It isn’t just one of your holiday games …” (Sorry, Mr. Elliot, but I couldn’t resist.)
I had a title. It roughly fit the pattern I wanted for the series, it was nice and alliterative, it fit on the cover, and it tied in to the story.
Then I realized how badly it would sell the book, and how it would mess up the Amazon algorithms and categorizing system. Oops. Instead of urban fantasy, everyone would glance at the cover, the title, and say, “Horror. Nope!” Soooooo, back to the semi-drawing-board.
This is not the first time I have had to change a title I’d planned on, although usually the problem gets caught earlier. I had one of the Cat Among Dragons books that was going to be With This Ring. It fit the events in the book, and nodded to some other things within a larger story arc. Then I did an internet search of the title. Ohhh, only over a thousand hits for short stories, books, and so on. That many works with the same title will be a problem if potential readers go looking for your book and don’t remember your name, or the series (if there is one), or misspell your name. And most of the books with that title are romances, while the Cat book lacks 90% of the romance cues and beats. So another title was found.
Can you copyright a title? Not on its own, no, nor can you trademark it. (Especially if you try to also use a commercial cover font that you have not paid for rights to. Don’t be that person.) The title can be part of the work’s copyright, but you can’t copyright, oh, Space Marine Adventures or The Shining. Would I use the second of those as a title? No, because it is already a very well known book and film, and you might get a Cease-and-Desist from High Powered Law Firm anyway, even though the law says you can use the title. Can S. King’s lawyers sue you for The Shining Star? Nope.
So, you want a title that relates to your book in some way, that doesn’t send the wrong genre signals, that isn’t overwhelmingly common already, and that isn’t the same as a much more famous work.
Voice from the Back of the Class: What about Android Karanina, huh?
What about it? Will anyone mistake it for the original? No. Was/is it part of a series (sub-sub-genre?) that takes classic [public domain] literature and adds a sci-fi or fantasy element to it? Yes. The title tells you the basic plot (if you already know it, or if you go to a website and find out), and what element is added/changed. Not a problem. Likewise parodies and satires, as long as it is very clear what you are doing (Bored of the Rings). Look at what Weird Al does with song titles for other examples.
So, your title needs to fit the book, not be the same as a much better known book in the same genre, not be too common, and (in most cases) not include obscenities. The last might, maybe, perhaps, be changing a little, maaaaayyyybe, but I still wouldn’t do it. The example I can think of uses an * in the title (Sh*t Flying Through the Air.) I wouldn’t go there, because I’m not sure an indie author could get away with it in a mass-market book.
Image credit: Image by Ron Porter from Pixabay
Mad Genius Club 
12 responses to ““The Naming of Books is a Difficult Matter”
And something to consider also – the proposed title in conjunction with the cover art concept.
My Teeny Publishing Bidness did a book for a client – an interestingly readable memoir for a woman who had a very eventful life, including five husbands. (Married first as a teen, he turned out to be gay, second an abusive criminal that she divorced, third died as a soldier in Vietnam, divorced the 4th, and mercifully, is still married to the fifth.) Anyway, she wanted to call it “A Last Dance With Daddy” – since her own father, whom she adored vanished mysteriously under suspicious circumstances when she was in her twenties, and she always wished that she could have danced with him one more time. She also wanted to use a picture of her current husband walking hand in hand with her little granddaughter – from the back and suitably artistically filtered, of course. And I worked up the prospective cover and thought… “Oh, dear. That has rather horrid implications…” I pointed this out to the client, who saw the problem instantly, once I pointed it out. Any other picture would have worked with the title, any other title would have worked with the picture. Eventually she decided to change the title, and use another illustration entirely.
I am reminded of an incident in Murder Must Advertise 🙂
There’s also the simple aspect that the longer the title is, the more physical space it will turn up.
A Diabolical Bargain was a pain. I kept on having titles that were either horror or romances, and it’s neither.
The Jewel of the Tiger, OTOH, was suggested by the title, and marvel of marvels, actually fit the title when I was done.
I’ve got a work in progress where all the titles suggesting themselves are either too young (though it’s perhaps middle grade) or too comic (when it’s a drama).
Most embarrassing titling mistake was definitely the time I published a space opera named Shadow Captain and then discovered after the fact that there was already a tradpub space opera of that name. (Thankfully, they had reasonably different covers and synopses!) I let it be, both because I wasn’t sure if I could change it at that point.
My last book was very nearly named Wolf’s Claw, until I realized that it made the monster hunter guy on the cover seem like the werewolf, so it became Wolf’s Trail.
Better title, also improved by the fact that wolves don’t really have much in the way of claws. It’s teeth, teeth, teeth all the way.
Once upon a time when I had to read the professional publishing magazines for work (PW, Booklist, etc.), there was a remarkably boneheaded article about titling, whose central anecdote was about how Heather Graham was agonizing about what to name her newest novel. Problem solved when she had an amazing brainstorm that slammed her with the most perfect, most INSPIRED title for said opus! And that brilliant, awesome title was … wait for it … The Island. Oh, for the Love of Life Orchestra….
For a series, sometimes it makes sense to use a gimmick to reinforce the series-aspect.
My not-yet-released indefinite length series (Science of Magic)’s 1st three titles:
Structures of Earth
Fragments of Lightning
Dustings of Blue
Same meter / same midword for each title to come.
Series name: The Affinities of Magic
I stumbled into a similar pattern for my ‘Republic of Texas Navy’ series, with the titles alternating between ‘Texas…’ and ‘The Lone Star…’.
Texas at the Coronation
The Lone Star, the Tricolor, and the Swastika
Texas in the Med
I’ve pretty much decided that book 4 will be ‘The Lone Star, the Red Banner, and the Rising Sun’. The first book of the next story arc will probably be ‘Texas out in the Cold’.
Series names need to fall between two extremes:
You want them to sound like they have some kind of relationship. Grammar structure and types of references help. ”The Prince of Foxes” “Enchantment” and “Joan and the Tower” do not sound like a series.
You want them to have enough differences you can ensure that you can continue the series in the same spirit. If you use not only the format “The X of Y” but ensure that X is a gemstone and Y is an type of magic (Emeralds of Enchantment, Rubies of Sorcery) titles may sound out of place even if they are X of Y
I use the meter (STRUCtures of EARTH) to keep the coherence, since the actual nouns will vary considerably for cause.
And they don’t vary in a pattern, which is how you avoid the second pitfall!