How to Choose a Book Title

Our guest today on the Crime Writers' Chronicle is Rayanne Culpepper, the immensely powerful eminence grise of a New York publishing house which shall remain nameless. She has promised to appear from time to time to tell us our business. Today she shares a few thoughts on book titles.

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So you've finished your crime novel. Before you do anything serious with it, you have to make sure it has a good title. Preferably a title that not only bears some relation to the contents of your book, but also helps your book to best-sell.

A cursory examination of the New York Times fiction best-seller lists for the past few years will reveal certain patterns, which you can always analyze and in fact copy (the patterns, that is, not the titles, although it's true that titles cannot be copyrighted). Most best-selling novels are crime novels of one sort or another. Make a list of the recent best-sellers with a view to using them for models. Strike out those that are definitely not crime novels. Fifty Shades of Crime is not a good title, unless your book is what is called a cozy, where any silly title is acceptable but best-sellerdom is not within your reach.

A strong, punchy noun with overtones of menace makes a good best-selling title. Inferno (Dan Brown), The Forgotten (David Baldacci), The Heist (Janet Evanovich), Guilt (John Lescroart), Deadline (Sandra Brown), The Quest (Nelson DeMille), The Racketeer (John Grisham), The Drop (Michael Connelly). Bombshell (Catherine Coulter). Mistress (By James Patterson). If your name is James Patterson you can do anything you damned please, but on the other hand you're not reading this post, looking for advice, are you? So.

A good way to choose a menacing name for your book is to open your Thesaurus (of course you have one) to synonyms for a creepy noun of your choice, say, Murder. Under Killing we find such gems as Slaughter, Assassination, Carnage, Bloodbath, Deathblow, and on and on. All excellent titles for a thriller. You can have them for free. Don't send me your manuscript, I only look at submissions from agents.

If a single word seems too stark and bare, tack a modifier on your menacing noun, as in High Heat (Lee Childs) or Threat Vector (Tom Clancy). Don't say, "in Death." J.D. Robb has a corner on that.

Another winning approach is to use an imperative verb phrase, such as Don't Go (Lisa Scottoline), Fly Away (Kristin Hannah), Don't Say a Word (Barbara Freethy), or Kill Alex Cross (Patterson again). Play around with these concepts. Something appropriate is bound to occur to you.

Some years ago a team led by British statistician Dr. Atai Winkler was commissioned by Lulu.com to study best-selling titles over a fifty-year period. They analyzed some 700 titles, determining whether a title was literal or figurative, the word type of the first word, and the title’s grammar pattern. The result was the "Lulu Titlescorer," a program able to predict the chances that any given title would produce a New York Times No.1 bestseller. You can use it to predict the success of your title. Here's the link:

Lulu.com titlescorer

Good luck. Watch this space for Step Two: Finding an Agent.

© 2013 Rayanne Culpepper

That Day…

On November 22, 1963, a motorcade on Dealey Plaza in Dallas, at about 12:30 P.M. changed my life forever.

And yours.

And our nation. Our world. The future of planet earth.

The incident is still the subject of widespread debates, books, films. Has spawned numerous theories and scenarios in fiction, as well as non-fiction.

A moment before the murder, the First Lady of Texas turned to him and said, "Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you!"

If you or I wrote that in a novel the editor would probably cut it out. Truth IS stranger than fiction.

Jackie said, moments later, " They have killed my husband! I have his brains in my hand."

I have rarely read a more poignant sentence in any novel…

One of the most amazing facts was that at that time it was not a federal offense to kill the President of the United States!

People often ask, " Where were you… ?"
- December 7, 1941?
- November 22, 1963?
- September 11, 2001?

That day in 1963, a day of lost dreams and dashed hopes, America's sacred honor was stained with Jack's red blood and universal dreams were shattered.

The mystery of who the killer was still haunts us. Was it a lone gunman? The mob? The Soviets? The CIA? The government?

This crime of all crimes to many of us…

The quest for the truth continues. The weeping has not ceased for 50 years…

Where were YOU?
That day?

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THAT DAY . . . . . .( written November 22, 1963)

You prince and king and everybody's hero,
idol of the poor,
friend of intellect and all we knew to be
in our reborn post-war world.
Could any mature man
not weep
THAT day, when ignominy raped our youthful joy?
Why… oh God, why???

The cry of Dallas-town
will echo down the empty alleys of time
as long as there is any wind
to blow limp papers along deserted city streets.
Until the last corn stalk
in western civilization outlines an autumn sky.
Until the last grave is dug
in what we call
America.

Don't tell me, critic-man, there are no
messiahs of politics, no kings in democratic states… or that
grown men are ashamed to cry.

THAT day, their women kissed the dust with
women's tears. But women have no monopoly
on weeping. We know to live is to weep.
Sometimes…

THAT day everyone of us knew
a little part of ancient Greece.
Tragedy became large, wide-eyed,
terribly personal. The horrible events
were echoes, tapes and films and heart-rending photos
of a world's pathos and grief
we had always known, since Virgilian plagues,
those high tragedies by Euripedes, all the Greek-greats of ancient times.

Some part of each of us died
THAT day. Our own red blood
spurted out in Dallas. The ballads now
sing "In Dallas-town…"
The elegies will sing
a hundred years from now
and carry out the long tradition
of tragedy's tale. God will
there will be elegies
in a world not quite
all Western…
A hundred years from now…

Thelma Jacqueline Straw

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Dear Friends and Colleagues of Crime Writers' Chronicle,
Please share with us where you were… THAT DAY…

tjs

Ten Things I'm Not Going to Do

My birthday is this week. It's one of those momentous birthdays. When my mother had this birthday, some thirty years ago, she was in a coma and had four days left to live. Nevertheless I woke up this morning perfectly happy, and I still am, although my literary career is in the toilet and there are a number of other hard truths I find myself unable to deny. Hey, at least I'm not going to be dead in four days, that I know of.

So, a list of things that, let's face it, I'm not going to do. Not going to have to do, not going to be able to do, or just not going to do.

1. Die right away.
2. Write my autobiography. Many of you will be happy about that. You know who you are.
3. Lose the twenty pounds. If they're not gone by now they're here to stay.
4. Make a pants suit out of the loud wool plaid stuff I got last summer. On sober reflection I feel that such a garment would make me look as if I had dressed myself as a racetrack tout for Halloween. Instead I think I'll make a poncho out of it.
5. Have Christmas dinner with my ex-husband and his wife.
6. Give another dime to a political party.
7. Forget to take my pills.
8. Pass up a chance to go out to dinner with Harold. This is Lambertville, after all, where you can't get a bad meal. Except maybe in our house when I'm trying a new recipe.
9. Perform a tap dance in public. (Although I have a great pair of shoes for it.)
10. Master the English concertina. I keep saying I'll take it up again, but…

Okay, enough of this. I'm going to go have fun now. Carpe diem and all that. You go have some fun too. Life is short.

© 2013 Kate Gallison

Headline Bloopers

A number of years ago, my students in a technical writing class gave me a gift: one of those little books that you used to be able find at the cash registers of bookstores, when there were bookstores.  Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim was published by the Columbia Journalism Review and documented hilarious headlines, mostly from local newspapers, back in the day when there were local newspapers.   I share of few of them today.  Many are about crimes or crime fighters; some only sound that way.  All are documented, real headlines that ran in actual newspapers:

Beating Witness Provides Names

Youngstown Police On Duty Getting Smaller

Lawmen from Mexico Barbecue Guests

Man Robs, Then Kills Himself

SCSC Graduates Blind Senior Citizen

Robber Holds Up Albert’s Hosiery

Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant

Police Can’t Stop Gambling

Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case

Police Kill Man With Ax

Police Union to Seek Blinding Arbitration

Not about crime but too funny to pass up:

Stiff Opposition Expected to Casketless Funeral Plan

Bishop Defrocks Gay Priest

Chester Morrill, 92, Was Fed Secretary

Annamaria Alfieri

My Amazon Conflict

I am writing this blog post on November 3. On October 26, I wrote the following letter to Jeff Bezos.

Dear Mr. Bezos:

My husband's cell phone was stolen yesterday. He got a replacement today.

I have been calling your customer service department since October 11 because thousands of archived items are not showing up on my Kindles which are in synch with one another. Still I have not been presented with a solution. Getting my Kindle problem solved has become a second job. This seems monstrously unfair since most of my disposable income is disposed of on Amazon.com.

My primary Kindle displays all of my items (I have around 4, 800) but another only displays 1,026. I have had multiple conversations with countless Amazon employees over the past 15 days. I have had to repeat my story over and over again. I have spent minutes I'll never get back on hold. I have been told multiple times that the issue has been "escalated." Now at my office when an issue is escalated it means one person stops everything else she's doing to resolve it. I believe Phil escalated my problem on October 18th. Alas, when I talked with Brian on October 23, he told me my service ticket had not been touched "for a couple of days."

Last night I spoke with Edmund. Though I begged to be spared another recital of my tale of woe, I finally realized there was no way around it. I told my story and he transferred me to his supervisor. She explained that in order to transfer me to someone who could help me, she would have to call me back. She confirmed my number, called me back and put me on hold. The call dropped. I was not discouraged because she had confirmed my number and I assumed she would call me back. I guess my expectations were too high. I was just not willing to call again and tell my story one more time to five people on the unlikely chance I might get an answer. And the hold music! NOOO!

Yes, I told my husband, it's time to write to Jeff. I love your company. I am physically disabled (I walk with two canes) and the Kindle has changed my life. I no longer have to worry about whether a book I want to read is too heavy to be carted back and forth to work. I'm able to carry a whole library with me. I can't tell you how wonderful that makes me feel. Many of my friends have bought Kindles because of my near manic enthusiasm for it. I bought my first Kindle in 2009, but I've been an Amazon customer since 2006. I have bought traditional books, 4 CD players which hold a total of 1200 CDs (need I mention that I bought many of the CDs at Amazon), miscellaneous items and numerous gift certificates so that other people can discover on their own how wonderful Amazon is.

The Amazon staff to whom I've spoken have been unfailingly courteous, but only occasionally competent. Surely I deserve a customer service experience that matches my loyalty.

 Sincerely,

Stephanie Patterson

The letter got results. I heard from an Amazon employee who told me he was responding on behalf of Jeff Bezos. He sent an email, left a vmm and sent another email to make sure I got the voice mail message. He asked when might be a good time to call me. I said Friday, November 1 at 7PM. He confirmed the time and did not call. I forwarded the employee's confirmation of our appointment to Jeff Bezos and ever so casually mentioned that I hadn't gotten a call.

I hope by the time this blogpost appears, all will be well. I want all my Kindles to hold those 4,000 items (which I might mention include books by Annamaria Alfieri, Kate Gallison, Bob Knightly, David F. Nighberg and Sheila York), And I want to maintain a good relationship with Amazon. Even before the Kindle appeared I was a great customer. One of my train buddies told me she figured out where I lived when she saw a collection of Amazon boxes on a porch. And Kindle is once more wooing me (and millions of others) by offering very reduced prices on
Kindle editions of selected books if a customer bought a hardcover or paperback version from Amazon. Be still my heart!

But I won't wait forever. Barnes and Noble sent me an update on electronic devices that they will be selling at the end of the year. Don't make me buy a Nook, Jeff. Don't make me buy a Nook.

© 2013 Stephanie Patterson