Prisimpad: A Guide to Wattpad, Writing, and Whatever

ON WRITING: It's Titling Time

Let's talk about the title of your book. For the love of all that is holy and pure, enough with the description titles, Wattpad. What is a description title? I'm so very glad you asked. Yes, I'm pretending you asked, leave me alone!

A description title is something to the effect of: I'm in love with one direction, but I'm the queen bee of nowhere town. Oh bother, that is inconvenient.

Or: 36 students, 3045956763465876874 teachers, how am I to survive?

Or: I'm in love with a vampire who is actually a vegetarian.

Or... are you getting the picture yet?

The Amazing Spiderman is a title. The Amazing Spiderman bit my boyfriend and now he thinks he's Thor, is not a title.

Bed Buddies is a title. One Direction lives in my bed, is not a title.

Titles should be, for the most part, short sweet and to the point. They should draw the reader in, but not give anything away. If you can type in your summary area "The title says it all" instead of an actual summary . . . I'm sorry, but rename your book and rename it now.

But how do you get the title? Well, once again there is no secret method passed down from generation to generation. The title needs to have a relation to your book in some way. Why call it Bird Watchers when it's a book about Whale Watchers? It can be something obscure or a deeper meaning that people will only understand once they've read the book, but it still should relate to your book somehow.

I struggle at coming up with titles. I often have many names before I settle on one. For example I'll use my first novel Brothers Blood. That one went from "The super cool story without a super cool name" (I kid you not, it was called that for a good length of time) to "Young Prince." I hated Young Prince. It fit the book, it did, but it sounded like it was a children's book. Eventually I settled on Brothers Blood. The book is about two brothers battling for the throne and also about how their bloodline is special. It fits.

Freelander and Ewah are the last names of the MC's in those two books. Those were easy.

Guardian of Calandria started out as Johnny Five: Savior of the Fae (crappy title, but at the time the story was actually going to be a satire) then as the plot adapted to become a serious novel, it became Guardian of the Fae before I settled on Guardian of Calandria. It is easily figured out how that relates to the book once it's read.

I have From the Ashes which started out as Risen From the Ashes. That title is basically a metaphor and it's relation to the book is revealed in the final chapter.

Draygon Frost is another one that is simple. Siobhan is the MC, she's Draygon and has frost magic. Blamo. Draygon Frost is born.

Now I'm not saying my names are the best, I'm just trying to show ways you can come up with your titles and how they could maybe relate to your book.

Sit down and think about your book. Is there a deeper meaning to it? Is it about two people who fall in love? Does their love have a name? Is there a single city it takes place in? Maybe there's a magic orb they have to search for, your book could be named after that orb. Any one of those thought lines could lead to a name for your book and/or series. It's okay to start with one name and eventually change it. Until the book is published in print there's nothing stopping you from changing the name.

And if it's a series and you want to come up with a name for the series as a whole, in addition to each book, think about the books as a single entity. Here's some published examples: The Mortal Instruments are tools of the shadwhunters which are the focus of the books. The Divergent trilogy are books following Tris who is *gasp* Divergent. The Hunger Games is about, shock face, the hunger games that Katnis gets drafted into.

For my trilogy I call it the Celestial Children Trilogy, this is because the three children which are the main focus of the books each have a celestial entity they're attributed too. Child of the Sun, Child of the Stars, Child of the Moon. For me, those are very easy to come up with. You might not have something as clear in your series to tie them together. But if you take a moment to really think about it, I'm sure you can find an underlying theme that works for all the books. If I were to make GoC into a series I could have two potential names: The Wilders Saga/Series/Trilogy or something which uses Calandria because it's about the Wilders which are from Calandria. There's nothing wrong with the series being after a race of people within it. Right now, unless I come up with something I like better, my Draygon books are called just that: The Draygon Books. If/when I know how many are going to be in the series I'll know if it's a Duology/trilogy/or what.

Do you have a series of books that take place in a world called Allegra? Well, you could call it the Allegrian Series. Is your lead character through all the books a Wiccan? You can call it the Wicca Books. Is a young witch called a Witchling? The Witchling Trilogy. Break the books down and find the commonality in them. They don't have to be some brilliant names, they just have to work.

There is a name within your books somewhere. Be patient, it will come to you. It's also possible what you name it now gets changed if/when you're picked up by a publisher.

I think that covers everything on titles, or at least everything I can think of.