Quirky humour

It happened a while ago, but I thought I’d share with you. When I told my daughter that my sixth book was titled Fatal Flaw, she quickly came back with, “And I guess the sequel will be called Treacherous Tiles, or Lethal Linoleum, or …” You can probably gather from that that her mind works in a rather quirky way.

It set me thinking about book titles and how they can be interpreted by readers and whether they play a part in why a reader selects a book to peruse and perhaps to purchase. After my first book, Dance with the Devil, was published, I was shopping in Target and, naturally, checked out the book department. To my surprise, Dance with the Devil had been placed in the Horror/Supernatural section. Another surprise was that my friend Louise Cusack’s first book, Destiny of the Light, a fantasy, had been placed in the New Age section.

What had made the Target employee decide where to place the books? The title? The cover? As the cover of Dance with the Devil gave no indication that it had any horror or supernatural elements in it, I could only assume it was the title. And I’d thought Louise’s book looked like a fantasy.

So what makes you, as a reader, pick up a book? And does the title influence what you think the book might be about?