Introducing the Amazing, Patented Title Generator - Cathy Butler

Many children’s writers find giving their book a title one of the trickiest parts of the job. It’s an important consideration, though: along with the jacket design and the name of the author, the title of a book is the thing mostly likely to make a potential reader pluck it from the shelf or leave it be. But what strategy works best? Direct or oblique? Short or long?

There is no single answer: both Joan Aiken’s Is and Russell Hoban’s How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen strike me as excellent, though they have little in common. (Aiken’s of course would give a present-day marketing department conniptions, being virtually invisible to search engines, but that’s a different matter.) Back in 1950, when my mother was a humble secretary at Geoffrey Bles, C. S. Lewis sent them a manuscript called The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, with a note to the effect that this was obviously just a working title - and it was only at Bles’s persuasion that he used it for the published book. History has proved Bles right, but I can see Lewis’s point too: it does look like a working title, once you allow for the beer goggles of hindsight.

Titles have their fashions, like anything else. For example, the big Disney blockbusters of recent years have mostly been past participles: Enchanted, Frozen, Tangled (or “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” as I like to think of them). This snappy style is seen as more in keeping with the busy lifestyles and short attention spans of modern children, but it’s a sobering thought that if Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella had been made today they would have been called Pricked and Slippered.

Around the turn of the millennium there was a vogue in Young Adult fiction for titles that described continuing actions or progressive states, in the form “Verb + ing + Noun”: Gathering Blue, Burning Issy, Missing May and so on. I suppose this was intended to evoke a sense of adolescence as a moving target, a time of change and flux. Any device can be overused, however, and when I wrote Calypso Dreaming (2002) I deliberately reversed the order so as to make my book stand out. How well that strategy worked in terms of sales I leave to historians to record.

If you want to make your own YA title from circa 2000, you can do it by following these simple steps. Turn to page 52 of the book nearest to you and find the first transitive verb; add “ing” to it, and then the name of your first pet. Voilà – there’s your title! (I got Vexing Topsy.)

Alternatively, perhaps you wish to produce a prize-winning children’s novel from the sixties or early seventies? In that case it pays to give it a title in the form:

“The + Slightly-Quirky-Noun-Used-as-Adjective + Noun” 

This will confer the air of poignant obliquity so appealing to publishers of that era, home to such books as The Dolphin Crossing, The Owl Service, The Chocolate War and The Peppermint Pig. Naturally the success of this strategy depends a little on one’s choice of words, so to make it easier I invite you to use the chart below, which contains a selection of words approved by our experts as Puffin-friendly. Simply look for the month and day of your birth to find your own title. There are 84 possible combinations, any of which would, I’m sure, have been a shoo-in for the Carnegie shortlist and warmly recommended by Kaye Webb as “a thoughtful novel about growing up that will appeal to slightly older girls.”

Mine’s The Blue Moon Promise. What’s yours?