "What's Love Got to Do With it?" which spoke volumes to so many. 

Then, in the 2000s, I encountered a new Tina, now in a Buddhist incarnation, as were many in our cohort. After years of pain, of suffering, and a lot of growing, the Queen of Rock had found healing and peace.  

https://youtu.be/6XP-f7wPM0A  ~  Sarvesham Svastir Bhavatu Om

 

 A rough translation: May there be well being in all, May there be peace in all, May there be fulfillment in all...Peace, Peace Peace.)

Hail the Traveler! I'll never forget that wild night in a Hartford auditorium. 

~Juliet Waldron

All my novels at Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Juliet-Waldron/author/B004HIX4GS?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true