The great title hunt

This morning I finished that story inspired by the snippet of insider police information. The anthology is coming together nicely and I'm starting to think about something other than just finishing stories: the order of the contents and a title.

The other day I realised that all the stories involved revenge in some form or another so I wanted a title that would reflect that. Straight away I thought of 'Best Served Cold', and headed off to search the Amazon catalogues. Not that titles are covered by copyright, of course, but it's nice to know that if I do get my book published it won't be one of dozens with the same name. That way if a reader searches on the title rather than my name, they won't be faced with a heap of books and choose the wrong one.

Sadly for me, 'Best Served Cold' was a popular idea. There were at least seven or eight books with that title, ranging from mainstream crime novels to self-published e-books. Not wanting to be number nine on the list, I had to come up with something else.

A frequent port of call for titles is quotations so I started searching online for quotes that involved revenge. I was struggling rather; too many of them are Biblical and involve God's vengeance - possibly not the most suitable thing for a book about crime. But then Dave came to the rescue with a Confucius quotation which was ideal. So now I have a working title, a contents page, and another story to slot in. If I can keep up the momentum I might actually finish this thing.