At the same time as I was sorting through them I was trying to work out - yet again - why I'm not getting any short story acceptances. I've rewritten the first pages and sections of many of them to make them tighter, and I was looking for any other ways to improve them. That was when my eyes lighted on an old article about turning rejected stories into accepted ones. I'd tried most of the remedies suggested in it, but the one I hadn't tried was changing the titles of stories.
Then I came across another article by prolific short story writer Della Galton, talking about rejection. She too said she'd changed story titles and subsequently had the stories accepted. She said that sometimes a good title could sway an editor to accept a story.
Hmm. Clearly I've been missing a trick here. I'm a very solid practical person, and I tend to think of solid, practiical titles for my stories. They tend to be down-to-Earth titles that describe the story, often in one word. Maybe they weren't exciting enough?
Then I went on-line and started reading some more recently-published SF short stories. And found that many of them have lengthy, often quirky, and sometimes obscure, titles. When I read the stories, the titles seemed only loosely connected with the narrative they headed up, but they were getting sold.
So my next experiment is to change the titles of stories I believe in and am happy that I've edited to within an inch of their lives. I've found two good titles already, and am about to submit them in their new guises. My only problem then will be keeping track of the old and new titles, and where I've sent the story as each. But if an obscure title really will tempt an editor to buy the story, what have I got to lose?
Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives. Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com
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