Saturday, March 20, 2010

eBook Experiment - Titles - The Good, The Bad, and The Spammy

Sometimes a book just wants a certain title. This one wanted a title that I really wasn't sure about, but it did really fit the book. It's the title of a book within the story, and a label that the unfortunate heroine gets applied to her. It's kinda thematic and all that.

And I find it odd that I haven't had any negative response to it. (So far. Not that many people have seen it, yet.)

The title is The Whore of Freedom.

It's a provocative title, and that's a good thing. You want a title people might take a double-look at. And since the book wants that title and all that, I can't think of a better one.

Most of the arguments that I can come up with against it comes down to "it's provocative." And I have to think, hey, I'm the Daring Novelist not the Ninny Novelist.

There is one practical argument against it - it contains a word that could get caught in spam filters. Even though I don't intend to promote it by email, pretty much any promotion online is going to be affected by spam filters and word blacklists.

Luckily we promote books by author name as well as by title. In particular, the website associated with a book can be the author name or a title. So it becomes especially important for me to decide whether to use a pseudonym or not. I think I've pretty much decided to publish under my own name. It keeps things simple.

The other potential downside of the provocative title is that it doesn't really give a good picture of the story by itself. And that's where the cover comes in - and why a good cover is important even in an ebook. Later tonight I will post the beta version of the cover I came up with, with some commentary as to why I chose it.

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