Writing popular fiction

one of or any combination of four things: exotic events (a foreign background, fantasy plot, or glamorous profession), suspenseful action (a chase, a race against time), a violent incident (death, injury, rape), or sex. A title should usually be as short as possible, and the promise of one of those four elements should be carried in one key word and possibly one or two modifying words. For example:
    Exotic events:
The Hong Kong Caper
or
The Boat to Singapore
suggest a foreign background;
The Gentle Unicorn, A Journey to Atlantis
, or
Ghost Story
suggest a fantasy plot;
Starlet, The Gossip Columnist
, or even
Airport
suggest a glamorous profession.
    Suspenseful action:
The Running Man, Flight into Fear
, or
Smith's Escape
suggest a chase; 30
Seconds Over Tokyo, The Desperate Hours, Last Chance
, or
The Ticking Clock
suggest a race against time.
    A violent incident:
Deadly Edge, Anatomy of a Murder, One Body Too Many
, or
Killer's Choice
suggest death;
The Bleeding Man
or
Scars
suggest injury;
The Mishandled Girl
or
The Lady Killer
suggest rape.
    Sex:
The Love Machine, The Ravishers, Nude with a Gun
, or
The Million-Dollar Babe
all suggest sex.
    New writers generally make one of seven mistakes when choosing a title for their novel. Here are those mistakes, in an easy-to-refer-to list:
    Dull titles
. Remember that a title must have some action word that promises one of those four quantities already discussed. Titles like
The House, The Place by the Sea
, or
The Circus
don't especially whet the book buyer's appetite.
    Cliché Titles
. Do not use old sayings, famous quotations, or punch lines from well-known jokes or proverbs as titles. They will be so familiar that the book buyer will only yawn at them. Titles such as
Murder Will Out, Winner Takes All, Thou Shalt Not Kill
, and
The Tables Turn
will gain you no readers.
    On the other hand, if you take your title from a poem, proverb, or quotation which is unknown or known but still fresh, you might have something interesting, like:
The Dead of Winter, The Clash of Distant Thunder, The Naked and the Dead
, or
Alas, Babylon
. Also, if you choose a well-known phrase and give it a clever twist, the resultant title may well intrigue a potential reader, as would be the case with each of these titles:
Do Your Christmas Killing Early, Murder is the Best Policy
, and
Slay ground
(which twists a single common word).
    General titles
. Titles that are too general are similar to those that are too dull, with one important difference—even a colorful word will make a bad title if it is too general, offering no distinct promise. For example,
Dragons, Warriors, The Sun
, and
Rat
would be too general to make good titles, while
Soft Come the Dragons, The Unborn Warriors, The Other Side of the Sun
, and
The Stainless Steel Rat
are all successful science fiction titles.
    Incomprehensible titles
. No reader will be attracted to a book bearing a title like
The Poisonous Colchicum
or
The Hyperborean Giant
, while they could be intrigued by
The Poisonous Herb
or
The Frozen Giant
. Every word in a title should be understandable at a glance.
    Misleading titles
. You wouldn't call a Western, set in a great fir forest where the sky is seldom seen, something like
The Starless Trail
, which sounds as much like a science fiction story as like a Western. An excellent suspense novel by Stephen Geller may have suffered in sales by having a title that promised sex more than suspense—
She Let Him Continue
. Readers seeking erotic fiction probably skimmed it in the store, discovered it wasn't for them, and dropped it. Suspense readers not interested in erotica would never have picked it up. Even though the title fit the story quite well, it was a bad choice. The title must promise exactly what the book delivers.
    Revealing titles
. If there is any mystery whatsoever in your plot, don't choose a title that gives away the killer's identity or the fate of your hero.
The Murderous Schoolmarm
, if the killer indeed is the schoolmarm in the end, is a foolish title choice.
My Brother's A Killer
would be a bad title for a mystery in which the brother was, indeed, the murderer. You know enough not to use the technique of foreshadowing to spoil suspense for your reader, and you should be equally aware of the disastrous effect of a give-away title.
    Arty titles. Your Huddled Masses Yearning to Be Free, The Meaning of the Archbishop's Death, The Implications of Troy's Kidnapping, Death Scares Me Not
, and other