The Funny Puns Used For Cozy Mystery Titles

One of the interesting trends seen in mysteries has been the increasing use of colorful, humorous puns for the titles of cozies. I'm writing two such series at the moment, and, so far, I've resisted adopting a pun for any of my titles.

Puns are fun, however, I'm not really good at coming up with clever puns. The good ones make you chuckle at first reading them. Well, that will change with an upcoming Isabel & Alma Trumbo cozy mystery title. But more about that in my later blog posts.

I often find puns coming up while I'm writing my books's drafts. The puns just sort of arise in the flow of the prose I'm writing. Sometimes I don't see the puns until later on while I'm revising my work. I usually strike out the puns unless I can use it in a refreshingly humorous way.

The other problem I've encountered with using puns for titles is the number of characters in the title grows longer. When you're looking at thumbnail-sized ebook covers, a long title becomes a more difficult problem in making it all fit in the small space along with the author's name. My name (ED LYNSKEY) uses ten characters. Anyway, those are my thoughts today on puns.