A lot goes into selecting a title for a book or movie, but no matter what you choose, you also have to have what people in the film industry call an elevator pitch: the short and catchy phrase that says what something is about.
Sometimes titles ARE the pitch. “Bambi meets Godzilla.” “Snakes on a plane.” “Young Sherlock Holmes.” But my titles usually aren’t.
The Sparrow is a courtroom drama, set in the context of first contact Science Fiction.
Children of God is a three-generation family saga, with three species and two planets.
A Thread of Grace is war-time thriller about Jewish survival in Nazi-occupied Italy.
Dreamers of the Day is a political romance about the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, when Winston Churchill, Gertrude Bell and Lawrence of Arabia invented the modern Middle East.
The original title for my fifth novel was Eight to Five, Against. Every time I had to make an elevator pitch, I would say, “It’s about Doc Holliday. Those were the actual odds he gave that he would die of tuberculosis before somebody gunned him down.”
A lot of people liked that title, but it was hard to remember and it sounded like a sequel to that movie with Dolly Parton: Eight to Five! This time we get to work early!
My publisher wanted me to come up with something different, so I read through the manuscript again, looking for an evocative phrase.
Stealing from Shakespeare is always good, so my first try was Lost Without Deserving,
from the scene where Doc Holliday quotes Othello to Wyatt Earp: “Reputation, reputation, reputation… It idle and most false, oft got without merit and lost without deserving.”
Still too hard to remember. So I tried again.
A Day When You Were Happy
Something Like Happiness
Reputation
The Edge
No good. No good. No good. At that point, I started to get a little punchy.
The Good, The Bad and The Sickly
Death Takes a Holliday
Holliday on Ice
Lonesome Horse
A Fistful of Lung Tissue
Blazing Poker Chips
and my personal favorite,
TB or not TB
Finally Gina Centrello, the president of Random House Publishing said, “It’s about Doc Holliday. Call it Doc.” I resisted that for a while because I thought every review would start, “Eh, what’s up, Doc?” But Ms. Centrello felt that with the right jacket art, we could avoid that trap, and she was right.
I’ve got to get back to work on Novel Number Six, but next time I’ll tell you what I think that book’s title will be.