Fussing over titles

[mrissa]

I was talking to Michelle about my books, and she brought up an association that has worried me before. timprov suggested that AKICILJ was a good principle to use, but it seems to me that it's opinion more than knowledge. So here we go, and please feel free to elaborate in comments:

[Poll #423689]

Note: please do not get abusive about titles. I have an acquaintance who said things to me (about a different title) like, "Did you pick that title because you want people to ignore your book?" Behavior like that is one reason this person counts as an acquaintance and not as a friend right now. If you think Sampo is a horrible title and you'd never read a book of that name, there are far better ways to express that sentiment.

Comments

[palinade.livejournal.com]

Every time I read your title, I think of my DVD player. The company is Sampo. It's Japanese and a region-free player.

I'm not at all familiar with Finnish myth so I wouldn't know what Sampo meant until I'd read the cover copy (representing a person who would just randomly browse the shelves). I'm not a fan of the weird use of "a novel" as a subtitle (because if it's not a novel, *gasp* we might never know what it was doing in the fiction section of the bookstore!).

OTOH, if Sampo is a hugely important part of the novel--it represents a major theme, character, place, or mythic image--then I'd leave it. Gosh knows many didn't know what Gibson's Idoru meant or even Le Guin's Tehanu and those books are perfectly reasonable and fine.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It is a hugely important part of the novel: it is the central goal of the major characters. But there are other important parts of the novel, so I don't know; we'll see, I guess.