When I started writing my fantasy trilogy, one of the first issues I had to wrangle with was what to title my books. I’ll admit I fretted about it for a while, because to me, the title is a big deal. The title is arguably one of the most critical pieces of book metadata. When readers tell others about my books, the title is probably how it will be remembered. That makes the title an important marketing tool.
At first, I wasn’t sure what to call the series, so I just started writing it using a working title. It was something generic like, “Fantasy Story.” [Yeah, originality would have to wait a while.]
While developing the story world, I thought it would be fun to give magic a special name of its own. My magic system is built on a life force of sorts, but sadly, “The Force” was already taken. Needing to come up with something original, I started playing with words. I began with the Latin root for life: vita. Several variations later, I came up with “vaetra,” and the new moniker was born.
I needed to make sure vaetra didn’t have some meaning I didn’t know about and that it wasn’t someone’s trademark. During my research, I discovered a nice side-effect of making up a new word: no search competition. At that point, I realized that including Vaetra as part of my series title would practically guarantee top position in search results, assuming anyone bothered to search on my made-up word.
Naming the series The Vaetra Chronicles was a no-brainer at that point. The question then became what to call the individual books. Should I use Vaetra in each book title as well? Doing so would give them some continuity, and the book titles would also benefit from the uniqueness factor. But how would I incorporate vaetra into all three titles?
To answer that question, I needed at least a rudimentary story plan for the entire series. Fortunately, I had one. The first book would be a revelation for the main character that his life was about to change. The second would be about how he adapted to his new life. In the third, he would have to defend the things that had become important to him.
Next came the question of how I would structure the titles. I wanted to keep them short so they would look good in the book listings of the various web sites. I also wanted the pattern to be consistent: blah blah Vaetra, Vaetra blah blah, or some other variation of those patterns.
I sat down and brainstormed words that would succinctly sum up the story arc of each Vaetra Chronicles volume. While doing so, I noticed that several of the words I had written down started with an “un” prefix. I focused on those words and brainstormed more of them until I had all three of the terms I eventually used for the books: Unveiled, Untrained, and Unleashed. The final touch was putting “vaetra” in front of each word.
Now, three years later, I’ve been able to see how the plan is working out. Overall, I’m happy with the titles I came up with, although there have been a couple of disadvantages.
In general, it’s a good idea to avoid reader confusion. From that perspective, it is risky to make up a word and use it as part of a title. On the other hand, made-up words are pretty common in fantasy, and my readers seem to have adapted well. The only question that has come up is a matter of pronunciation. Is it “vay-tra” or “vee-tra?” When I coined the term, I was thinking “vay-tra,” but others have pointed out that the ae letter combination is often pronounced “ee” (as in “daemon”). Officially, it’s “vay-tra,” but I don’t care how you pronounce it as long as you are talking about my books!
The other disadvantage is the similarity of the words I chose for each book title. Although their meanings are very different, the “un” prefix gives them all a sameness that can cause confusion. For instance, does “untrained” come before “unveiled” or vice-versa? I haven’t actually had any readers say anything about this, but here at Magic Fur Press, we’ve already had a production snafu because of it.
In spite of the disadvantages, the advantages are working out just as anticipated. The short titles fit well on the book cover and on web site listings. The term “vaetra” still has no search competition. The rate of readers who buy Vaetra Untrained after Vaetra Unveiled is fairly high, so they are easily identifying the next book of the series. Best of all, sales have been good, so readers aren’t letting the unfamiliar word prevent them from telling their friends.
One nice thing about coming up with all my titles in advance is that I haven’t had to think about what to title my books in quite a while. I got to revisit the exercise recently though when I had to brainstorm a title for the book that will follow The Vaetra Chronicles. Stay tuned for more about that.
So now you know the story of how I titled the three volumes of The Vaetra Chronicles. I’d welcome you to leave a comment on the subject of book titles, but I haven’t figured out a way to enable comments in WordPress without getting blasted by spam. If you have any suggestions on what I can do about that, feel free to use my contact page and pass them along.
