Snow outside my building in Bratislava

I’ve had a lot of trouble choosing a title for my current work in progress, the one I simply refer to as my Bratislava novel. But I finally have, and I thought I’d share how it came about, although it’s nothing to be particularly proud of and you probably won’t learn any great tips from this story: although you might empathise, perhaps. Here goes:

Choosing a title is both an important and a nonsensical business. As I understand it, publishers change the title of a novel to one of their own choosing extremely frequently … but it’s still important to have a decent, memorable title in the meantime. I was really struggling with this and here is the true, slightly embarrassing story of how I came to pick the current title. For the ABNA contest, I needed to submit a 300-word pitch explaining the novel, and of course, the pitch includes the title several times. I wrote the pitch using my dumb “Bratislava Novel” working title as a place holder. My pitch came out to 303 words. Three too many. I tried to edit other bits of it but I liked it as it was. I realised if the title, mentioned four times, was just a one-word title, I’d be fine.

Yep, that’s one of the reasons this novel is now simply called Bratislava. It was a convenient choice. But I didn’t just settle at that. First, I stopped over at the Lulu Titlescorer and keyed it in – Bratislava scored a 45.6% of becoming a bestseller (according to their algorithm), which is nearly as good as Kanako’s Foreigner and heaps better than lots of actual bestsellers. I mean, it can’t be too bad a title. And finally, when I stopped and thought about it, and re-read my pitch too, the actual place of Bratislava is important, almost like a character in this novel, and so it’s really quite appropriate. That, and nobody else has called their novel Bratislava yet, well not that I can find anyway.