How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Kemper Donovan's website.
Quite a lot, I hope! My title, Loose Lips, is the first part of a common phrase: “Loose lips sink ships.” To make certain that this word association occurs in the mind of a would-be reader, I made sure to include a picture of a sinking ship on the cover of the book. The idea is to convey: 1) the action of the story takes place entirely on a boat, and 2) matters on this boat go seriously awry. There is also a subtitle, A Ghostwriter Mystery, which clarifies that this book is a mystery, one in a series, and furthermore, that it does not matter where the book falls within that series, since any one of the Ghostwriter Mysteries can be read on its own. The Ghostwriter in question is the narrator of each book, and in this outing, she reluctantly joins a literary-themed cruise as a lecturer, along with a handful of writer colleagues and a few hundred paying passengers. Would you be surprised to learn that...[read on]
Q&A with Kemper Donovan.
--Marshal Zeringue
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