Quote:
Originally Posted by meeera
None of those are generic. I'm talking about the titles which are already titles of ten or twenty or more other books in print. To take the most generic of the ones you've mentioned: if you say, "I've just read Dune", pretty much everyone knows which book you read. If you say, "I've just read Shattered", no-one's any the wiser.
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Despite my little attempts at humour, I think your advice is good. Not that I personally find one-word titles in any way off-putting or otherwise peevish, it's just not a good idea from a marketing perspective.
When I decided on the title for my first published novel (and, as a result, had a pretty good idea of the titles for the subsequent novels) I actually did a check on Amazon and a few other places. I was only able to find one or two others with the word in the title - and no exact matches. Great! ... I thought. The problem was that it was more than 2 years later that I finally published, and by that time I was able to find many books using the word in their title. And now? Let's not even go there. My book is way, way down the list.
Even if I had really wanted one-word titles I had other choices, and I may have been wiser to go with those. The first book could have (legitimately, and with equal or greater relevance) had a title of "Aaranya" - which not only would have been less common, it would have been like starting a company called Aardvark Enterprises
. ... But, by the time I got to publishing the first novel, I was pretty stuck on the series titles that I had chosen and I kept them. Marketing never has been my strong point.
