Long ago, I was nearly ready to look for an agent. My opening pages glittered. My query letter shone. There was just one problem: my book didn’t have a title, and “Please represent my book UNTITLED” didn’t have quite the competent, professional air I wanted to project.
I made lists of keywords and quotations and random ideas, and none of them me got anywhere. Finally I said to myself, “One-word titles are hot right now. I’ll call it SUNDERED and it will be fine, because everybody knows that the marketing department always changes your title anyway.”
Then I got an agent and an editor and provisional cover art and nobody seemed to think that my title ought to be changed. Until last month, when the marketing department finally decided that my book should have a new title after all.
The brainstorming process that followed was only slightly less lengthy and arduous than the trek to Mount Doom, and I’m just really glad that I had my editor and agent to help me this time, or else I would probably still be staring at the wall and making lists of keywords. But we finally found a title that everybody liked, and so now I can announce that my debut novel is going to be called CRUEL BEAUTY.