“Too Hot to Handle” and other titles…#MFRWAuthor

Welcome to Week 8 of the MFRW 52-Week Blog Challenge! This week’s topic is How I Choose a Blog Title.

Sometimes we think book titles choose us. Did you ever try to pick something up off a hot stove and go Wow—that’s too hot to handle? Yeah. That’s the level of heat we hope you think of when you see our upcoming title this July. When Extasy Books proposed their Summer Shorts series, we knew we wanted to write about the swinging mid-life couple who star in our Swinging Games Series. The incident at the stove happened the evening after I saw the announcement – well, and maybe I said some other words, too, but they don’t belong in our title. We’ve had a lot of fun writing Too Hot to Handle. Summers can be brutally hot and humid where our star couple live in Southern Indiana, so we sent them to the Wisconsin north woods to cool off at a nudist resort. Wonder if they’ll meet another couple too hot to handle…

Any little thing in our life can inspire a title or a story. We were driving through Ashland, Wisconsin, headed back home to Minnesota late one spring when we had to stop for a construction van that was double parked unloading supplies. When we took a closer look at the figure in coveralls carrying the materials, we discovered it was a woman. Our son is a general contractor, and at the time he had a female interior painter he relied on for detail work, so our title was easy, and the plot soon followed. The book will be released at Extasy Books March 17.

“Riders Up!” is the call for jockeys to mount and move from the paddock out to the racetrack for the post parade ahead of each horse race. We thought that would work perfectly for our four-book romantic suspense series set in the horse racing industry. The title for Book One was obvious as soon as we had names for our heroine and her horse: “Cassie,” and “Cassie’s Hope.” Once that was in place, we wanted all four books to have a two-word title. We love how our cover artist, Rebecca Poole, created symmetry across the series with the title words.

For this last book, the title definitely created the story. Young virgin seeks out her trusted childhood buddy for some sex tutoring so she can please her fiancé on that special night. Cherry Tune-Up says it all, don’t you think? Wonder who she’ll choose for the next tune-up…

When you’re browsing for books, what grabs you first and makes you look again? It can be a close race between the cover and the title – but for me, the title wins out. Titles are almost certain to have come from the authors, while covers are more likely to have a host of other contributors and decision makers behind them.

Click on the links below to hear about other authors and their titles!