We’re following up yesterday’s post with an examination of my own title experience, which right now, has been two books.
As some of you know, the original title of Secret Society Girl, as reported in Publisher’s Lunch, was Confessions of a (Secret) Society Girl.
Early in the editorial process, “Confessions” was nixed because there was a bit of a glut of confessional titles on the marketplace at that time. We also lost the parentheses, because they were durn confusin’ and would screw up the alphabetical listings in the card catalogs and computer systems. It would never do for my book to be listed under ( rather than under S. So now we were dealing with the title Secret Society Girl. (As it is, there was one chain of bookstores which had my book erroneously listed as Ssecret Scoiiety Girl, by Diana Petefrreund, and I’m so not kidding about that.)
Now, the trend in modern publishing is to append the words “a novel” to any work of mainstream novel-length fiction. This, apparently, is to warn the reader that the book is a work of fiction, and not a memoir, or a cookbook, or a biography, or a self-help guide. Seriously, most hardcover releases have this baby slapped on. Cell: A Novel. The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel, Brother Odd: A Novel.
I’m not necessarily a fan of this trend, but I am a fan of clarity. I’m also a fan of the classic literary subtitle, a’la Vanity Fair‘s “A Novel Without a Hero” or Clarissa‘s “A History of a Young Lady” (which, to be fair, Richardson, is actually a novel of the history of a young lady, but whatever…). When my editor suggested the appendage of “An Ivy League Novel” I thought it had a touch of the Thackeraean descriptor about it, since the book is not just about a girl in a secret society, but a girl in an Ivy League secret society, and about her life in college in general. She’s not a Mason or anything. She’s in a college society. (Though really, I wait patiently for the day when the muse shall deliver unto me a subtitle on the level of “The Modern Prometheus.”)
And I’m sure someone has already come up with this, but is there a book out there called “A Novel: A Novel?” Or, better yet: “A Novel: A Critical Examination of the Need for Superfluous Subtitles in Modern Fiction?” Call my agent.
And, while mainstream fiction loves “a novel,” genre fiction loves series branding. The new trend in genre fiction is for series to be called out using a descriptor followed by “novel.” You most often see this in the world of paranormal romance: Light My Fire: An Aisling Grey, Guardian, Novel, If Angels Burn: A Novel of the Darkyn, Rebel Ice: A Stardoc Novel. So, on occasion, readers have mixed up these two types of subtitles and thought that my series is called “Ivy League.” It’s not. It’s the Secret Society Girl series. In the inside back cover of the first book, it says “Bantam Dell will publish the second book in the Secret Society Girl series in 2007.” In the inside cover of the second book it says, “Look for the first book of the Secret Society Girl series:” and then has a picture of the paperback cover of SSG.
So that’s how we got the title for the first book.
When I first sold the books, the second book in the series was described in the pitch as Chronicles of a Secret Society Girl. Which now, looking back on it, I think sounds so much like the first one that people would have been very confused and the whole thing would have been A Bad Idea. Anyway, obviously, once we dropped “confessions,” “chronicles” went the way of the dodo. When I turned in the proposal, (though I joked about calling it Secret Society Girl Gets Laid) I called it Secret Society Girl Sub Rosa.
“Sub Rosa,” some may note, means “Under the Rose.” It’s a Latin term that harkens back to any number of legends from classic mythology to Roman dinner parties to early Christian meetings underground, and medieval secret societies. In fact, it is postulated that the Rosacrucians (i.e., knights of the rosy cross) adopted that symbol not because of any weird rose/female/Mary Magdalene imagery as hypothesized by Dan Brown et al., but rather, because of their propensity for meeting “sub rosa.” Basically, it’s an old fashioned way of “keeping it on the down low.”
Apparently, populations speaking Latin not being what they once were, everyone felt it best my titles were in English. Classics majors everywhere felt my pain. But “Under the Rose” is more unwieldy than simply “Sub Rosa,” plus it doesn’t have that great sibillance to match with SSG, so we dropped the SSG and stuck with the three word title of Under the Rose.
So here we are. I love the title. I think it’s perfect, for people who have read the first book, and thus will get the Rose imagery, for people who haven’t read the first book, but think the title has a certain ring to it, and most importantly of all (this is my main thing for titles) for people to think while they are reading the book. Plus it meant we got to put a rocking rose on the back cover.
The only downside is that the acronym UTR is not as aesthetically pleasing as SSG. It sounds, perhaps, like an illness, or maybe The Utne Reader.
The titles of my unpublished novels rocked hard. So hard in fact, that three of them have recently been used in published novels of the same genre. Yes, I did have that momentary twinge of, “Hey! Mine!” but mostly, I’m just pleased as punch that other people thought the titles were as good as I thought they were.
8 Responses to Titles, or We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Engleesh!