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‘The Pirates of Sausalito’ Or Maybe ‘Pirates? In Sausalito?’ Help Me Decide

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At our April 6 meeting, I will be leading a Five-Minute Feedback session about the title of my upcoming book.

Titles are important. And hard. 

Once my book is published on KDP, I can change the book description, the cover, the interior, and the keywords, but not the title. (Unless I want to republish. Which I don’t.)

The BAIPA hive-mind helped me a couple years ago with a book cover. I’m hoping you can help me now with the title. 

Here are my four options, the current one, which I’m pretty sure I’m abandoning, and three new possibilities.

   
   

The book, which is adapted from a play that I wrote and directed last year, is currently titled The Pretend Pirates of Sausalito. The book is fiction, but based on true events, during the 1970s “houseboat wars” in Sausalito. Hippies and artists living on houseboats in a ramshackle shantytown faced off against city leaders and developers who wanted to build a luxury harbor on the waterfront, and when the police attempted to evict them, they fought back with street theater, civil disobedience, and monkey-wrenching.

I shared advance reader copies with bunch of beta readers and asked for feedback on the manuscript and the title, and now I’m leaning now towards removing the “pretend.” Going with The Pirates of Sausalito.

I’m also considering Pirates? In Sausalito? Or Pirates in Sausalito? 

I have a subtitle too, which I’ve changed from Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery True Story to Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery. Not that catchy, but informative.

I welcome your feedback in the comments or via email. Or at next Saturday’s meeting. 

Thank you in advance.

P.S. I’ve been percolating on some tag lines as well, and there are two I like, but they’re very different from each other. I could use one (or both) in the book description on the back cover and on vendor sites like Amazon. I’m even considering one on the front cover. There’s some open real estate above my author name.

Here are the tag lines. I’d love to hear what you think.

  1. Not a True Story, But Based on True Events
  2. Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test meets Murder, She Wrote

 

About John Byrne Barry

John Byrne Barry is author of four "page-turners with a conscience" — Pirates of Sausalito: Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery, When I Killed My Father: An Assisted-Suicide Family Thriller, Bones in the Wash: Politics is Tough. Family is Tougher, and Wasted, a "green noir" mystery set in the Berkeley recycling world. He's also an actor, pickleball player, and and crossing guard. He lives in Mill Valley.

Comments

  1. Marilyn R Flower says

    you’ve got a possible play on The Pirates of Penzance going as well. Not to complicate things but what comes to me is The Pirates…of Sausalito? I think Pirates? In Sausalito and even the above imply humor. If not, I’d go with The Pirates of Sausalito.

  2. David Gerstel says

    John,

    I have been thinking about your cover and the BAIPA discussion of it.
    I keep returning to the comment of the man who said “the cover is a missed opportunity.” I agree, for several reasons:

    First, While “Pirates” is good, “Sausalito,” even though it is a colorful and compelling word, is limiting. Only a tiny fraction of potential readers in the U.S. or even CA will recognize the name. For many people in the Bay Area the name will register only vaguely at best. Yesterday I was talking with a Bay Area woman who was mixing Sausalito up with San Rafael. Imagine her puzzlement upon reading the title Pirates of Sausalito.

    I wonder if Pirates on the Bay (or Pirates on The San Francisco Bay) might be a better choice. That’s specific to our area; locals will get the meaning, but “Bay” would work for more remote readers, too.

    Second, and more important, the cover is jumbled. That’s a subjective take to be sure. Aesthetic preference is a personal choice. But it does seem to me that with your current cover, with all those images and lines of information pushed into a small space, the eye hardly knows where to go. I wonder whether the cover will be legible at all as a small icon on Amazon.

    I would much prefer just one strong image, say a houseboat flying a pirate flag, the title, and your name, all against a uniform background, perhaps the surface of the Bay or just a single color. I would leave the explanatory info — i.e. that the book is a murder mystery — to the back cover (Or alternatively manage to deliver that info within a quiet line at the bottom of the front cover that was also a boost for your book: Something like “Another page turner from the award winning author of _______________.”

    I hope all this helps. For all that, for sure, you’ve latched onto a heck of a good story!

    Happy writing
    David Gerstel