Sherri’s back today with an excellent guest post about one of those essential tasks that can give even the best of us fits: picking a title for your book.
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Finding the right title for my books is something I spend a lot of time contemplating. Often a title doesn’t come to me for a particular book until I sit down to write the book blurb for my publisher. Need and Truth, books two and three in my Finding Anna series, were like this. The right title wasn’t coming to me no matter how many minutes—hours—I spent thinking about it. I was at a total loss. I was discussing Finding Anna, Book 2 with my editor one day, and she suggested I go ahead and write book summaries for marketing, and see if a title came to me. Sure enough, after I finished, I noticed a theme. Need. Could she be what he needed? Could he be what she needed? Could they find what they needed in each other?
Red Zone, my newest novel, set to release February 7, 2013, was the exact opposite. I knew even before I started writing what the title would be. The hero, Gage Daniels, is a professional football player. I knew I wanted to utilize a football reference in the title, I just had to find the one that would be the best fit. It’s a romantic suspense novel, and I wanted something that would reflect that. In football, the red zone is the stretch of field between the twenty yard line, and the end zone. They are the last yards that stand between the offense putting points on the board. It’s the part of the field that either makes or breaks a team. They pull together and score, or they fall apart, and lose the precious opportunity.
Every story is different, but for me, it’s important to take the time to find the right title for a book. It should say something about the story whether it be the overall theme, or something more vague. Either way, the title should mean something, and shouldn’t be rushed. It’s better to take the time to find a title that works, than to pick something generic that has no meaning.
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Biography/About: Sherri is the author of four novels: Hidden Threat, Slave (Finding Anna Book 1), Need (Finding Anna Book 2), Behind Closed Doors (A Daniels Brothers’ Novel), and a short story, A Christmas Proposal. She lives in central Ohio with her husband and three cats. Her mother fostered her love for books by reading to Sherri when she was a child. Stories have been floating around in her head for as long as she can remember, but she didn’t start writing them down until five years ago. It has become a creative outlet that allows her to explore a wide range of emotions while having fun taking her characters through all the twists and turns she can create. When she’s not writing, she can usually be found helping her husband in his woodworking shop.
Social Media Links:
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sherri-Hayes/122511444477280?ref=hl
Website – http://www.sherrihayesauthor.com/
Twitter – https://twitter.com/Sherri_Hayes
Goodreads – http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4496779.Sherri_Hayes
Blog – http://www.sherri-hayes.blogspot.com/
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