Last fall, after a fellow author interviewed for a podcast, she said to me that she found it interesting that someone as articulate and accomplished as I was chose such a poor book title.
It was just one person’s opinion, I told myself. Still, I had to wonder if a different title could make a difference in terms of visibility and sales.
Titles are hard. I wrote an 80,000 word novel, with 54 chapters and an epilogue, and I had to distill that into a few words.
The premise of my novel is simple enough — what if your ailing father asks you to kill him?
Here’s my elevator pitch: Psychologist Lamar Rose’s father is suffering from cancer and dementia, and wants his son to help him end his life. Lamar refuses, but his father keeps demanding, and he relents. Then, from the pulpit of the church at his father’s memorial, his sister accuses Lamar of murder.
I like to callWhen I Killed My Father a “page-turner with a conscience,” about a man caught between what is compassionate and what is legal.
Response from readers has been heartening, but I have not had as many readers as I’d hoped. Not everyone wants to read a book about death and dying and end-of-life decisions, of course, even though, as more than one reviewer noted, the novel is also fun and funny. My disappointing sales may have more to do with my subject matter than the title.
There are authors who have done republished with new titles, and managed to keep their reviews — See Helena Halme on How to Change a Book Title Without Losing Reviews. But there’s no guarantee that her strategy will work for others.
The web is full of advice for writers, and no shortage of articles about how to promote yourself on social media, how to use the right keywords in your book description, how to find the right editor. But I have found hardly any useful advice on book titles, other than obvious things like, the title is uber important and you should devote your best energy to it.
The advice that is out there is more on how to avoid a bad title. As Tucker Max, co-founder of Scribe, says, “A good title won’t make your book do well, but a bad title will prevent it from doing well.”
Informative (Gives an Idea of What The Book is About)
Easy To Say
Not Embarrassing or Problematic For Someone To Say It
The right length
Well, I think I’ve got three or four out of six.
When I was first writing When I Killed My Father, its working title was Edgewater, which was the name of the senior residence Lamar’s father lived in, on the lakefront on Chicago’s North Side.
There was a lot I liked about that title — the noirish sound of it most of all — but it’s such a common place name and it doesn’t signal the subject or genre of the book in any way.
I brainstormed many title ideas, such as:
Cheeks as Smooth as Ice
Die Now, Pay Later
What I Did for My Dad
My Father Begged Me
What I Promised My Father
At First I Said No
The Measure of My Love
I Can’t Stand to Live Like This
Some Secrets Should Stay Secret
The Duties of a Son
Fulfilling My Father’s Wishes
And many more.
My brother Pat, who read an early draft, suggested Let Me Go, which I liked a lot, and that’s what I used when I published my advance reader copy.
But one day, when I was sharing title ideas with fellow writers, one said Let Me Go was too subtle. I said, “Well, I don’t want to be too over the top and call it ‘Why I Killed My Father.’” She blurted out, “Oh, that’s so much better.”
I took heed and that became my first choice, but because it sounded like a how-to book, not a novel, I changed the first word from “why” to “when.”
I’d love to hear what you think, whether you’ve read the book or not. (If you haven’t, you can read the first three chapters here.) Should I change the title? What title do you like best?
If you’ve published a book, do you have second thoughts about your title?
I’m on the board of the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association (BAIPA), which has been holding our monthly meeting on Zoom since March, and we were recently discussing how we as authors and publishers might help each other promote our books during the pandemic, or whether we shouldn’t be doing that at all.
One idea we had was to interview each other on Zoom and post those interviews on BAIPA’s website as well as give the authors the interviews to use as they see fit.
I conducted two interviews of fellow authors, and last week, Janice Litvin, a wellness author and speaker, interviewed me — about how I came to write my book, what surprised me researching the end-of-life movement, and what I’m working on now. Thank you, Janice.
I hope you enjoy watching our conversation half as much as we enjoyed having it.
My mom died last year at 95, after ten years of falling deeper into dementia, and if I’m honest, I have to admit there were times during that period when I wished she would die.
Seeing her decline was heartbreaking. First she lost her sight, then her mobility, then her mind. Yet, often when I called and asked her how she was, she would say, “Oh, I’m fine.”
Except that time she answered, “Well, there’s a bear in my living room.”
“What’s the bear doing?” I asked.
“Sorting through the mail.”
I miss her, but I was missing her long before she died. She had become a shadow of the vibrant woman she had been. Some days she was more lucid than others, she still had her appetite, she still knew who we were more often than not, but she was not going to get better. We wished we could spare her the worst.
I don’t remember when or how I came up with the idea of a writing a novel about assisted suicide, but I’m not surprised I did. The novel was clearly informed and inspired my mother’s and our family’s experience. It’s dedicated to my mom and my four siblings.
When I Killed My Father is fiction. All made up. Our family — my mother’s five children and our spouses — communicated well and handled our real-life challenges with a minimum of conflict. It would not have made for a compelling story.
In my book, there’s a lot of conflict.
Psychologist Lamar Rose’s father has cancer and dementia, and wants his son to kill him and end his suffering. Lamar refuses, but his father keeps asking, and he relents. Then, at his father’s memorial, his sister accuses him of murder from the pulpit of the church.
What Lamar does on his own, leaving his sister out, is wrong in all kinds of ways. But it is what his father wanted. Lamar is caught between what is compassionate and what is legal. I’ve always been attracted to moral dilemmas, especially gray areas where the difference between the right thing to do and the wrong thing are not so clear. Like family. Like relationships. Like dying.
I’m a big fan of John LeCarre, whose dozens of cold-war thrillers and other espionage novels explore that moral muddiness. Like if and when do ends justify the means.
In the past ten years, I’ve written two other novels, where I explored a world that I was exposed to, but was hardly an expert. My first novel — Bones in the Wash: Politics is Tough. Family is Tougher — is a political thriller set during the 2008 presidential campaign in New Mexico. My second, Wasted, is a “green noir” mystery set in the garbage and recycling universe in Berkeley.
As a journalist, I enjoy learning enough about places and issues and movements to be able to write about them with credibility. So I learned about memory care units and advanced care directives and the rapidly growing end of life movement in the same ways I learned about political campaigns and recycling — reading and talking to people.
I was surprised to find out how large the end-of-life movement has become. Even though my mother had a caregiver for ten years, was treated for cancer and a brain tumor, spent many a week in the hospital, and lived in a memory care unit for the last year and a half of her life, I barely knew this end-of-life movement existed until I was deep into researching and writing the book.
During that process, I talked to a lot of people who had personal or professional experience with end of life, and was moved by their stories. (You can see some of my interviews and stories at johnbyrnebarry.com/end-of-life.)
I wrote When I Killed My Father because I wanted to entertain readers, but also because I wanted to encourage more conversation about the all-too-often taboo subject of death. To borrow a headline I saw recently, I wanted to promote the “most important conversation no one wants to have.”
One of the unexpected rewards of writing this book is talking with people in the end of life movement, and I found, perhaps not surprisingly, that they all seemed to be happy, vibrant, grateful people. In one way or another, they all affirmed that awareness and acceptance of our impending death can help us live a more fulfilling life.
—
On October 26 in Berkeley and November 2 in Mill Valley, I am thrilled to be hosting two events as part of Reimagine End of Life SF, a week exploring big questions about life and death. My event, “Why I Wrote an Assisted Suicide Family Thriller,” will be one part author reading and one part conversation about end-of-life concerns — family decisions, dementia, dying, and more.
You can read the first three chapters of the book here.
If you like the book, or even if you don’t, I’d love to hear from you. Contact me at johnbyrnebarry@gmail.com.
I heard Ram Dass on the radio telling a story about a Chinese farmer who is too old to work in the fields any more. He sits on the porch watching his children tend to the crops.
One day, his eldest son lugs a wooden box to the porch. “We’ve got too many mouths to feed,” the son says. “Get in the box.”
The old man gets in. The son puts a lid on the box and drags it toward the cliff at the edge of the farm.
He hears a knocking from inside the box. Takes off the lid.
His father sits up. “Son, I know what you’re doing and why, but might I suggest that you lift me out of the box and throw me over the cliff. That way, the box will be there when your children need it.”
That’s not quite the theme of my upcoming novel, an assisted-suicide family thriller called Why I Killed My Father, but it’s in the same universe. Without intending to, I’m now knee deep in writing about death and dying.
A few alarmed friends have reached out and asked if I’m OK. I am. Yes, I am going to die just like everyone else, but I’m healthy and active now and I’m hoping for several decades more. But I have been devoting far more of my energy to thinking and talking and reporting about death, and it’s not as morbid as I might have expected. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s true. Being more aware of death — our own as well as others — can make life more meaningful and precious.
That said, I know that many people are not necessarily waiting in line to talk about death, let alone read a novel about death. One friend, upon hearing what I am working on, said, “I’ll pass and wait on your next effort.”
I was disappointed to hear that, but I get it. Which is why I’ve worked hard to make this book as entertaining as possible. I call it a “page-turner with a conscience” — it moves like a thriller, but without explosions. Well, I guess there are explosions of a sort.
If all goes well, the book will be out this fall. You can read Chapter 1 here.
(I’m seeking a few more beta readers. Let me know if you’re interested.)
She was referring to my most recent novel, which is titled, When I Killed My Father: An Assisted-Suicide Family Thriller. I thought that was a good title. I still do, but with less confidence than before.
But one day, when I was sharing title ideas with fellow writers, one said Let Me Go was too subtle. I said, “Well, I don’t want to be too over the top and call it ‘Why I Killed My Father.’” She blurted out, “Oh, that’s so much better.”
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