So, how does a title pop into my head? I have no idea. Sometimes she listens, but mostly she just gets an amused look on her face and tells me to keep working on it.
When that doesn’t work, I bounce ideas off my wife. My process for finding titles is to waste time by looking for words in an online thesaurus (which is not a type of dinosaur). Because Book15 is the final installment in the series (I know, it’s shocking), I tossed around crappy ideas like All Good Things or The End of All Things, but those have been done before.
OK, it is not true that I have no ideas for titles-I just don’t have any ideas I don’t hate. So, what are the titles of Books 14 and 15? At this moment, I have no idea, and Book 14 is more than halfway written. The titles of ExForce books are usually chosen before I begin writing I develop title ideas when I’m creating the outline. The third book, Deceptions, has a perfect title, so why couldn’t I think of something better for the first two books? Answer: I suck. The titles of my Ascendant fantasy trilogy? I kind of hate Ascendant and (UGH) the second book, Transcendent. The title of my sci-fi book Aces is also good I wouldn’t change it. In the end, I chose Columbus Day because it described the basic concept that inspired me to write the book: that any aliens who traveled across interstellar space must be so advanced beyond our technology that we would have no chance to fight an invasion. Those two words don’t give the casual book browser any idea what the book is about, and I probably lost some sales because people shrugged and moved on. For a while, I regretted choosing Columbus Day as the title. The first book was going to have a more descriptive title like A Long Way from Home or some phrase with “invasion” in it.
I am happy with the titles of the existing ExForce and Mavericks books, although for each book, many potential titles were discarded along the way. For example: the second Star Wars movie was titled The Empire Strikes Back and not Vader Is My Daddy, which was a good decision. The ideal title encapsulates, in a single word or short phrase, the basic concept of the story, again without giving away too much. For me, the worst part of writing a book is choosing a title. Writing books that average 180,000 words ( Expeditionary Force 13: Fallout is over 215,000 words!) is not easy, and writing a blurb description that gives the reader enough information to know what to expect but not enough to give away the plot is even more difficult.
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