Naming a series is harder than writing one

I titled this series in my head before I knew what most of it was about. When I first started writing the stories that grew into Paleomythic, I called the whole project the Deep Time series, even though at that point “the whole project” meant one book about sentient geological features and a vague sense that there would be more of them eventually, because I had a trio of book titles that I liked too much not to use together. Yes, I sometimes title my books before I have the faintest clue what they’re going to be about. My brain is a weird place.

For a while, that didn’t matter. A working title is just a label on a folder. But at some point you can’t get away with a working title anymore. You need a real one, that other people are going to hear about. That’s where things got complicated.

When Paleomythic was ready to move toward publication, I brought a couple of series title ideas to my then-marketer. Both got rejected, and not because they were bad titles. They were rejected because other, well-established books already used them… books that Amazon’s algorithm knows very well. If I’d gone ahead, I wouldn’t have been introducing a new series; I’d have been walking straight into someone else’s search results. That’s not a competition I could win. 

It still hurts a little. Not because I desperately love those original titles, and not because I mind marketing, but because I can’t help feeling that marketing should be something you do after the writing. That the work itself should be clean of it. Usually, it can be. Not quite always. That should be enough, but it doesn’t always feel like it. 

Anyway, I retreated to my original working title. The Deep Time series. It sounds right, and it’s not fighting anyone else for algorithmic space. It’s fine.

But it’s not quite accurate anymore, and that bothers me more than it probably should. Paleomythic genuinely lives in deep time — the geological past, entities as old as the solar system. But Biomythic moves into the present and near future, and Astromythic is going to push further out still, into the distant future. Only one book out of the three actually happens in the deep past. Calling the whole thing “Deep Time” is like naming a college major after the first year survey course. It’s an incredibly important foundation but it’s not the whole story. 

So I’ve been turning over alternatives. The Living World series has a nice ring to it — it gestures at the ecological throughline without pinning everything to a single point in time. Mythic Earth does something similar, leaning into the mythological framing instead of the temporal one.

I have to be careful with those, though. If I blend the two of them into Mythic World — which is the version that feels more comfortable to me — I run straight into an existing line of coloring books with that exact name. Which puts me right back in the middle of the algorithm problem again. Wheee!

I don’t have an answer. I have a series that’s technically still called Deep Time, a growing awareness that the name undersells two-thirds of the project, and a shortlist of alternatives that either work well enough or collide with something unexpected the moment I try to shorten them. And I’m running out of time. I have to start telling people who are helping me publish the first book what I’m going to call the whole bunch of them. 

So I’m tossing the question to you nice people. If you had to name a series that tells the story of sentient geological forces, from the creation of the planet through several hundred years from now, what would you call it? I’d be grateful for your suggestions.