The title of a book is a funny, paradoxical thing. On the one hand, as far as novels are concerned, we rarely think of it as an intrinsic part of the book at all during the reading experience, when we’re too busy engaging in the story, characters and themes. What was that book called again? You know, the one with the murderer and the cat, it was on Arena last month …
On the other hand, the title is all-important: it’s the first thing we see — perhaps the clincher in whether we pick up the book at all — and it should summarise the whole work in a few words, invest with an identity and integrity. No pressure! A good title is a minor guarantee that the book behind it will at least be interesting. Would The Great Gatsby have lasted under one of its working titles such as Trimalchio of West Egg, The High-Bouncing Lover or Under the Red, White and Blue?
Little wonder then that many writers, like Fitzgerald, have struggled over how to name their books. Martin Amis, in the opening pages of one of his novels, wrote about how “there are two kinds of title. The first kind of title decides on a name for something that is already there. The second kind of title is present all along: it lives and breathes, or it tries, on every page.” Amis toyed with calling that book Millennium, or Time’s Arrow, or The Murderee, eventually settling on London Fields. (Though clearly, Time’s Arrow was too good to waste; it became the title of his next book.)
Some writers show no signs of this struggle. Tennessee Williams had a golden ear for a title as good as anyone — A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Night of the Iguana — as did Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon, To Have and Have Not. And William Faulkner’s titles are, to be frank, sometimes better than the books: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August. Here we have a resonance that works not just before you read the books, but afterwards too.
But not all books are lucky enough to spring from the womb fully formed and to make an impact with the right name right away. In fact, the title, seemingly an indivisible part of the book, turns out in some cases to be decidedly flexible. Detachable, even.
There are two prime circumstances where this can happen. The first is territorial, informed by the fact that two of the largest markets for English-language books — the UK and the US — are, after all, two countries separated by the same language.
Publishers’ assessments of what will play better in different countries aren’t always borne out
And so JK Rowling’s debut novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone — you might have heard of it — was titled, for the US market, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. This was, reportedly, because Rowling’s US publisher, Arthur A Levine of Scholastic, thought Philosopher sounded too “arcane” and he wanted a title that said “magic” more overtly to US readers. Of course, most British and Irish children have not heard of the legend of the philosopher’s stone either, but this isn’t the first time a US publisher has underestimated its readers’ intellectual curiosity. (In cinema, the James Bond film Licence to Kill had its original title Licence Revoked changed, as test audiences associated the term with driving.)
Publishers’ assessments of what will play better in different countries aren’t always borne out. Harry Potter would still be a phenomenon with Philosopher, and at the other end of the scale, less commercially successful novels like Will Ferguson’s Generica (US)/Happiness (UK), or James Buchan’s The Persian Bride (US)/A Good Place to Die (UK) were never going to make it big anyway.
Occasionally a territorial title change can happen not by design but by accident. Novelist Jim Crace, winner of the Dublin International Literary Award among many others, found this out when he completed his 2003 novel Genesis, and then decided it might be too “bloated” for a book that was about neither the Bible nor a rock band. He changed it to Six, which relieved his British publisher — it turned out “hardly anyone had liked it anyway [but] hadn’t wanted to say” — but appalled his US publisher, who had thought Genesis “cheeky and witty” and felt Six was “hollow and meaningless … like a cheap Hollywood thriller”.
The only solution was to please everyone, or no one, by giving the book different titles in different countries. Crace was sanguine. “I’ll be able to pretend I’ve written two books instead of one. Maybe my more obsessive readers will be fooled into buying both.” And of course, “if anything goes wrong, there’s someone I can blame.”
If the decision to change the title between countries is half-artistic, half-commercial — “what will play better in the States”? — then the other name-change situation seems more nakedly mercantile. This is when a hardback book assumes a new identity for the paperback edition. The inference, accurate or not, is that the book hasn’t sold as well as publisher or author hoped, and a renamed paperback is another shake of the dice.
This provides opportunities to pursue lowest common denominators. When the well-established, reliably interesting but not household-name writer Tim Parks published a novel in 2012 about life in a Buddhist retreat, he called it The Server, a gently ambiguous title referring in part to the protagonist’s role at the retreat. For the paperback, however, the browser’s first approach to the book was scrubbed clean of all subtlety with the lip-smacking title Sex is Forbidden. (The cover changed too, an ethereal figure throwing yoga shapes replaced with an arms-aloft bikini-clad sunbather.) This is the literary equivalent of a school chess club putting up a post headed “SEX!! Now that we’ve got your attention …” And with an Amazon sales rank of 1.8 million at the time of writing, this shameless effort doesn’t seem to have worked.
Its success was enough to enable Kirsten Roupenian to sell her debut collection of stories for a reported $1.2m
Alternatively, who remembers Kirsten Roupenian’s story Cat Person, about a bad date and unwelcome sex, which briefly achieved viral notability in 2017 when it appeared in the New Yorker? It became the magazine’s most-read piece of online fiction and, as the author later put it, “its status as fiction had largely got lost”.
Its success was enough to enable Roupenian to sell her debut collection of stories for a reported $1.2 million, and the collection was published in the UK and Ireland in 2019 under the title You Know You Want This, and, with astonishing hubris, no author name on the cover. Happily, hubris led where it always does, and the paperback edition of the stories came out the following year with the author’s name fully in place — and under the tail-between-legs title of Cat Person and Other Stories.
Finally, we cannot forget that the passage of time might unilaterally impose a new title, as society changes what is acceptable. Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel was always known in the US as And Then There Were None, but in the UK it took a while to get there. It was initially published as Ten Little N*****s, and when an attempt at correction was made in 1985, it was not much better: it became Ten Little Indians. Only in the 1990s did it get its current title. We might, by the way, note a double standard: popular writer Christie’s title was changed, while the more literary Joseph Conrad’s The N***** of the ‘Narcissus’ retains its original title.
In non-fiction, the impulse may be slightly different. Just as the use of on-screen TV guides means that programme titles must make their content clear at a glance, so it’s de rigueur in non-fiction books to include a subtitle explaining what it’s about. Patrick Radden Keefe’s award-winning Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty goes one further with a sub-subtitle (The Sacklers, Purdue Pharma and OxyContin), all the better to attract googlers who can’t recall the actual title.
If you can’t decide, adopt the position of American author Kurt Vonnegut, whose fans celebrate his centenary this month
And sometimes what might have worked as a subtitle becomes the main title of a book. Sathnam Sanghera’s If You Don’t Know Me By Now (“a memoir of love, secrets and lies in Wolverhampton”) became, in paperback, the equally artful but more direct The Boy with the Topknot.
More eyebrow raisingly direct still was former mental health nurse Nathan Filer’s The Heartland: Finding and Losing Schizophrenia, which was relaunched in paperback with the bolshy title This Book Will Change Your Mind About Mental Health.
Or, if you can’t decide, adopt the position of American author Kurt Vonnegut, whose fans celebrate his centenary this month. His restless, jumpy style — and love of exclamation marks — was perfectly summed up by his habit of giving his novels dual titles, such as Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday! and Slapstick, or Lonesome No More! At least he provided good value to his readers.
So, next time you visit a bookshop or browse online, pay some attention to the titles. You’d be amazed at how much effort, ingenuity and downright commercial terror has gone into that little perfection of words that you just scrolled idly past and immediately forgot. Better luck next time, Mr Author!
