One of the most important issues to be decide before you submit your novel to a publisher is the title of the novel, or at least some suggestions of good titles.
A title is in my experience one of the most difficult issues to settle.
What makes a good title? If you already have a publisher, they should in principle be able to help.
But really they are a bunch of amateurs in my (somewhat limited) experience when it comes to this.
If you don't already have a publisher, the title may be rather crucial to getting the publisher to look further into your manuscript.
There are certain criteria about a title which are reasonably obvious, at least in retrospect.
First, you can check on the internet if the title which you are thinking of has been used before.
You might feel that if it has been used, then this rules it out.
I certainly started off with that idea.
Unfortunately I based my belief that my choice of title was pretty well unique on my general knowledge of titles.
But soon I was forced to realise that it better not be a hard and fast rule that the title should never have been used before! 'Friends and Enemies' was chosen as the title of my first book, and then the series title - and it has indeed been used before.
I must admit that I did not think of checking this carefully - and it seems that my publishers did not either.
So when I did check it on the internet with heart in mouth, when it was too late to change, I discovered that there were a couple of other novels called by the same name - or more or less the same name, at any rate.
But it has not turned out to be a disaster.
For my second novel, the second part of a trilogy, I used Beings in a Dream, which somehow came to me even before I had written the book! Now that title turned out to be a phrase in a poem by Ginsberg.
There is nothing new under the sun! Interestingly I got several hits on my internet site from Oak Hill College, which is a theological college - not my area! This turned out to be because there was someone of my name working there and he appears to be quite a prominent theologist.
So I think that you are more likely to get mismatches because you do not have a name like Rambang Sootipong, but something rather common like David Field, rather than because of clashing book titles.
Second, you want a title which can be readily identified by a search-engine.
Here you have to balance between getting a very specific hit and getting hits by good luck - the latter at least at first, before there are a lot of links to your website.
You will certainly get very specific hits by calling your novel 'Grabblepinch and Snufflepock' but people have already to be looking for it rather specifically.
On the other hand if you call your novel 'Star', then you will indeed be somewhere in the list when people are searching for quite other things than novels, but you will be a long way down the list of dozens and dozens of pages that will come up.
It is very well known that the likelihood of someone clicking further and further down the list decreases extremely rapidly as they go further down.
In fact you want to be in the top five, say, on a Google search.
But that takes time and is, I believe, achieved by getting lots and lots of links to your site.
But ask an expert! Third, your title should be relevant to the novel.
This means that you have to stand back and decide what your novel is really about! This may be quite educative.
Or maybe a title should be completely irrelevant? I remember despairing of finding a decent title and suggesting to my publisher that we call it 'Squirrel Stew', which figures somewhere in the first book.
But no, I do not think that this is a good idea.
If people read the blurb on the back of the book, then look back again at the title, they will probably get puzzled, frown and put the book down or click to the next site.
You do not want to play tricks on your readers.
Of course it is awfully difficult to find a single simple appealing phrase which describes your book.
Jane Austen sometimes liked abstract notions, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility.
Dickens sometimes used names, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby as did many others with Camilla, Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, Pamela, Shamela, Tom Jones highlighting the chief characters.
Or you may highlight the chief location, Treasure Island, Penguin Island, Aerodrome.
Or you may go for startling titles, The 19th Wife, The Crippled Eunuch for example, or very evocative titles, like The Wasted years, The Road to Despair, Joy and Heaven.
Russian novelists are especially good at utterly depressing and grandiose versions of this, Crime and Punishment, Transfiguration, Resurrection or the juxtaposition of opposites, War and Peace, Life and Death, Misery and Happiness or variations on these.
Fourth, you can use a known phrase as your title, 'Back to the Drawing Board', 'Cows Come Home', 'An Ill Wind' and so on.
Or you can pinch the title of a famous painting or piece of music: 'Beethoven's Fifth', 'Mona Lisa' or you can hijack a famous name in other ways as in the 'da Vinci Code', if you dare.
You can also use a quote - there's a lot of rather loose Shakespeare floating about.
In fact I am guilty because I called my last novel The Fairest Star, which is a misquote from Romeo and Juliet, a play which figures in the novel.
Fifth, whatever you do, you must be happy with your title.
But it is very difficult to know if you are going to be happy with it.
Take a well known but peculiar title like 'Lord of the Flies' and try to imagine that you had never heard it before.
You will realise that what seems good through repetition perhaps sounded rather ghastly at first.
So as a way of finding if you are going to be happy with your title, repeat it again and again.
Let it well up out of your subconscious over breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Giving a title to your novel is like giving your dog a name.
You've got to like it, you cannot change it and you have to be prepared to be able to shout it down the street without feeling terribly embarrassed in front of the neighbours.
So what do you do? One thing that is fun to do is this: have a brainstorming session.
I was introduced to this by the leading UK firm of advertisers who very kindly offered their services free of charge to the UK Nuclear Freeze organisation, with which I was involved many years ago.
We were trying to find the name for a new anti-nuclear weapons organisation.
Following the recipe of the advertising company, you sit in front of a blackboard with several people, the more the merrier, and as a name for your book occurs to anyone, no matter how barmy, they quite uncritically write it down.
You can do this by yourself of course with just a bit a paper, or with a couple of friends.
In other words, everything from sausage to reincarnation is allowed.
No one is allowed to raise objections.
You soon have a pretty long list.
When you have had enough of this, you go through the list crossing out the obviously ridiculous ones and then look critically for the first time at the others.
This stops you getting fixated on one name only and allows you to put together the best of what you have, combining all the ideas and coming up with a killer title.
Try it! Of course it may not come up with a title for you but it will certainly be fun and it just might work.