I recently joined a Discord server aimed at helping independently published authors grow their audience, and as part of the “initiation”, I was required to write a short introduction to myself. I began by mentioning that I’m approaching my fiftieth year on this blue and green glode we call home and the recent realisation that it means I’ve now been writing “smut” for almost thirty years and that it’s nearly twenty years since I sold my first piece for actual money.
And in all that time, the one thing I’ve always struggled with is coming up with titles for my work. In fact, I’m so bad at titles that when I was writing The Lies We Lead, I ran a competition on Facebook asking readers to make suggestions for the book’s title.
When I originally wrote A Good Man back in 2011—thirteen years ago now—I came up with what I thought was a clever title for the series. Tutelam Venit. Which, let’s be honest, is pretentious bollocks. I got to this because Paul’s story was going to be a Coming of Age story, so I put that phrase into Google Translate and asked it for the Latin and used what I got out. That was in 2011 though and it was a crap translation. A better translation now is “He came under protection”, which still sort of fits the story, but not really.
Anyway, I ditched the pretentious series name after A Tortured Soul came out. Now it’s just The Paul Robertson Saga, which is a much better name for it.
The titles for the three books in the series actually follow a definite pattern.
- A Good Man
- A Tortured Soul
- A Wounded Heart
The pattern is clear.
- A/an Adjective Noun
All three of these titles were planned from the beginning because the story was planned as a classic trilogy. But, of course, it didn’t turn out that way because as A Wounded Heart approached the same length as A Tortured Soul—already the longest book I’d ever written—I found I had a hell of a lot more story still to tell.
So, as you know, I resolved to write a fourth and possibly fifth book, which meant I had to come up with one or maybe two new titles. And for my own sanity, those titles had to fit the pattern of the other three.
Interestingly, I started a thread about this in a Reddit group for erotica authors and was told that the best titles are some variation of VERBed by the NOUN, which isn’t the pattern I’ve got for the Paul Robertson books, but you live and learn. I was also told that most readers don’t care about clever title patterns in series.
But I do, so I’m going to stick to the pattern, no matter what.
Unless I can’t think of anything. Which, for a long time, I couldn’t.
I did have a title. And it was a good title and it fit the final book in the series.
An Everlasting Love.
The problem, of course, is that book four isn’t the final book. At least, it won’t be unless I can somehow shoehorn what’s left of the story I’ve got to tell, which I estimate may be as much as two hundred thousand words worth, into seventy-five thousand words.
Not happening.
So I’ve had to change the title of this forth book. I had hoped I could hang on to An Everlasting Love for the fifth book, but I don’t think my desire to stick to the pattern will let me. And that’s because the title of this forth book is…
Wait for it…
A Healing Love
There you have it. The title of the fourth book in the Paul Robertson Saga. A Healing Love.
The reason it means I can’t keep An Everlasting Love as the final book’s title is that it will feel wrong to me to have two books with the same noun in the title. I’d like to keep the “Everlasting” part, but I’ll need to find something else that lasts forever rather than love.
Unless I can think of something else that is Healing for Paul other than love. Passion? An Affair? I don’t know. There’s no urgency, I need to finish writing the book first.
