Yes and no. That blog title caught your attention, didn’t it?

And while most writers bemoan the fact, it’s still true that many if not most readers will indeed judge a book by its cover … and its title.

I am miserably bad at finding titles for my own work. I was young and stubborn when my first novel came out and I insisted on my version of the title—years later, I learned that the publisher had been right, but it was a little late then. My best title ever, The Illusionist, was a suggestion given by a friend. So what this all means is that I think a lot about titles.

Terri Marie has this to say about finding the right title:

The title of your book is the billboard for the words and ideas you are giving to people. Those four to seven words or so are most critical of all the words you write.

A dear friend of mine, John Harricharan, author of best-selling, “When You can Walk on Water, Take the Boat,” explained to me that the real title comes from within you, like the book. I finally understood that I did not “try” to write the book. It wrote itself. So too, will the title come from within you. What John meant, is that you must love the title you choose. Be confident with it. With that confidence, the energy of the book can come through, almost like a light shining through the window.

In other words, it does not matter so much what the actual title is. What matters is the feeling you have when you read, see or say the title. That’s the key.

Wow. Just a little pressure there. I wish I could have that upwelling of feeling about a title, but it’s never happened yet.

Fortunately for most of us, she goes on to offer some very practical advice:

1. Write down all possible titles. Anything and everything you can think of. You never know which phrase may catch and stick.
2. Pay attention to how YOU feel when you tell others your title. Do you feel proud, tentative, scared, stupid? The feeling you want is like a proud mother or father of your new little baby. Give it the best name you can. It will be called that name the rest of its life.
3. I also researched other titles on amazon. You don’t want a title that everyone has. It will get lost. You also don’t want a title so obscure or undescriptive that nothing will come up on a search.
4. It needs to have intrigue and yet be clear. “Things Your Priest Doesn’t Want You To Know,” would be intriguing. So would “Things Your (fill in the blank) Doesn’t Want You To Know.” We humans like to know what others are doing, thinking feeling etc.
5. Does your title help the reader to become a better person? We want to strive higher, yet it has to be an achievable goal without huge effort. If your title is “How to increase your IQ by 10 points, studying an extra 5 hours a day,” I’m not interested.
6. Sum up your book in one sentence. Write as many as you can of these one liners. If you get just one chance to give a message from your book to others, what would you say? That’s often all you get. Use it wisely.
7. When it all comes down to it, go with your gut.

Obviously a couple of these suggestions apply only to nonfiction books, but novelists can extrapolate what they say into the fiction realm.

Feeling better? I’m not. I currently have a novel in search of a title. While it’s true that the future publisher may change the title (and probably will), it’s still important to present something strong and compelling to the publisher. With this in mind, I narrowed my options down to two possibilities. I sent them out to my online writing community and asked for opinions, and they came back weighing in more or less equally for each of the two titles. Damn!

Over at Writing-World, John Floyd has some things to say about choosing the “right” title: it shouldn’t be dull, it should be easy to remember, it should be appropriate. Read his entire article for sources to jog your imagination.

And for a little fun, once you’ve got a title or two in mind, head over to Lulu’s title scorer to see how it might work for you!

In the meantime, I’m stuck with my title dilemma, none of my research having given me any definitive direction. I hope your quest goes better! And if you have any secrets, methods, or ideas about finding the right title, please share it here! Then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

***

Everyone’s life is busier every year. Work, family, friends, church, volunteer obligations—we’ve loaded our lives with so much stuff that writing is often neglected. Finishing three to four hundred pages in this chaos can seem impossible.

Yet the dream of holding your first book in your hands persists. You know you have to do whatever it takes to keep your dream alive.

Great!

This is written just for you, not for those who pay lip service to writing. Since none of those unsavory types are here right now, draw closer, I want to share some tips on finding a few extra minutes here and there for writing.

First, writing time isn’t found: it’s made, and you need to decide where you will make time. I don’t know your life, so I can’t tell you exactly where your writing time goes. You need to be honest with yourself about where you waste time during a day.

A friend lamented that she has very little time to write. Yet, almost every conversation we have includes the following questions: Did you watch such and such show? No. What about this show? No.

Don’t get me wrong I have my favorite shows, but DVRs and VCRs were invented so I don’t have to sit through twenty minutes of commercials. If you watch two one-hour long programs a week, you can recover forty minutes to write.

Are you a perpetual volunteer? I’ve done my share of time on boards and committees, but there comes a time when you have to say no. Volunteering is a monumental time vacuum. Practice saying this with me, “I’m sorry, but I can’t help this time.” Trust me, it gets easier each time you say those words.

Maybe neither of these is you. Like I said, I don’t have a crystal ball into your life. Think long and hard about the activities you participate in, and ask yourself, do I want this more than I want a career as a writer? Then scale back the activities you can’t live without, so you can fit a few more minutes of writing into your day.

At the very least, schedule a half an hour of your day to write. It shouldn’t be too hard I just saved you forty minutes, but if you’re not a TV watcher then, wake up a half an hour early, stay awake a half an hour later, or sit in your car at lunch, whatever it takes to get that half hour. Your family can live without you for thirty minutes. Shocking I know. I was mortified to find out my husband didn’t sit in stasis when I’m not around, waiting for me to come home and plugged him in again. So use that time for writing, the world will keep revolving even if you’re not supervising.

Stop telling yourself, “I can’t write because …” You CAN accomplish anything you want. When you say, I am going to do x-y-z, then x-y-z gets done. Make writing a daily activity like changing your underwear.

The only way to get to THE END is to sit down, begin, stay seated, and keep working. Writing is hard work. Writers who succeed make a commitment to their work. You can too.

Stacy Verdick Case carves her half-hour out every morning, and guards it like a lioness. She is the author of the Catherine O’Brien mystery series. The first book in the series A Grand Murder is available in paperback, ebook, and now audio from Before the Fall Books. Visit Stacy on her blog, for more information on her writing—and general musings.

Check out her book and blog, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Compelling characters are characters that play a lot of roles inside their own role. They’re entertaining and engaging, those two overused words that actually work in this case: compelling characters are people that we want to see more of, learn more about, see interacting with others, watch as they navigate the situations into which they’re plunged.

To be seriously compelling, however, characters have to go beyond mere entertainment. Compelling characters are characters that teach us something beyond the storyline in which they find themselves. They force us to look at something—themselves, the world, a given issue or situation—and learn something about it.

At their very best, they force us to learn something about ourselves. The lack of limits Lisbeth Salander (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) acknowledges may make me envy her … but she reminds me in the process of the fact that my own limits are pretty firmly entrenched. Almost every character in Steinbeck’s novels is a fundamentally lonely person … and as I read about them I’m reminded of my own extremely high loneliness threshold, my desire for solitude, even as I sympathize with their need for conenction.

Phil Rickman writes novels in which the characters move fluidly from one story to another, to the point where they become very real to the reader. I’ve caught myself wondering how Moira Cairns would respond to something that happens in my own life and have to remind myself that she really only exists on the pages of his books. The recent popularity of Downton Abbey indicates that compelling characters don’t know historic or cultural boundaries, as continents of people find themselves enthralled by the joys and problems encountered by Lord and Lady Grantham, by Mr. Bates and Anna.

And how can they not hold a mirror up to us, even as we watch them live out their stories? Just as Nietzche said about the abyss, we look into the characters … and they look into us. Compelling characters create a connection between who they are and who we are, so that in a sense we can feel what they feel, imagine being them, maybe bring a slightly different sort of insight back with us into our own lives and dramas.

So … what do you think? What creates a compelling character? I’d love to hear it. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Note that I said “seen as an authority.” The sad reality is that the internet has changed the way we perceive others. The person who has invested years of her life to become an expert is easily supplanted by a Jane-come-lately who knows how to wrap Google around her little finger.

Authority is about perception. What people say about you is more important than what you say about yourself.

So whether you really are an expert, or you want people to think you are, here are some steps to getting there:

• Forget selling, it’s about teaching. The “hard sell” may still work when it’s a Jeep or a Honda you’re selling, but it doesn’t work in the internet world. What is valued online is content, knowledge, information. Use your website and your social media posts to teach people about your field of expertise. The more they see you teaching, the more authority you’ll be given.
• Content is king. Providing lots of foundational content that changes frequently will help you become the go-to authority in your field.
• Provide strong headlines. Most writers don’t think in terms of headlines, but they’re essential. Without a great headline, no one will even get as far as reading your content.
• Find your ambassadors. Every time you have a positive experience with a client, reader, or customer, use that person for a reference, referral, or testimonial. If you don’t ask, they won’t offer. Remind them to tell others about how great you are.
• Make them ask for you. In the heyday of direct-mail marketing, the power was in the list. Guess what——it’s still true! Whether you manage an opt-in email list (you can call it a newsletter if you’d feel more comfortable with that), have people subscribing
  to your blog, or accumulate followers on Twitter, the more people request contact from you, the higher your authority ranking will be.
• Don’t neglect SEO. Search engine optimization is still real. It needs to be integrated with social media, but it’s still one of the most important things you can do to boost the authority of your site.
• Take care of your people. Getting followers and subscribers is just the beginning. You need to be available to them, keep your updates current with them, and interact with them. The more you do, the more they’ll follow.

And that’s it. Not all that difficult, is it? The key to becoming (and staying!) an authority isn’t any kind of esoteric knowledge, but just going through these simple steps … and then doing them over and over again. Try it and see how it works for you! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Two years ago, I had a conversation with bestselling author Jodi Picoult (I adapted one of her novels for the stage and she’d come to see it performed). She said that it used to be her best sales were in bookstores, but not anymore. “It’s Walmart and CostCo now that are selling the most books.”

Really.

“The book trade” is defined quite clearly. That trade consists of retail stores that exist primarily to sell books (or at least, were founded with that purpose——nobody cared if sideline product revenues happened to eclipse actual book sales).

K-Mart and Target sell lots of books, but they are not classified as “bookstores” by anyone in the retail world. Kroger sells lots of books, but they’re in the grocery trade. Costco sells lots of books (and groceries), but they are in the “wholesale club” trade. Your books may happen to do well at office supply stores and on websites, but that doesn’t put them in the book trade category.

These distinctions exist, among other reasons, to help define sales turf among sales reps of all sorts. They might be in-house sales reps, contract reps, distributor’s reps, etc. When one signs an exclusive contract with a sales representative (whether it’s an independent commissioned sales rep or a book distributor with a staff of sales reps), the contract defines the boundaries of that exclusive territory. “Book trade” distributors have exclusivity within the book trade, but do not have exclusivity outside the book trade. Whether that sales rep can sell to other territories (wholesale clubs, gift shops, grocery stores, sporting goods stores, office supply stores, hardware and home improvement stores, etc.) is also determined contractually, as those territories may already be assigned to other sales reps.

This may seem archaic, but it’s very real. If you’ve ever worked in a business with a sales staff (whether they are assigned to a department in a department store, sell radio ads, cars, whatever), you know that the issue of turf for these very competitive people is very important. Further, the people on the receiving end of those sales calls also like the notion of exclusive territory, since it keeps the number of sales calls down to a minimum (you don’t want five different sales reps pitching the same product to show up on your doorstep!).

How many books do the book aisles at K-Mart and Target have to sell before they are considered part of “the trade”? Already they’re pushing more than a lot of the independent bookstores some of you are trying to get your books into. Granted this market caters to beach reading and dictionaries for the back-to-school crowd, but it’s still a large market.

As I already mentioned, K-Mart and Target are general merchandise discounters. It doesn’t suit their needs to be reclassified as a bookstore, grocery store, auto parts store, furniture store, clothing store, even though they sell all those things. Businesses that manufacture/sell products in particular categories report on those stores as a distinct component of their business. “We sell X percent of our products to hardware and home improvement stores, X percent to big-box retailers, X percent at our website…” and so on. Each category has its own specialized realities, so it’s not lumped in with categories that operate differently. There are different customer profiles, different sales terms, different procedures for pitching products, different definitions of “standard industry practices,” and sometimes even different labeling requirements.

A businessperson (and as an author, you are a businessperson, whether you like it or not) who ignores a potentially lucrative market is not a particularly good businessperson. At the very least, the businessperson ought to research that market and decide if it’s suitable for his/her product. It’s safe to say, however, that each particular category in retailing has to be considered on its own terms.

What is beach reading? In the case of K-Mart, Walmart, and Target, you’re really talking about specific types of books that can be sold in large numbers to the kind of customer that buys books in those stores. Bibles, parenting books, dictionaries, and road atlases may not qualify as “beach reading,” but they happen to sell well in those stores. You probably wouldn’t try to sell paté de foie gras in K-Mart or Target, either, even though some people might buy it: too few are likely to buy it to justify offering it for sale.

Consumers are pretty smart. They know that if they want specialty items, they’re most likely to find exactly what they desire at a specialty store. If they want mass-market items, they’ll usually find the best price at a general merchandise discounter. Harry Potter? Anywhere and everywhere, just find the best price. Balzac? Hie thee to a bookseller!

Let me turn the question around. How many espressos, large coffees, bagels, muffins, mints, music CDs and movie DVDs do the large bookstore chains sell before they are classified as a Starbucks that sells books instead of being part of “the trade”?

As far as the retail world is concerned, until they take down the Barnes & Noble sign and replace it with a Starbuck’s sign, it’s a bookstore. Among other things, reclassifying a store means reassigning a valued client to a different sales rep. As that rep might put it, “that’s taking food out of my children’s mouths.” A sales rep scorned can be a very dangerous person indeed.

Reclassifying a store also has to do with consumer perceptions. In the public’s mind, what is one’s purpose for visiting a particular store? If the primary purpose for the vast majority of customers is to drink a latté, and they can optionally buy a book to read while they sip, then it’s best to classify it as a café, advertise it as a café, list it in the Yellow Pages as a café, etc. At one time, A&P was a tea merchant. Eventually, the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company became a grocer. That sort of thing doesn’t happen frequently, but it does happen.

Count up the number of K-Mart or Target stores. Simply getting two copies of your book on the shelves in one of those chains would consume nearly an entire print run for most authors. People buying books in those stores aren’t in the same mindset as people spending an afternoon drinking coffee products and playing chess in a “trade” store. They are in there buying other things, and simply make a pass down the isle to pick up a book to read at the beach.

If a book is suitable to sell in K-mart or Target, and the publisher can afford to produce the book in the quantities required and accept the typical high level of returns that come from those accounts, that’s just super! Just remember that it doesn’t really matter where your books are sold—just that they are. It doesn’t make you better or worse than an author who sells books elsewhere. If I could sell my books effectively at office supply stores, I’d do it!

One important trait for survival in this world is to match your own perceptions of——and responses to——the world to the way the world seems to work. Some people are able to succeed despite some glaring mismatches between their perception and that of those around them.

So sell your book where you can, and then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!