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I think there are two phases of thinking about titles:
Unpublished writers: fretting about coming up with the most perfect title that will get an agent to sign them.
Published writers: somewhat cynical, not too attached, don’t worry about it till marketing comes into play.
Here’s a thing, if you’re querying with a shitty title, it probably won’t matter unless your title is actively offensive. Even if it seems to misrepresent what your book is—an erotic thriller that accidentally sounds like a YA fantasy—an agent is ultimately judging the query overall. It won’t matter hugely in the decision to sign you, and it won’t really matter until you are ready to go out on sub. I’ve never been super attached to any of my titles because I knew they would change. When I was drafting Never Saw Me Coming, I had no idea of what to call it, so the working manuscript was titled Dark Triad. Hey, I knew this wasn’t a good title (it’s a reference to the “Dark Triad” in psychology, which is when you have psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism at the same time). It’s not a good title because very few people know what that means. When I started querying I changed the title to With Teeth. I still couldn’t think of a title, and am a Nine Inch Nails fan and there’s a song with that title. There’s also a line in the book where Chloe’s talking about how thousands of years of domestication of dogs have left us thinking that we can kick dogs and get away with it, but every now and then when we kick a dog, we’re going to come across one with teeth. Before we went out on submission, my agent noted that it’s kind of hard to pronounce “With Teeth” and that it doesn’t necessarily denote “thriller.” I had no strong feelings, so we went out on sub with the title “Tooth & Nail.” (Funnily enough, a book came out the same year as mine called With Teeth, by Kristen Arnett, who is way more famous than me.)
After my book was acquired, we couldn’t announce it until we came up with the ultimate title. This took many rounds of coming up with title after title, many of which were terrible. I came up with titles that sounded too YA, too cutesy, too ambiguous. I tried several that were references to famous works of literature, and some that were references to idioms. I don’t know if “Never Saw Me Coming” is really an idiom, maybe something that is like one level under an idiom—a thing sometimes people say.
So if you’re agonizing over a title at the querying stage, I wouldn’t worry about it too much—it will probably get changed anyway. If you have a REALLY banger title, it might give you a little extra attention from the agent, but it won’t lead them to sign you if your book isn’t good. (What is a banger title? There is a cozy mystery—part of a series that take place in a Chinese noodle shop, called Dim Sum of All Fears. This is a perfect title, because cozy mysteries are often cheeky-funny and have pun-related titles. I first heard of this title years ago and I still remember it! It’s sticky.)
So for published writers, you’re not getting too attached to draft titles. The draft title for A Step Past Darkness was Dark Days. What happens is you have a joint conversation with your agent, editor, and marketing about whether or not the title works. We went through several iterations of titles for ASPD where me, my agent, and my editor liked a particular title, but marketing did not. But what exactly is marketing looking for? They are thinking about sales, not artsy stuff about what feels right. If your book is a thriller, it has to sound like a thriller. Fantasy should sound like fantasy. Cozy romance like cozy romance. A name has to be sticky. Something people remember that they don’t confuse with something else. You also want something that has reasonable SEO. (I wonder if Stephen King had written It today he could get away with that title—even though it IS the most appropriate title for that book. I don’t think that even he could get away with it though, as its an SEO nightmare.)
But wait, this isn’t fair, a title isn’t sitting there by itself. Potential buyers are seeing a title in context. With the right book design and font and color choice, you can clearly indicate what type of book something is. Here’s a book I picked at random—it’s a romance. It is clearly and unambiguously telegraphing romance.
But can’t you imagine a psychological thriller book cover where the title is in a sans serif font and the main image is of a lit window of a dark house, with the same exact title? You know, a book where a woman thinks her husband might have SECRETS? Or maybe a horror novel about telepathy? I often felt this way when it felt like marketing was rejecting a lot of potential titles—maybe it doesn’t “sound” like a thriller but it would definitely come across as one when put together as an entire package.
But, ultimately, it is a decision that isn’t entirely yours. My advice: the exact title isn’t the right hill to die on, just make sure you don’t have a title you actively hate. Like one where you would cringe every time you were out promoting the book.
Another step that occurs in the title-making process is seeing who else has used it before. Book titles can’t be trademarked or copywritten. The main reason you check to see if anyone else has used it is not to make sure that no one has ever used it, but to see if anyone has used it recently and if so, did it happen to be huge. ie, if you use that title, who exactly will people be thinking of when they think of that title? There are actually several books that have the same title as mine.
When we did the search of “Never Saw Me Coming” in 2020, only the penultimate book existed. It was self published in 2018, which we didn’t think was a dealbreaker, so we went ahead and used it. The last book is also self published and came out a year after mine. The second book is a traditionally published book from Little Brown that came out this month, though technically the full title is Never Saw Me Coming: How I Outsmarted the FBI and the Entire Banking System--And Pocketed $40 Million. I found out about this book because I have a Google alert set up for both my book titles and my name (this helps find articles and promotions even before my PR person finds out about them). The traditionally published book is interesting, because it means a team of people probably did a search and decided either my book was far enough in the past or not big enough to worry about in an SEO kind of way. Or perhaps because it’s fiction rather than memoir. (I’ll try not to take it personally lol. But it’s not like my book didn’t do well.) Or maybe they added the long subtitle for that reason- I don’t know actually.
The risk of having the same exact or similar title to someone else is someone going to buy your book and ended up with someone else’s. Yes, this happens even if author names are radically different and the books have entirely topics. I recommended David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas to one of my good friends and she read an entirely different book with the same title (that, strangely, came out the same year from another division of the same publisher). I read somewhere else that the latter guy actually got a bump in sales because Mitchell went on to win a bunch of awards.
Slight sidebar here: It should surprise no one that I have a general distain for AI when it comes to writing. In the struggle to come up with a title for my second book, I tried using AI and it was laughably horrible. I fed it a hundred or so recent thriller titles and asked it to come up with titles and its suggestions were things like “Murder at the Mysterious Mansion: Murder Most Foul.” I’m… not worried about AI overlords coming for us anytime soon.
Sorry for the short post, but I’m getting ready to head to Bouchercon- (I have a panel Thursday morning if you’re going to be there!)
To leave you on a funny note, the below book which was published the same exact day as mine clearly demonstrates how one word and design can clearly convey a totally different book.
Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
The same-title-as-something-else thing drives me nuts.: it implies that there are a finite number of titles in the world, and that publishers have no choice but to recycle them, which strikes me as cynical and defeatist.
My favorite suspense-thriller author is Peter Abrahams, and my favorite novel if his is END OF STORY (2007). This year, the evil and toxic “A.J. Finn” released his second novel, END OF STORY. It tanked, and I’m glad it did, but I can’t help but wonder if Abrahams caught some stray fire in the reviews. Even as I hope some new readers discovered his wonderful story.