Taglines

Today I took a stroll through the American Christian Fiction Writers forum and saw the Ane Mulligan had started a thread on taglines. She offered to help author's come up with one before the conference in September, or share her opinions on taglines they already had. After reading through the thread, I was inspired to contemplate my own tagline. I hadn't really done so yet since I'm only about 25K into my novel.

What makes a good tagline?

Taglines in marketing are catchy slogans that peak the interest of consumers. We can all name present/past slogans for brands such as Nike, Pepsi, and many others. Similarly, taglines in writing are interesting sentences that grab the reader's attention and don't let go.

Taglines are:

--STRONG! They use as few words as possible to get the purpose of the novel across. They use powerful verbs and nouns in place of stretching out the description with adjectives and adverbs.

--CATCHY! A tagline must snag the reader. It should give them just enough information without giving away the secrets of the novel. Get creative!

--DEFINIATIVE! A super tagline defines a novel. It wraps in character, plot, purpose, etc all in one, while throwing in a taste of the style of the novel. A happy-go-lucky novel won't have a tagline which uses verbs/noun with a heavy or disheartened connotation.

So, I spent part of the morning messing with some words and metaphors, etc. and came up with what I think are a couple of good possibilities.

"When life shut the door on her memories, God opened a supernatural window to help her save the world."

"A disillusioned loan officer loses her memories, but gains a supernatural gift meant to save the world."

What do you think? Are they strong enough? Which do you think is better?