When this project started I didn’t have to have a title. The book was part of a series and it would be known simply by the name of author. It was only once I submitted the book that we realised that calling it simply Robert A. Heinlein would not make it terribly searchable in the e-book stores.
One of the comments I’ve frequently made, is that in some ways I have been channelling the great man himself. Verbosity, intemperance, etc etc. But nowhere has this been truer than my inability to come up with a title. Heinlein had a terrible ear for titles. Most of his stories were titled by magazine editors, and most of his adult novels were titled by Virginia. His original title for Number of the Beast, for example, was The Panki-Barsoom Number of the Beast, or even just Panki-Barsoom.
So I did what Heinlein did and outsourced the problem, in this case to many friends on facebook. I assembled 12 titles, submitted them to Unbound, and after some back and forth as our ideas changed we finally settled last week
And the title is…..
The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein.
release date: March 2019
Farah Mendlesohn 