What's in a name? Or title............

…….Well quite a lot it seems. Authors have fretted over the titles of their masterpieces for centuries without coming to any hard and fast conclusions as to what’s a good one and what’s a clunker.

Lulu, the self-publishing outfit, recently ran a survey which concluded, on what evidence I know not, that single word titles were not a good idea. Since Plato’s “Republic” seems to have done OK for a good few years, I’m not so sure that I go along with their hypothesis and I’m sure I can think of a good many other titles of similar brevity that have lasted.

But titles are important. I recently completed cooperating on a book whose author had chosen a title that seemed to be neither relevant or even catchy. As authors, including myself, are inordinately touchy when it comes to criticism, I refrained from questioning the choice until the job was finished when I asked, as diplomatically as possible, what on earth it meant. Thankfully, I found out that she was as unhappy with it as was I, just unable to think of a better one. We chewed it over and came up with a pretty good one, I think.

And, it consist of more than one word.