Book and Chapter Titles

I'm going to start with the easy one first: chapter titles. I love chapter titles, and I love seeing them in the page header. I refer to them while reading, guessing the meanings behind them.

I put a lot of thought into creating chapter titles in my work. Sometimes the title is obvious about the upcoming content. Other times they refer to overall themes, significant events, or chunks of time.

Maybe this is why the chapter lengths in my novels are variable. Splitting chapters is one of the last things I do in a draft. I know readers don't always like long chapters so I try to keep them a reasonable length. Most tend to be around 10-20 pages, I think. But the odd chapter ends up being quite long. I try to manage this through multiple section breaks.

Unlike chapter titles, creating book titles are much more difficult. Book titles are not copyrighted, but it’s been challenging to devise a unique title that is reflective of my book and genre. The thesaurus is really handy here, and so is test running titles with people. To further help with uniqueness, I decided to have a series title.

Book 2—Twisted Monarch—was a unique, easy choice. But the title for Imperious Realm was a panicked, 11th hour decision. It was the last thing I did before hiring a cover designer.

My book titles appear to be unique—so far—but I try to put thought around the title early. Hopefully I can keep that up!