How to come up with a title
plus tour dates + pre-order sales!
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News:
My debut novel Greenwich will be out July 22! Booklist calls it “gothic and atmospheric” and “absorbingly paced.” Publisher’s Weekly says it’s “[An] insightful debut…Fans of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere ought to take note” and included it as one of their “buzz books” for summer 2025. It’s an Amazon Editor’s Pick and Vanity! Freaking! Fair! just featured it on a list of 8 novels to read this summer. Adrienne Brodeur, bestselling author of Little Monsters, calls Greenwich “A stunning debut…Beautifully written, vividly peopled… impossible to put down.” We’re getting close to release day, which means if you order it now, you don’t have to worry about missing the day and will have it shipped to you as soon as it’s out!
You can also order a signed, personalized copy! Order from Oblong Books and include in the comments what you want me to say, and it’ll ship to you on release day. Makes a great gift!
Right now through July 11th only, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop are ALL having sales/deals, so this is a great time to stock up on summer reads!
“Word of Mouth” is out in The Brooklyn Review Issue 39. (This isn’t online, so message me if you want a PDF.)
“Care and Feeding” is out in The Rumpus
“Good Dead Girls” is out in No Tokens
EVENTS:
Tuesday July 22, 2025, 7pm (doors open at 6:30)
P&T Knitwear, 180 Orchard Street, NYC.
In conversation with Jillian Medoff, author of When We Were Bright and Beautiful and many others. I loved this book and its messy family dynamics — this is going to be a great conversation!
Tickets are $5 and go toward a purchase at the store.
July 27, 2025, 2pm
Newtonville Books, 10 Langley Road, Newton, MA
In conversation with Elizabeth Gonzalez James, author of Mona at Sea and The Bullet Swallower. These books are both so different, SO GOOD, and so richly, fully, realized. I can’t believe I get to sit down with Elizabeth and talk all things writing! Free and open to all — no tickets.
June 29, 2025, 7pm (doors open at 6pm)
Booked Author Series, Fleur Restaurant at the Omni Hotel, 1 W Exchange Street, Floor 2, Providence, RI
With an incredible lineup: Amy Poeppel, Meg Mitchell Moore, Jordan Roter, and Marjan Kamali. There will be dinner, drinks, a Q&A, and great conversation!
Tickets are $15 in advance, $20 at the door.
Dear Kate,
Tricks or advice for how to come up with a title? I’m about halfway through a new project and I keep waiting to be hit with the right idea but I just can’t come up with something that feels right. How do you find something that works, and how do you KNOW that it works when you’ve found it?
- Untitled
Dear Untitled,
I love this question because I don’t think I’ve ever written a manuscript where I haven’t at some point changed the title, sometimes multiple times. Greenwich was originally titled So Lucky, but I made a comment to a friend joking that I could just as well call it “Greenwich” because that totally sums it up—and the name stuck.
Sometimes titles change because the story changes. Sometimes it’s because your understanding of the story changes as you make your way through it (that’s more what happened with Greenwich). Sometimes titles change for frustrating reasons, like because another book comes out with the same title and you’re left scrambling before publication. Sometimes, no matter how much you love your title, your agent/editor/marketing director/someone on your publishing team says it doesn’t fit the genre or for some reason isn’t going to sell, and you have to decide how much to push back versus how much to trust their expertise and make the change.
I know you aren’t talking about changing your title but coming up with something in the first place, but I share all this to say that even if you start off with a title, it’s not necessarily the one you’ll stick with. So it’s okay not to have something now! It’s okay to still be feeling your way through your draft and have the search for a title be part of that process. Even if you come up with something tomorrow, it might not stay that way. I hope that takes some of the pressure off! It’s good to know your story and your heart, and it’s also good to stay flexible enough to be able to roll with the inevitable edits and changes that will come up along the way.
Tips for title hunting:
Sometimes titles are words or phrases lifted from the manuscript. Read through and see if anything jumps out at you. (Conversely, if you come up with a title, you can decide if it’s a word/phrase you want to bring up intentionally in the manuscript. Readers will never know which came first!)
Look for recurring images, themes, ideas, visuals, repeated ideas/phrases/concepts, and anything that feels central, interesting, maybe a little off-beat or intriguing, or sticky enough to keep you coming back for more.
Scan your bookshelves, or the shelves at a bookstore or the library, and see what sorts of titles you like, and how the titles of books you like correspond to the way it feels to read them. What are titles you like, and why do you like them? Are there any trends in your genre that you want to follow? What about current trends you want to buck?
Sometimes a title makes sense on its own. Sometimes it doesn’t become clear until you read the book and put together what it all means. Play with both clarity and obfuscation in your title possibilities and see if that leads anywhere.
Make a giant brainstorming list where you keep track of anything and everything that comes to mind. There are no bad ideas or wrong answers. No one has to see this document. It truly doesn’t matter how off anything is. Let yourself be free and creative in generating a list and see if anything sparks. (I’m currently in Michigan, but if I were at home I’d hunt down the PAGES AND PAGES of possible titles I came up with when I was changing the title of my dissertation to share a picture, lol/sob.)
Take breaks where you let yourself stop thinking about your title. Sometimes, forcing yourself to BE SMART AND CREATIVE RIGHT NOW, DAMMIT just winds up feeling like you’re banging your head against a wall. You can create the conditions for your own success, but at the same time, you can’t force a thought that won’t come. Giving yourself some time away from the manuscript is sometimes exactly when new ideas will form.
Relatedly, let yourself stay untitled until you’re several additional drafts in. I struggle to write without a title, since it’s such an anchor point to the whole project. But you’re in the first draft — your only job right now is to learn how to tell yourself the story. You don’t need to have this all figured out just yet, and you might find that you come up with more ideas the deeper you get into future drafts.
As far as when you know a title feels “right,” I think it’s similar to how you know when ANYTHING in writing feels “right.” How do you know you have the right character for your story, or the right central premise, or you’ve come up with the right idea for what’s going to happen next? There’s just this nebulous way you know when you’ve landed on something that works. There’s something in there that gets you excited—something you keep coming back to and can’t stop thinking about.
There’s always doubt, of course. But that’s also part of the process. It can be helpful to bounce ideas off of critique partners and trusted readers and see how they respond. Also, be sure to give yourself time to sit with the title and see over time if it’s something that keeps feeling right, or if there’s something still nagging at you. This isn’t a last-minute change to knock out right before you go to press.
Whatever you do, don’t forget to google and see if there are other books with the same title. It’s okay to share a title with an older book, or something with soft sales. But you want to make sure that anyone searching for your book will easily get to YOUR title and not confuse it with anything else.
I hope this helps, and gives you some generative ideas. You never know—you could think and brainstorm and write and struggle, and then when you’re in the shower or chopping potatoes or waiting at a red light, something will hit you and you’ll know you’ve found your title. Creativity follows its own schedule, but as long as you keep showing up and doing the work on your project, something will gel.
Keep writing, and don’t forget to grab your tickets for NYC or RI, or come find me in Boston!
Kate