How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit G. M. Malliet's website, Facebook page, and Instagram home.
Titles are nearly as important as covers. It is one of the pleasures of browsing a bookstore that you can be drawn to a book you never knew you wanted by its title alone.
I’ve been lucky with being able to keep my original ideas for book titles. I believe I’ve never had an editor request an alternative title except in the case of the St. Just books. “Marketing,” a term for a generally anonymous, behind-the-curtain group in publishing, wanted every title in the series to begin with “Death.” (The series began with Death of a Cozy Writer.) After six books, all this “Death” is getting a bit morbid, but I’m stuck with it now, and I do see the wisdom of making it easier for readers to find me.
I have a title I really love for Book #7. I won’t say what it is, lest I break my lucky streak.
Choosing titles is the fun part, however, even given that constraint. Death and the Old Master, a title with layers of meaning, suggested itself to me in a chicken/egg fashion, and became integral to the plot. DCI St. Just is based in Cambridge, and the story concerns an aging master of a fictional Cambridge college called Hardwick. The master is an art expert who acquires a painting that may or may not be...[read on]
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Writers Read: G.M. Malliet (April 2017).
Q&A with G. M. Malliet.
--Marshal Zeringue
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