About Covers and Titiles . . . (Patricia Potter)

I’m often asked about covers and titles. How much input do we have?
Do we have a veto?

When we first started this blog, we asked what people would like discussed. I remember someone mentioning covers, but then it kinda got lost as the year went on.

The subject came up yesterday when I and three writer friends did our annual pilgrimage to the main Shelby County Library (Memphis) where we discuss the appeal of romance to its branch librarians. It’s all part of their in-house training and one we eagerly embrace. Any time spent in spreading the word about romances is time well spent.

But it reminded me that everyone seems interested in covers, bad and good, and titles, bad and good, and with more than fifty published books, I’ve had my share of all four.

I must confess I’m not very good at titles, but every once in a while I have a stroke of genius. In my mind. Usually not in my editor’s. Probably half of my titles survive, and the others are usually the product of a call at 4:15 p.m. on Wednesday with the news that either the publisher or marketing department hates my title and I have to have a new one in the next 15 minutes (This has happened with four different publishers).

This sends me screaming to my Thesaurus while my editor and I frantically go over magically marketable words. We usually compromise on something that I don’t think is nearly as apt, but there it is.

I must mention my favorite story of a title change. I’d written a romantic suspense full of angst. The hero was a former cop who had served ten years of a life sentence in prison for killing his partner. Out working on a road gang, he saves the life of the heroine and her son after an accident but in so doing is badly injured by an explosion. He suffers a concussion and loses his memory. He doesn’t have amnesia. He has brain damage. He will never regain his memory.

As I said. Angst. Angst all over the place. The heroine has her own tragic story. She was a rising district attorney when her husband, also an attorney, became involved in drugs and corruption and killed himself. Needless to say, she lost her job and is raising a young son on her own.

I titled it “Twisted Shadows.” The title fit the book, which was full of shadows for both characters. The hero didn’t know whether he had committed the crime of which he was accused. The heroine is terrified of loving again, especially someone with the hero’s background.

My editor called and said she had great news. They were changing the title to “Home For Christmas.”

I was, to say the least, stunned. There was no Christmas in the book.

But the publisher had decided to make it a Christmas book and I had to go back and put in a Christmas thread, and “Twisted Shadow” became “Home for Christmas.”

The book really did turned out to be better with the added Christmas touches, and it's one of my all-time favorites because it’s so emotional, but I still shake my head every time I remember that phone call.

Then there are often endless discussions about certain words. I’d planned a series of books centering around a newspaper, all with “Devil” someplace in the title. The first, “Tempting The Devil” made it through, but the second did not. Then the publisher thought the title might lead readers to think it could be paranormal or something other than what it was. So we’re going back to “Shadows” for the series, the one underway being “Catch A Shadow.”

Then there are covers. Do we have input? Well . . . yes and no.

We are asked our opinion, then it may or may not be incorporated in the final product. Usually when I see the proofs, it’s really too late to change it. A huge amount of money has already been spent on the cover and any changes will cost dearly.

I’ve been mostly happy with covers although there have been some misses. One, despite great intentions, did not do well in the execution. Two tiny people on the cover looked like hippy action figures, despite the 1500's time period, and it was very likely to qualify for the writer's Hall of Infamy for career-ending covers.

In this case frantic modifications (the people were erased) changed it from horrible to unexciting before it hit the book shelves. But the original cover -- already finished when I saw it -- went out to buyers, and sales fell drastically. Covers, as we all know, can make or break a book.

Ah, the joy of publishing.

What about my fellow bloggers. Good titles? Bad? Cover stories? Bring them on.