The Working Title

I am asking people to weigh in on what type of title most appeals to them on my facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/alliepottswrites) because frankly I need all the help I can get coming up with a title for my current project. I’ve run through at least five working titles and still haven’t found the one. I ran into a similar issue when selecting the title for my first. By comparison, I found naming my characters significantly easier.

In my first novel, my protagonist’s name was Charlotte, selected because it quite simply means feminine and I wanted her to represent an average woman. There is a mystery element to the story, but for obvious reasons I couldn’t title her story Charlotte’s Web. I am rather proud of the ending and did not want to give anything away, so that further limited what imagery I could include. By the same token, I don’t expect the reader to particularly like her during the first act in the book, so I definitely didn’t want to pull imagery from that section either. I ultimately decided to create a title that summarized the underlying premise of the book, but it was a difficult decision to make. I had just spent the last several months of writing to develop a premise, and here I was trying to refine it down to a catchy 1 – 3 words.

Thankfully I worked with a professional cover artist so that I was able to avoid a similar situation when selecting the front.

So now I’d like to open the topic up for comments from the public. Authors, what inspired you to create your own titles? Did you create the title first and then write the story or vice versa? Were you lucky (or not so lucky) to have your title selected by a publisher’s working group? Readers, what kinds of titles draw you in?