How Do You Like Your Book Titles?

There are short book titles:

And long book titles:

Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog

Per favore dite a mia madre che faccio il pubblicitario lei pensa che sono un pierre e che quindi regalo manciate di free entry e consumazioni gratis a chi mi pare, rido coi vips, i calciatori le veline e le giornaliste, leggo Novella e mi fotografano i paparazzi, entro neI privé saltando la coda, bevo senza pagare, sono ghiotto di tartine e gin tonic, ho la casa piena di oggetti di design, conosco Paris Hilton, Tom Ford ed Emilio.

(That one is actually in the Guinness Book of Records as longest title.)

The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure

Some series have matching book titles:

While others don't:

A few make up their own words:

Some are questions:

Others end with periods or exclamation marks:

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What's your preferred kind of title: short, long, matched for series, questions, sentences? Do the titles of your own books follow some pattern, or do you change the style based on the story itself?


And a note: the order of the books listed was based solely on their titles, in case you were wondering. I have not read all of them, nor are they from the same age group/genre.

-----The Golden Eagle

I'm Afraid My Novel's Title Implies There Are Vampires, Of Which There Are Actually None

Have you ever run into the problem where you've got an awesome title for your novel, but later realize other people might think it means something entirely different than what it's really all about?

You see, I'm currently revising a Science Fiction book. It has ships and planets and galaxies and races and government and the usual SF stuff. (Although I'm striving to make sure it's original in other ways.) The issue is that there's the word "blood" in the title.

It just recently occurred to me that might be a bad idea. Nowadays, with the advent of vampires and werewolves and faeries and other creatures, I think a lot of shelf-passersby might categorize it as a Paranormal/vampire novel.

Oops. My novel has no connection to the genre, and I wouldn't want people to mistakenly think it's related to vampires. So I've decided to re-title it with something blood-free and SF-ish.

But it's just that I liked the old title.

*sigh*

Has this kind of thing ever happened to you?


-----The Golden Eagle