My Life in Titles, or The Title Game, or Adventures of a Title Maven, or Titles: The Writer’s Indispensable Tool, or What’s in a Title?, or...

Among the immortal literary classics to be found on the bookshelves of every civilized person are such books as Trimalchio in West Egg, My Valley, Pumphre, and Tom-All-Alone’s the Ruined House.

Do you mean to say you’ve never heard of them?

Actually, those were the titles before the author or publisher thought better of them. You undoubtedly know them as The Great Gatsby, East of Eden, Babbitt, and Bleak House. It’s hard to know whether they would have endured despite their dreadful original titles, but it does make us wonder. In fact, book editor and author Andre Bernard wondered so much about titles that he produced a whole book about them, Now All We Need Is a Title: Famous Book Titles and How They Got That Way.

The first problem most authors face when commencing a book or story is what to call it. Many writers cannot start writing until the question of title is settled, for among its many functions, the title helps an author focus on the point of his tale, its theme, mood, tone of voice, and the nature of the audience that will be reading it. Each version of the title of this article represents a different solution to the challenge of how to approach this subject. Do I play it straight or cute? Grimly academic, pedantically classical, or cleverly metaphorical? Luckily, for purposes of illustration, I was able to use all of them. I doubt if we shall see such an opportunity again in our lifetime.

I am a connoisseur of very few things, but I do consider myself one on the subject of book titles. It is certainly not a form of expertise I deliberately set out to develop. But even if you have a tin ear, over decades of immersion you do become something of a maven in this sub-sub-sub-species of literary endeavor.

There are worse things one could be. The first impression you form of a book is the one evoked by its title, and its impact on you is no less significant than the one you form upon first setting your eye on a stranger. Your bond with a book commences with its title: your mind and heart are subliminally conditioned by a title to anticipate the book’s message and respond to its contents.

The title of a book is its most important sales feature; you are often intrigued or put off by its title long before you see its cover, study its jacket blurbs, or browse through its contents to decide whether or not you want to purchase it. It is therefore not hyperbolic to suggest that many consumers make their decision to buy a book or pass it up on the strength or weakness of its title. Perhaps you can't tell a book by its cover, but by its title? I think you can.

Little wonder, then, that authors, editors, and agents spend an inordinate time seeking les mots justes for the titles of their books. I keep a file of terrific titles for which no books have yet been written, and when a client complains about being stumped for one, I haul out my list and see if I can make a match. When I was a freelance writer, I collaborated with Elizabeth Hogan on a Doubleday book describing the dangers of nuclear power plants that were then beginning to proliferate in the United States. We took our title from Robert Frost’s poem "Fire and Ice": Those Who Favor Fire. We thought it was a brilliant choice.

Doubleday’s sales reps didn’t. Every publishing company sales department has a Vice President in Charge of Rejecting Great Titles and Substituting Mediocre Ones, and that’s how our book ended up being called Perils of the Peaceful Atom.

The original title went into my Terrific Titles file, however, and when, years later, my client Marta Randall turned in an apocalyptic novel for which she lacked an appropriate title, I resuscitated Those Who Favor Fire and suggested it to her, and this time it passed muster.

Actually, it’s not fair to make fun of the sales reps, for it is they after all who have to go out and sell the book to the accounts. If a sales rep is not confident that your title makes an immediate and forceful impact on the buyers – which translates into lost commissions for him – he is going to lobby his publisher to get it changed.

And what for authors is an inspired title may be seen in a very different light by the sales grunts slugging it out on the front line. Among the most common complaints publishers hear from sales reps are vagueness (“What the hell does Attitudes mean”?), insipidness (“Alien Attackers sounds like a million other science fiction novels”), and inappropriateness (“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance sounds like it should go in the how-to section of a bookstore”). Sales reps are therefore the conservative party in any publisher’s legislature, and they usually control a majority vote. But if I love a title enough I will fight like a devil for it, even with my own authors. In 1984 my clients psychiatrist Stanley Turecki, M.D. and co-author Leslie Tonner delivered to Bantam Books a contracted book advising parents how to understand and manage particularly difficult children. The authors and I had spent a long Saturday poring over Bibles, Bartlett’s, and other reference books, and had at last distilled a splendid title drop by drop: Parents Under Siege.

It did not pass muster with Bantam’s Vice President in Charge of Rejecting Great Titles, and we ended up with – well, what else? – The Difficult Child. Talk about difficult children, I was so bitterly disappointed I almost threw a tantrum. But the sales department felt that there are times when a title should simply state, without poetic flourish, what a book is about, and this was one of them. We ultimately acceded to this line of reasoning, and several dozen printings later I must grudgingly admit that Sales had a good point. (In the 1996 edition of my book How to Be Your Own Literary Agent, in which this essay was published, I wrote, “If you’ve written a book for which the title Parents Under Siege is appropriate, take it, it’s yours.” I don’t know if authors James Garbarino and Claire Bedard read this invitation, but in 2001 they brought out a book with that every title.)

Brilliant titles are not always desirable, however, and may actually hurt sales if they point the potential book buyer in the wrong direction. This is particularly true in genre fiction. Every category of books has what might be described as its own characteristic title “profile,” a word or phrase that blatantly declares the book’s genre. An obvious example is detective fiction, where you have The Case of the . . . or something with the words “murder” or “death” in it. Although these catch phrases have become clichés, they help everybody down the line, from editors to bookstore buyers to consumers, to immediately classify the book and make the selection process easier. The title, in other words, is a key element of the package, and guarantees the slot in which the book is to be displayed. A title that deviates too far from its appropriate genre can be a liability, no matter how clever or mellifluous it may be. If you don’t think you’ve been mentally conditioned to respond to titles, take any mainstream title and marry it to a genre formula one and you’ll see what I mean. Pretend you’re a bookstore clerk and determine in which department you would display the following:

The Valley of the Dolls Sanction The Dragons of Valley of the Dolls Dollsworld Showdown at Valley of the Dolls Mistress of Dollsvale Love’s Virginal Valley of the Dolls The Dollsdale Horror A Woman of Uncertain Valley of the Dolls Murder on the Rue Valley of the Dolls

It works for nonfiction, too:

The Valley of the Dolls Syndrome Tighten Up Your Valley of the Dolls The Thirty-Day Valley of the Dolls Slimdown

Even in mainstream literature, titles can give confusing and misleading impressions, and the results can be funny. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance really did get placed on how-to shelves, and the New York Times once ran an apology for referring to Evan Connell’s biography of Custer, Son of the Morning Star, as a novel. If you didn’t know better, you might very well place on the wrong shelves such ambiguously titled books as, Exit the Rainmaker, White Mischief, and The Dancing Wu Li Masters. It’s no laughing matter when these mix-ups cause lost sales, however.

Like everything else in modern culture, titles tend to go in and out of fashion. The revolutionary ’60s temporarily loosened strictures against long titles and book authors took their cue from the stage. Plays like Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, and The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the- Moon Marigolds had lengthy runs despite jawbreaking titles, and authors and publishers tried the same on books. Which is how we ended up with titles like, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. The problem with titles longer than five words, however, is that they crowd the cover and must be reduced to an unacceptably small typeface. The counterrevolution restored short titles, and many best-selling authors went on to employ one-word titles to good effect. There's nothing like Jaws or Roots to instill confidence in succinct titles!

Juvenile and young adult titles have become particularly inventive in the last few years, and it seems that the wackier they are, the more the kids love them. No more Treasure Island and Little Women for today’s boys and girls. They want Jelly Belly, There’s a Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom, Jacob Two Two Meets the Hooded Fang, Hershell Cobwell and the Miraculous Tattoo, How to Eat Fried Worms, Wonder Kid Meets the Lunch Snatcher, Can You Sue Your Parents for Malpractice?, The Alfred G. Graebner Memorial High School Handbook of Rules and Regulations, and the like.

Every publisher’s dream is to have a book that sells by the truckload on the strength of its title alone. Of course, it’s impossible to know with any accuracy what attracts buyers to a book. After reading The One Minute Manager or Swim with the Sharks, you may wonder whether the contents lived up to the brilliance of the titles. But you probably plunked money down at a bookstore to find out.

Most lucrative of all is the title that starts a copycat fad, such as 101 Uses for a Dead Cat, Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, and Thin Thighs in Thirty Days. For years after publication of those books, publishers brought out variants on the titles to take advantage of the public’s infatuation. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, the ripoff titles merely fueled the success of the original ones. Patricia Matthews’s romance Love’s Avenging Heart launched a veritable flood of Love’s Something Somethings that did not subside for years.

Nonfiction writers are luckier than novelists because they often get a second chance in the form of a subtitle. If your title is a bit poetic or obscure, don’t worry, your subtitle will correct any ambiguities. What does Final Cut mean? It could signify anything until you couple it with author Steven Bach’s subtitle: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of “Heaven’s Gate.” Similarly, Merle Miller’s Plain Speaking doesn’t give one a clear idea of his book’s contents until you couple it with its subtitle, An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman. Note that after you read the subtitle, your attention returns to the basic title, and you are now able to understand and appreciate it much better.

For authors struggling to come up with a good title, I advise you to make a long list of words and phrases that have any bearing, however remote, on your story. Some of these may come from the text itself: a description of your hero or heroine, a reference to the plot, theme, or action. Mix and match words until you arrive at the precise formula. If your title doesn’t jump out at you, go through your thesaurus for related words that might be more felicitous than the ones on your list. Or use the index of your Bartlett’s to locate passages in classical literature that succinctly, cogently, and lyrically evoke the appropriate image of your book.

Titling is an essential element of the writer’s craft and requires as much thought as plotting and characterization. Some authors do have a special genius for it, however. I have, for instance, always admired Gregory Benford’s ability to select monumental titles that capture the stupendous profundity of his stories of time and space: In the Ocean of Night, Beyond the Sea of Suns, Timescape, Against Infinity. You read his titles and you know this writer is grappling with nothing less than imponderables, immutables, and ultimates. If you are a romance fan you may find Janelle Taylor’s titles fatally irresistible: First Love Wild Love, Whispered Kisses, Sweet Savage Heart, Passions Wild and Free. The titles of Father Andrew Greeley’s books guarantee that you will be witnessing the torments of sinners: Thy Brother’s Wife, Patience of a Saint, The Cardinal Sins. And John Saul’s titles portend suspenseful tales of creepy kids: Suffer the Children, The Unloved, The Unwanted, When the Wind Blows. Some authors get a lot of mileage out of a title. Lawrence Sanders went through all the deadly sins for his titles, James Patterson through nursery rhymes, and Harry Kemelman’s mystery titles lured readers from one day of the week to another, starting with Friday, the Rabbi Slept Late.

Our love of great books is often enhanced by the great titles that go with them. How Green Was My Valley, From Here to Eternity, East of Eden, Crime and Punishment, One Hundred Years of Solitude, King Solomon’s Mines, Forever Amber, The Magic Mountain, Lord of the Flies – how often are unforgettable titles married to unforgettable books!

If, try as you may, you simply can’t come up with an apt title for your book, don’t despair, you’re in good company. Margaret Mitchell had a hard time coming up with anything more engaging than Tomorrow Is Another Day for her novel of the Civil War. Luckily, a better one did occur to her before the book went into production.

- Richard Curtis

This article was originally written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. It's reprinted in How to be Your Own Literary Agent, published by Houghton Mifflin, Copyright © 1983, 1984, 1996, 2003 by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved.