Do you start with a title, or does it emerge organically from your writing process? How important is a title in shaping your project—or even selling it?
I always start with a title. But sometimes that title is New Book.
Right now, I'm writing the first draft of a new book called The Railway Adults. But isn't a bit strange to use your book title up on a blogpost, you ask? Thing is, this is my one and only chance to put something out actually called The Railway Adults. Because I will eat my drafts if the publisher keeps it. New Book is better.
Luckily, I'm fine with giving titles up when someone from marketing says "Honey, no." I'm fine with anything on the outside of the book changing - jacket image, cover copy, quotes, bio, author photo. To me that's publishing and I'm not a publisher. It's the bit between Chapter One and The End that I'll go to bat for.
Less luckily, I've always got a lot of emails and other bumf about the book before it gets its final title. So I've got files and labels called whatever I thought the book was going to be and somehow I never get round to changing them.
So I need to remember Hang My Hat to find correspondence about Scot Free and look for early drafts of Deep Beneath Us under "Hiskith". Yes, Hiskith. Why ever did they change that, eh?
If I want to look back over the publication journey of In Place of Fear, I need to retrieve the information that it was once called A Fountain Filled With Blood, until I remembered that the reason it sounded so perfect for a crime novel was that it was a crime novel, By Julia Spencer-Fleming.
Anyway, that's not my biggest problem with In Place of Fear. I shortened the title to IPOF, then lengthened that to International Pancake of Fear and was once caught like a rabbit in the headlights during an interview, completely unable to remember what it was really called.
The sequel, The Edinburgh Murders, is easier to remember, except that I still call it Next to Godliness, or Janey for short (by way of Janey Godley, you know).
One title I love and never forget is Strangers at the Gate. It was gifted to me by my editor after she pointed out that someone with my talent for typos couldn't risk bringing out a book called The Cuts.
I grumped for years about my former editor's decree that every book in the Dandy Gilver series was going to be Dandy Gilver and the Dandy Word Crimey Word of Third Word. "Okay" I said, "But I'm not committing to thinking them up." I truly believed her assurances that I wouldn't have to. Huh.
Definitely the most troublesome title was when I had to have a different one for the US and UK. I thought House Tree Person was the perfect name for a psychothriller set in a psychiatric hospital. (The "House Tree Person sketch test" is a now-discredited diagnostic for sociopathy.) Terri Bichoff at Midnight agreed. The editor at Little,Brown UK very didn't. She pitched hard for The Weight of Angels, which I also loved. But in the US, as Terri pointed out, people would think it was about angels. Blank stares from London. Blank stares about the blank stares from Minneapolis. The Atlantic never felt wider.
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| Imagine if your patient drew this! |
So it's got two different names and I've only ever had one email from someone who accidentally bought it twice. I sent her a free copy of a newer book and she seemed okay. (She was in Arkansas and she knew it wasn't about angels, by the way.)
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