It's not the cover you're judging a book on any more

Last month at bookswap, Sophie Hannah made a passing-ish comment that really stayed with me. 'Look at all the books that really work', she said. 'They've all got Ronseal titles'.

If you grew up pre-Ronseal, what that means is a title which exactly sums up what the book delivers. In my first in-house publishing job that's exactly what we called book titles, and it's stuck with me ever since.

I've been thinking about this again this week. Is there a correlation between book sales and titles that tell you exactly what they're about without giving it away? A quick browse at any BookScan list (or media bestseller list, usually fed by the same data) will tell you it probably is. Sister. Room. The Help. Have a think.

So the more interesting question is: why? Is it to do with our link-hitting, button-pressing age, where we memorise nothing because 'I'll google it if I need to know'? Is it more prevalent now than it was in the 1950s, for example? Is it because, in this world of the Hollywood pitch, a publisher is more likely to invest more strongly in publicising a book that's easily described? Very possibly, surely, it's a mixture of both.

More and more, books are coming up with titles that sell them to us in our lightning-quick decision-making world. And people are buying them, in their droves. Something to think about before you name your putative bestseller after an obscure 16th-century Latvian poet.

Brown paper packages tied up with string

A year ago today, we were packing up our Seattle lives ready to move back to Europe.

Jonah was of course oblivious to the broader implications of leaving behind everything and everyone he'd ever known (melodramatic, moi?). So as far as he was concerned, this was just a fantastic day of mess. Things to crinkle! Things to hide in! Things to roll around in!




I was sorely tempted to join him but figured the removal guys would be less tolerant of a noisy pregnant Brit than they were of a noisy (non-pregnant, clearly) toddler. And hey, Jonah's American by birth, so he's supposed to be noisy.

We had substantially more gear to move back than we'd moved over with four years ago. The toddler, for starters. And wedding rings, deep and lasting friendships, a gaggle (giggle?) of memories...Oh yeah, and a serious coffee house habit. I mean, c'mon! A coffee shop with a "laptop bar"! Hard not to love.

When we'd moved to Seattle, our giddy Londoner-selves hadn't owned enough to fill a sea container, so our stuff had shared space with other traveling randomata. And man, the randomata that some people choose to travel with is staggering. Our bits and pieces got mixed up at customs with some of the other passengers' stuff (presumably when it was opened to make sure none of us was smuggling Class A drugs or small mammals, or possibly one inside the other...anyway...). Who travels with a self-portrait of their own (male) nipples? Not us, although we now possess said photo (mmm, lucky us). We assumed it was a self-portrait from the angle of the shot.

But on the way back? Oh yeah, we were American now. We had consumed. Unsurprisingly, we qualified for a container of our own. Not quite Virginia Woolf, but we loved it just the same. It harboured our worldly goods - each and every lovingly wrapped-and-packed carton. All 235 of them.