This morning, I re-watched a couple sessions from the How to Write a Bestseller Course about book packaging and spent the rest of my time thinking about the title of my series and novel.
I liked both the series title and book one title that I had before, but I want to take an objective look at them to ensure that they convey the genre and are an effective advertisement for the contents of the story.
I think my series title is clear. It communicates the genre and overall setting, so I’m thinking of making that larger on the cover and then having the title of each individual book be smaller underneath it, like a subtitle. This pattern appears fairly regularly in the top 100 lists of various fantasy genres. . . but at the same time, the books that use it do not look like my kind of book. Several of them are sexy books that just happen to be set in fantasy or urban fantasy setting, and I do not want readers of that type of story picking up my book.
Yeah, as I’m writing this, I realize that I can’t do that. The “respectable” fantasy – the kind of high fantasy that I want my book associated with – does not do that. There are clear titles for each book and the series title is smaller.
So, that puts more importance on my individual book titles. While I do like the original title I had, I’m afraid that its tone is too dark because of the word choice, so I am trying to come up with alternatives.
Essentially, I spent all morning trying to produce two to three words and fell short.