I’ve been talking about and showing snippets from my upcoming book for over a year now. For that entire year I’ve been calling it “Mermaid’s Curse”.
The book is a Lovecraft meets high fantasy with witches, merfolk, and clerics bent on killing all the witches. The first book is how the curse happens, and the evil clerics trying to sacrifice her.
I’ve been told “mermaid” in the title might limit sales since it’s so specific … So I’d like some feedback.
Would you buy this book? Would you change the title? Suggestions maybe?
Anyone who would like to read the first chapter, it’s available here!
Author Crissy Moss 
If I hadn’t already read extracts you would have had me at Lovecraft.
If you are intending to play up the Lovecraftian resonance, you might want to avoid Mermaid (and other sea-tangential words) in the title, so potential readers don’t expect Deep Ones/R’yleh/&c.
I’m the one who suggested she change the title and here’s why. The audience for readers who are looking for fantasies involving Mermaids if probably pretty small. However, there could be alot of readers who love fantasy who read Mermaid in the cover and are immediately turned off and wouldn’t even read the blurb. I’m one of those readers. I read Mermaid in the title and I’d just pass by. So for every one person who loves Mermaids, what if you’re driving away 1000 who don’t. You can still attract the Mermaid lovers through Keywords and categories, without driving away people who don’t like Mermaids with the title.
But of even more concern is the fact this book really isn’t about Mermaids. The heroines are both witches. The heroine does fall in love with a Merman, but there isn’t much about the Merpeople’s culture or anything–the books doesn’t focus on the Merpeople as a race. The title refers to what happess in the last 2-3 percent of the book, so if someone picks it up off the title thinking they are getting a book about mermaids and merculture, they will be sorely disappointed.
What this book really focuses on is witches, witchcraft and sacrafice. The evil clerics sacrifice others to the Kraken so that they and their families may be safe- and the one heroine sacrifices herself so her daughter will be safe..
Witches are a much stronger pull when it comes to readers than Mermaids. You’d probably get more response to having Witch in the title than Mermaid. And since the focus in this book isn’t on the curse, it’s on all the sacrificing that’s going on–that’s why I suggested using sacrifice in the title.
I suppose I could change it to Witches Sacrifice, Witches Curse, and Witches Stand.