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.

Megan Stielstra writes stories and essays and tells them out loud at theaters, festivals, bars, museums, maybe even restrooms for all I know. Her work taps into a unique life—in exactly the same sense that each of our lives is unique. The difference is that Stielstra pays attention.

She has ideas, as we all do. She looks at them from one side, then another, from the top, the bottom, the reverse, the obverse. She inverts the idea, she subverts it, she follows wherever the process takes her. Talking about one essay, she said in an interview, “During the writing, I stumbled into some questions about memory. I walked around with those questions in my head. They were stuck there, in a good way, and all of a sudden I was writing to figure out . . .  not necessarily the answers but why the questions mattered. That happens all the time: you start writing one thing, and you end up in another. Maybe that’s the one you were supposed to be writing all along.”

It’s a great concept. It’s called freedom. Sure, we as writers, like all explorers, need a starting point. But once we start moving, it’s like walking the desert. The terrain is flat, bare, maybe harsh and austere. We see a depression, a watercourse. We follow it; it deepens; the sides get steeper: an arroyo, a gully, a canyon. We move through shadows. The earth changes, the vegetation, the life forms scurrying past the corner of our eye.

Soon we may not know the way anymore, or at least not the way that got us there. There’s no going back. But ahead . . .

 . . . ahead lies the great unknown, the infinite unknown. Scary? You bet it is. But oh, the world that’s waiting!

The point is the discovery, each of us finding out for ourselves what’s there. And it’s never the same as what the next person finds.

Revision can take you there, into writing totally different from what you started out to do. Character can take you there, if you give the souls you create the same humanity that the metaphoric God gave me and thee. Gluing your ass to the seat of the chair can take you there, trying the same scene ten different ways till you find the one that works.

Fuck writers block—just keep moving ahead! Lower your standards; flush them down the john. Follow the momentum. If you’re free enough, you’ll never know where you’re going. But if you’re lucky enough, you’ll know damn well when you get there.

The sun rises in the east. Writers want blurbs. Certainly the two truisms are equal.

You’ve written a book. That’s great; good for you; way to go! But how the hell are you going to get readers to buy it?

It’s easy, the theory goes: Just have lots of people—hopefully people those readers have heard of—write blurbs for the cover extolling your progeny as God’s greatest gift to fiction at least since James Michener met Joseph Pulitzer.

And then when the reader-to-be is eagerly browsing the local book store, those mellifluous words will leap from the cover and drag hard cash (or its plastic simulacrum) from reader-to-be’s wallet direct to book store’s bank account. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.

Of course we’re talking here about, for instance, Maria Semple’s loving view of Maggie Shipstead’s Astonish Me: “So dazzling, so sure-handed and fearless that at times I had to remind myself to breathe.” Or maybe we have in mind the king of kongratulatory kindness, Gary Shteyngart, when he said about the author of English, August: “Comparing Upamanyu Chatterjee with any other comic novelist is like comparing a big fat cigar with a menthol cigarette.”

Those—without doubt!—are words we writers would give half our keyboard fingers for if only we could be their subject.

(But consider the source.)

Shteyngart, a writer deservedly honored for his craft and creativity, has also been clear about his criteria: “I look for the following: two covers, one spine, at least 40 pages, ISBN number, title, author’s name. Once those conditions are satisfied, I blurb. And I blurb hard.”

Whyever has he set his standards so high, an achievement boggling to aspire to? The reason is clear.

He loves us. He knows the fear, bile, hormones, and substances we have put into our work (blood, sweat, toil, and tears being so last century). And he believes we’ve earned the right to connect with anyone we can find who’s willing to dispense sufficient adoration, and perhaps a few shekels as well.

Although Shteyngart, overwhelmed by the demand, has sadly announced plans to retire his “blurbing pen” (actually to hurl it into the Hudson River), his ethic fills me with inspiration. I stand ready to take up quill and cursor. No writer’s labor should go unrewarded, and though words may be the only reward I’m wealthy enough to offer, my full supply waits pantingly for your call.

Recently, I read a true paean to ebooks. “Last summer,” the author wrote, “I read Heart of Darkness on my cell phone. I read in line at the supermarket, sitting in my dentist’s waiting room, and even by sneaking peeks during traffic jams.”

Now, granted that Heart of Darkness isn’t a book of impressive length, I still consider this a pretty impressive feat. Mainly it’s impressive for the powers of concentration required by type that’s maybe a sixteenth of a inch tall (as well as by Conrad’s mystical, mystifying, and gripping tale).

The proud phone reader, though, was quick to assure us that actually, he goes both ways. (“I love print books.”) But he’s still pretty boggled by the fact that he remains in a distinct minority.

My guess is that it comes down to the eternal thrust and parry between science and soul. You can sure list a slew of reasons that e-readers can’t be matched, from changeable fonts to synching with a dozen other gizmos to toting around the OED in your back pocket. But, at least for anyone first captured by the magic of words on a page when that page was made of paper, there’s a look and a feel and a sense and a heft—and yes, a romance—that transcends all the acknowledged utility of electronic impulses.

But let’s face facts: We who once knew a world without computers are dying off a lot quicker than the kids we raised. And what happens when the lights go out on the last folks in the hospice who didn’t learn their ABCs on a screen?

For reading’s survivors, the habits they came out of the playpen with are the ones they’ll be shaped by. No need for the kind of relics consigned to the little old shop in an out-of-the-way neighborhood whose faded sign whispers “Used Books.”

I can see the place now: an ideal setting for some ambitious author’s fable for phone about the long-ago days of paper, ink, and pages you’d feel as you went from one to another. It would start out, “Once upon a time ….”