#it coudl have worked if that was the name of a SERIES set within the same city

[rjalker]

If you're publishing actual books then here's a tip:

Make sure the titles of your books are fucking relevant and memorable.

Exibit A of what not to do: The Murderbot Diaries.

The name for the whole series? Great. Descriptive. Can't be confused with anything else or easily forgotten.

The names for each individual story? Terrible.

They are, in chronological order (not publishing order), and the I only reason I know their names is from googling it despite having read each of these stories 4+ times now. This doesn't include the super short stories like the prequel or what I call book 4.5

All Systems Red

Artificial Condition

Rogue Protocol

Exit Strategy

Fugitive Telemetry

Network Effect

None of these titles are actually relevant to the story they tell in any meaninful, memorable way. I have read these books 4+ times now, and the only one whose title I can match up with its order is literally the first one, All Systems Red, because it's literally the first one.

The rest??? If you sent me a title at random I'd have no fucking clue which one it is or what happens in it!

These titles were very blatantly just chosen to follow a theme and sound cool and technological, and like,,,,,,that doesn't fucking work if you actually want people to be able to remember which one is which.

Let's compare this to another of Martha Wells' series, where she actually gives them memorable, meaningful titles!!!

The Cloud Roads

The Serpent Sea

The Siren Depths

The Edge of Worlds

The Harbors of the Sun

All of these titles are descriptive and relevant and meaningful to the story they tell! Once you read them, and hear the name, you're going to know exactly which one is which and what happened in it!

When picking a title for your books, do not just fucking pick some random words that sound cool but have nothing to do with your story! Even All Systems Red is kind of a fucking weird title for the story it actually tells. It sounds way more dramatic than it warrants.

None of The Murderbot Diaries book titles are actually descriptive or memorable in relation to the story they tell. Literally what in the fuck do the words "Rogue Protocol" have to do with the events of the third book??? If the title of your story requires readers to bend over backwards and reach for the farthest edges of their imagination to fit the title to the story, your title fucking sucks.

Your title is meant to do multiple things, including at its most basic, identify the story it tells. It has to be relevant and fitting with the theme of your story. The Cloud Roads does this. It's evocative, it's memorable, it's relevant, even if not literally.

Rogue Protocol does none of these things. Network Effect does none of these things. None of the titles for The Murderbot Diaries evoke anything of the story they tell.

This also applies to The Animorphs, but the Animorphs are absolute shit in every other way possible, so that's not surprising.

They are entirely and completely forgettable. And that's a problem, because literally the entire point of the title is that people remember and are able to identify it.

The titles could work if they were all just like,, normal short stories being published as a compilation. Like chapter titles. But they're not, they're separate books being sold by themselves.

More examples of titles that do their job correctly:

The Golden Compass

The Subtle Knife

The Amber Spyglass

All three of these titles are memorable and identifiable and relevant to the story they tell!

The Crystal Star

the only Star Wars book's name that I can ever remember off the top of my head. A major part of the plot is--you guessed it--a crystalized star!!!!

TLDR:

The title for your published book needs to be memorable and relevant, not just random cool sounding words!

#writing tips #writing advice #Rjalker reads The Murderbot Diaries #Rjalker reads The Books of The Raksura #And like Martha Wells did this with The City of Bones too. #like that title is useless. #yes there's some random offhand not actually relevant lore of people using bones #to tell fortunes. #but that is not actually relevant to the plot or important #there's no epidemico f people being murdered for their bones #it's a bad title #it coudl have worked if that was the name of a SERIES set within the same city #but it's literally just the one book that has next to nothing to do with using bones to tell the future!!! #so it's literally just there to sound cool and be irrelevant