The Adventure of the Carmelite Scapular

Titles are hard.


In the modern marketplace, the title of your book has to do more than attract the wandering eye. It also has to identify which of an ever-increasing number of ever-so-much-more-narrowly defined genres it belongs in.

The casual browser doesn’t want to have to read blurb, description, worse yet sample pages in order to find out whether it is actually the near future military werwolf vampire urban fantasy romance that they've been binge-reading these days, or a retro high fantasy action adventure with space ships instead.

Not that this is exactly new. The very idea of SF and Fantasy as definable (and different) brands is this. Brian Aldis did an amusing riff in his encyclopedic history of the field in which he talks about “rich autumnal colours” as one of the signifiers of a Fantasy cover. And someone commented (possibly on Charlie’s blog?) that if they saw another cover of a young woman in tattoos and a leather skirt looking back over her shoulder against a background of night and CO2 ground fog they'd puke up.

Out in the world of historical fiction, there are two kinds of covers I’ve been seeing a lot of. There’s ones which feature a young woman with a challenging expression and lots of diaphanous vaguely-period stuff blowing about her. And there’s ones that are a picture from a pot. Or a fresco — especially for Bronze Age tales, the Minoan frescoes and Mycenaean pottery get a LOT of play.

So my "Crete" should really have The Saffron Gatherer on the cover. Dammit. (Yeah, it's Minoan. Deal with it.)



The novel I'm struggling to name now is modern-day archaeology. Sort of. There are two dominant genres I am aware of that are set in the present day but involve archaeological and historical investigations. One are largely thrillers, the other are more solo adventures.

The lines blur, but the thriller is more likely to have “An international team” in the blurb, one that's “racing to stop a global threat,” and the solo adventure is more likely for the blurb to start with the name of the protagonist. Also, the solo adventurer tends to wear their series nature more openly, if only in the sub-title. (The Swabian Earspoon: a Rake Briskly adventure.)

And especially the later seems to go for artifact titles. Or you could call them MacGuffin titles. Sword of Destiny and Aztec Mask and so forth. Which often matches the content inside; an artifact-centered vision of archaeology, a MacGuffin-driven plot.

So. The fact that I'm both using and deconstructing the formulae means I should probably use an artifact title. That's the way to attract the mainstream audience for this sort of adventure-archaeology romp. But at the same time I'd like to clue in the reader.

So it is tempting to do an Artifact Title that would make the reader go "Wait, what?" In fact, I'm leaning more than a little towards something like The Münster Kylix. A Greek pot in Germany is a clue that something is going on. Also tempting is place names and thing names that just plain sound funny. That's why I used The Enceladus Oinochoe* in my last post.

But at the same time, I'm also tempted to go completely off this formulae with something like, Owed on a Grecian Urn. (Which would be appropriate to the plot, but...would make it look like a quirky detective novel, not an archaeology-inspired adventure.)


* Also appropriate to the plot; Enceladus is a giant met by Athena in a battle that's a frequent subject across several periods of pottery art. And an oinochoe is a small round bottle used to hold scented oils and often apparently worn tied to the wrist of athletes. If I can make the archaeology work out I want to reference that particular fight in the novel in just this way -- pottery art -- as a subtle foreshadow of a later incident. Except for plot reasons the pot should be larger, large enough it can be broken into several pieces -- what they call "orphans" in the antiquities trade -- but broken in such a way the figures aren't damaged.

And then there's the minor problem that more people have heard of Enceladus the prominent moon of Saturn than Enceladus the prominent figure of the Gigantomachy. It would give the title rather more a science fictional flavor than I intend at this early stage.