On another happy note, I read this story in Publishing Perspectives   and it made me laugh aloud. That business books (and plenty of other nonfiction as well) have long-winded subtitles is a convention of the genre, one that I rarely question.  The idea is to be both specific and alluring; to define, entice and occasionally make outsize claims—this book will change your life, change the world, reorder the stars, etc.  But this article gives novels subtitles, and thus we have  Atonement: How Making up Stories Can Make Amends for Past Wrongs and Be a Force for Healing by Ian McEwan and Gone Girl: Why Your Marriage is Not What It Seems – And What You Can do About it by Gillian Flynn.

Care to subtitle your favorite novel?

The writing life, as so many of you know, is a difficult one. Inherent in devoting yourself to a solitary, maddening, financially precarious pursuit is the tacit understanding that those around you must also come to some accommodation with your avocation.

I’m off to Grub Street’s MUSE AND THE MARKETPLACE conference in Boston (and very excited to be a participant, thanks to Adam Stumacher!) and I noted that there is a session on managing writing and parenthood.  Kids are not especially solicitous of activities that require quiet, solitary time—at least they are not in my house–so I think swapping strategies makes sense.  If I were not busy taking pitches and doing critiques, I’d sit in and take notes.   But in the absence of children, things are not necessarily easier.  My client, Christopher Yates, whose terrific literary thriller BLACK CHALK is just being released in the US, wrote a frank and funny piece on being a stay at home husband in order to write.  http://nypost.com/2014/04/30/my-wife-couldnt-survive-without-a-stay-at-home-husband/. Without prying, I wonder how it works in your household.  How do you negotiate time to concentrate, to create?

Writing has wrecked its share of relationships, so this strikes me as fairly essential question.

Yesterday I sat down with two clients and their editor for a pleasant meet-and-greet and to discuss their recently acquired work of nonfiction.  We talked about the editorial process, the production schedule, cover,  interior design and title.   The only hiccup arrived when we got to the subtitle. The suggested copy was, in the estimation of the authors, just a little over-the-top.  In particular, the subtitle seemed to intimate that the book’s contents would Change Its Readers Lives. Forever.

The authors wanted the offending lines replaced with something a little more modest, less hyperbolic—some phrase rendered in a tone more wry and recognizable. They offered to come up with some alternatives. The editor was amenable, and we all agreed to reconvene our discussion over e-mail, where we could bounce ideas off of one another. I don’t know about you, but I cannot properly consider a title or a subtitle until I see it written down, and I think best alone and in front of a keyboard.

I’ve been mulling over possibilities and I’ve yet to come up with the precisely-right phrase. Subtitles are tricky because they must 1) capture the content of the book and 2) convince a person to buy it.  I also I feel a bit conflicted.  The reader/consumer/book buyer in me knows better than to believe the overheated rhetoric of subtitles, but 15 years in the publishing business makes me wonder if we are quite ready to dispense with overstatement. More humble assertions like “this book will leave you largely unchanged, albeit with slightly less free time” well, there’s not much appeal in that. What do you say? Would you be as drawn to a book that promised to be only “mildly interesting” or “easy enough to read?”  Do you find subtitles off-putting or inviting?

Perhaps it’s just me, but I suspect that these breathless, over-earnest subtitle pledges, calculated as they are, also speak to the secret wish of every reader.  The desire to find that magic book—the one that does blow our minds, change our lives, the story, true or imagined, that affects us in some powerful, primal way.