Marty Gerber
  • Blog
  • About
  • Praise
  • Contact
  • TNB Home

Writing on my mind

If Godzilla and king Kong Wrote a Book, What Would They Call It?

12/11/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
I can remember having an idle thought once that it was a good thing my wife’s pregnancy was taking nine months (though I know her opinion differed) because the time was needed for us to suggest, reject, pore over, and battle over all the endless possibilities for naming our baby-to-come.

Similarly, though with obviously smaller stakes, I can recall emotional family discussions over what to name the household’s newest cat or dog—complicated by the fact that four people now had to agree rather than just the original two.

So what’s in a name? While Juliet implied that it wasn’t of much importance, the amount of thought and feeling often invested in the choice tells me most people feel otherwise. Which brings us to the progeny resulting when a writer’s chosen words fertilize the ovum of an idea. What shall we title this book?

In recent weeks, that question has been the subject of considerable mental gymnastics and anguished discussion concerning three books being published by Terra Nova.

On one hand, the decision is an “artistic” one, part of the same creative process that has produced the book. For the author, the ideal title will encapsulate the concepts and themes the book itself is built on, and will do it in a way that reflects the author’s own finely tuned sense of language.

But the decision is also a “commercial” one, to put it bluntly and crassly. The equation is pretty simple: Terra Nova is a business; it wants to make money from the sale of books (as do the writers of those books); the main source of that money is readers who part with it in exchange for the books; a book’s title is a key element in the decision-making process of that potential buyer.

Sometimes a solution between these differing points of view is reached through calm, reasoned balancing of pros and cons, pluses and minuses. Other times the consideration of conflicting opinions seems more like a King Kong vs. Godzilla rematch.

The author has already lived with the book a long time before it gets to me. The two of them have become intimate partners—sometimes in both the best and the worst sense. There’s a lot of emotion tied up in their relationship. And then the voice of Mammon speaks, disguised as me (or at least that’s the way it sometimes gets heard).

The author has usually given the book a title that fits, that works, that resonates with the meaning and intent the writing fed off all through the arduous, stressful process. But now this other person, wearing a badge that says “publisher,” shows up to suggest that the vague entity out there named “reader” may not take these words exactly the same way. And the battle is joined.

On one level, it can be said that this is about money: If no meeting of the minds can be found, then who is willing to sacrifice what for the sake of possibly selling a few more books? But money is merely a tangible representation of the essential but ephemeral value of connection. At rock bottom, a book is a connection, between the mind of the writer and that of the reader; that is its power and its only real purpose. If the book doesn’t have readers—meaning “buyers,” to go and be crass again—then the author has spent a great many hours doing something only for his or her own personal benefit, akin even to masturbation we might say (though this is not necessarily a negative pastime, of course, just not something most people hope to make money from).

So wearing my hat (or badge) as publisher, I’ve recently been embroiled in three sets of conversations with authors —in person, by text, by email, by voicemail, by mindmail—about what to title their books. Seemingly, all three have been resolved without bloodshed. “Come let us reason together,” the Good Book says, and ultimately it was a process that worked (although aided in one instance by a random epiphany). Strong feelings were voiced many times, but amazingly, a spirit of accommodation rather than intransigence triumphed.

Now all we have to do is see whether anyone buys these books.

0 Comments
    Picture

    Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner

    Marty Gerber is the editor and co-owner of Terra Nova Books. He established the publishing company in partnership with his son, Scott, in 2012 after working as a freelance editor of books and professional journals since the early 1990s. Before that, he was a newspaper writer and editor for many years, both with some of the nation’s leading dailies and as the founder of startups in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, N.M. He also has taught journalism at New York University and the University of Arizona, and has ghostwritten two books and written two others as himself.

    Archives

    April 2016
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    April 2014


    RSS Feed


    Twitter
    Picture
    Facebook
    Picture

    Categories

    All
    Amazon
    Amazon Kindle
    Arnon
    Author
    Ayana Mathis
    Best First Novel
    Best-Seller List
    Best-selling
    Beyond The Will Of God
    Bias
    Blurbs
    Book Review
    Book Title
    Brain
    Catherine McKenzie
    Competition
    Contemporary Fiction
    Creative
    Creative Nonfiction
    Customer
    Dallas Cowboys
    Daniel Mendelsohn
    Data Mining
    David Biddle
    Discovery
    Don't Tell
    EBooks
    Ego
    Elena Ferrante
    Eliza Gabbert
    Essential Good
    Five-star
    Future Of Books
    Gary Shteyngart
    Goddess
    Grunberg
    Hachette
    Heart Of Darkness
    Hubris
    Independent
    Indie Author
    Interview
    Juliet
    Kindle
    Koan
    Kowtow
    Literary Fiction
    Literature Of Reality
    Lyric Essay
    Maggie Shipstead
    Megan Stielstra
    Miranda July
    Mohsin Hamid
    Netherlands
    Neuroscience
    New York Times
    Novelist
    Objectivity
    One-star
    Oyster
    Paris
    Pew
    Phone
    Point Of View
    Praise
    Print
    Print Books
    Profit
    Quantum Physics
    Reading Habits
    Review
    Revision
    Roadmap For Success
    Rose
    Scribd
    Self-published
    Self-publishing
    Shakespeare
    Show
    Siddhartha Deb
    Simon & Schuster
    Sisyphus
    Sweet
    Terra Nova Books
    The First Bad Man
    Time Keeps On Slipping Into The Future
    Title
    Track
    Turgid
    Walmart
    Writers Block
    Writing

Copyright 2014 - Marty Gerber   All Rights Reserved
Terra Nova Books