Been watching old episodes of Jon Taffer’s Bar Rescue with my wife. Sometimes it’s pretty entertaining, and it’s a great way to learn about the bar business by seeing how people foul up what they imagined was a self-driving business vehicle.

If you’ve never seen the show, Taffer is a New Yawka who goes about the country helping failing bars and taverns to succeed. Can’t tell whether his antics are playing the stereotype to TV or his real reactions, because reality TV is unreal, but he can have a shouting match one day and come in calm and cool the next segment/day. He often shows a heart of gold, especially when it comes to establishments failing due to external, unavoidable impacts (death, cancer, hurricane, accidental ownership).

He is direct, vocal, and pretty hard to ignore. Good marketing. Worked on us.

His success rate seems to be about 50%. Considering that (taking claims at face value) nearly all of the bars he saves were about to faceplant and take the invested capital with them, that’s big. That means half the people end up paying off lenders, keeping houses, retaining staff. It’s a worthy social consequence. He’s helping the little guys and gals, who sometimes compete with well-funded chains.

After a couple of seasons, I started seeing analogies to my own field. There are key and major differences, starting with the fact that no one is at physical risk from reading a novel (consuming it might be another story). And one trend I have seen in bar owners is smack down the middle of my own experience:

Names.

Taffer usually alters the bar’s name. The bar owner will so often insist on the fig leaf of originality by going right back to the old name not long after Jon’s off to Tucson or Tallahassee. A world-renowned expert just told them they needed a new name, and they said “Meh.”

Not kidding. Of all places, that’s where they dig foxholes and prepare to die for it.

Want to know what’s hard in my line of work: Telling someone that the name they chose for their novel is ridiculous and counterproductive, but without being so blunt and cruel that one guarantees non-listening.

I have yet to figure out a good way to do that, but I can tell you that I find many book titles poorly considered, and I don’t know why they even chose them. For one thing, you don’t have to christen the thing in final form until printing. If you sell it to a publisher, they’ll probably reserve the right to change it. If you take it through  to publication yourself, you have until you push the buttons to set up the listings, post the blog posts,  create the blurb, and so on. You have months or years to think. Until then, a working title will more than suffice.

All right. What if your editor tells you, tactfully or brutally, that your novel’s name is not well chosen?

If you’re like most writers that’s an instant negative reaction. Rarely have I ever gotten the response: “All right. What do you suggest?” I have come to realize that the naming is so personal that nothing I know to say will crack that connection. It’s almost like an addiction, in which the addict must hit bottom before making a priority of seeking help and confronting the misery in order to get life back.

Not faulting anyone for that, either. I get its deeply human and not always practical nature, so this addiction seems to me something to just let go of once the subject is raised and blown off. Otherwise all it’ll do is alienate my client and then my advice will still be dismissed. “He didn’t believe in my work.” “This is the name it’s had in my mind for twenty years, and that’s that.”

What I’m hearing is: “I have to fight you on one key point or I will have surrendered myself. This is the hill I die on.” And a part of me even gets that. I’m the person who would rather have customer service calls take three times as long to get to a person because I refuse, point blank, to have verbal conversations with robots. That admitted (and I do have a purpose to it), they’re dying on a worthless hill.

It’s worthless because a title that doesn’t make sense doesn’t help to sell the book. That’s fine if it’s a vanity project and the au doesn’t expect to recoup the costs of editing. Nothing against vanity projects; in a way, they are very liberating. That said, it’s my job to render the best guidance I can, and if one has a deep need to fight for some aspect of their writing, that’s one of the bad ones.

If you’re a writer, and your editor is trying to tell you that your title is ill-chosen, hopefully at the very least you give it fair consideration.