What’s with this trend I am seeing of writers who publish Kindle-first books of giving superfluous subtitles to their work?
Or has it always been around at this frequency and I am only now noticing it? I am well aware that the idea of using a superfluous subtitle in of itself is not a new thing, but when this month’s offerings of “free” Kindle books for Prime customers are littered with subtitles that make no sense to add, I have some head scratching going on inside my skull.
“Title: A Novel“
“Title: A Thriller“
“Title: A Historical Romance“
“Title: A Horror Story“
In every case, the subtitle doesn’t add to the title, but arguably subtracts from it. The subtitle describes the book’s genre/subgenre, it doesn’t create an narrative atmosphere in any way.
My terrible webnovel I wrote back on 1999-2005 (it is so awful I can’t even quote from most of it), was really the only time I considered giving a novel a subtitle in this vein, and that’s because I intended to file it under horror/fantasy. “Drifter: A Love Story”. The suggestion of romance was a dissonance for horror/fantasy before urban fantasy took the idea and ran with it.
I hesitated and debated using “thought + memory” for my book of poetry, “galdr“. I wanted to hint at Huginn and Munnin (Odin’s twin ravens), and I purposefully added a “+” over an “&” or “and”, and there are some days that I wonder if it would have been better to leave the title unadorned as “galdr” and let everyone try to figure it out what it meant to them for themselves.
I’m just trying to figure out if there is a purpose in adding a subtitle that adds nothing to a title, or if it is just ego wanting to say: “Look, I published A Novel. It even says so on the cover, right next to my name!”
Drop your thoughts below and enlighten a cantankerous old fuddy-duddy. Or another word that starts with the letter “f”.
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