And what’s it called…?
The inexact science of the title. And what happened when I asked ChatGPT to come up with one for my new book.
(I haven’t done the usual author thing of showing me holding my new proof as I’ve got the lurgy and eight days in, look like a whites wash gone wrong)
What’s in a good title? Like almost everything in publishing, it’s an inexact science. I’m thinking about this because my next book has just arrived in proof form. It’s called We All Live Here. Two months ago, though, it was called The Rebuild (and still is, on a number of foreign contracts).
I’m not alone. The Great Gatsby, for example, was almost The High Bouncing Lover. Or even On The Road To West Egg. Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms was almost, among other possibilities, Love Is One Fervent Fire. Most of my novels have a working title, but only a handful have kept them all the way through to publication. What changes? A number of factors: what is working in the market at the time, whether the publisher thinks it reflects the book’s contents, whether it will work on the shelf, or sounds too like something that’s already out there.
My best known book, Me Before You did not begin its life with that title. It was originally called Six Month Contract, a title I fought hard to keep. But the view of my UK publishers, Penguin Michael Joseph, and my US publishers, Pam Dorman Books, was that it sounded like an employment manual. It was dry, forgettable. It said nothing about the book’s contents. With that book we had an added problem: a title that said too much about the book’s contents might be just as off-putting.
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