{"id":98591,"date":"2016-05-25T14:58:41","date_gmt":"2016-05-25T18:58:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=98591"},"modified":"2016-05-25T16:30:09","modified_gmt":"2016-05-25T20:30:09","slug":"title-fights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/05\/25\/title-fights\/","title":{"rendered":"Title Fights"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who gets to name an author\u2019s book?<\/em><\/p>\n

\"black-and-white-people-bar-men\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When I was readying my first novel for publication, it struck me that writers have far more control over what\u2019s in their books than what\u2019s on<\/em> them\u2014the cover art, blurbs, jacket copy, but especially the title, where the author\u2019s concerns overlap with marketing ones. Deciding on a name for your life\u2019s work is hard enough; the prospect of changing it at the eleventh hour is like naming your newborn, then hearing the obstetrician say, But wouldn\u2019t Sandra look amazing<\/em> on the certificate? It took a nine-month war of attrition to secure the original title of my book, Private Citizens.<\/em><\/p>\n

The history of writers fighting for their book titles is extensive and bloody; so powerful is the publisher\u2019s veto that not even Toni Morrison, fresh off her Nobel win, got to keep her preferred title for Paradise<\/em>, which was War<\/em>. (For her most recent book, God Help the Child<\/em>, she favored<\/a> The Wrath of Children.<\/em>) Who knows why George Orwell\u2019s editor thought<\/a> Nineteen Eighty-Four <\/em>was more commercially viable than The Last Man in Europe, <\/em>or why the industry\u2019s gerund fetish turned<\/a> Helen Simpson\u2019s Hey Yeah Right Get a Life <\/em>into the insipid Getting a Life?\u00a0<\/em>Commercial interests even beyond the publishing house can get involved, as in the famous case of DeLillo\u2019s White Noise<\/em>, which was to be Panasonic<\/em> until the corporation\u2019s lawyers intervened<\/a>. Susan Orlean has had a particularly rough time\u2014every one of her books\u2019 titles has been changed<\/a> by various powers that be:<\/p>\n

\n

My first book was called Saturday Night in America<\/em> until the person designing the cover thought it would look better with fewer words \u2026 Homewrecker<\/em> became My Kind of Place<\/em>. The Millionaire\u2019s Hothouse<\/em>\u2014a title I loved dearly, although no one else on the planet did\u2014became The Orchid Thief<\/em>. Shiftless Little Loafers<\/em> became Lazy Little Loafers<\/em> because some individuals in an executive capacity at a bookstore chain that will go unnamed didn\u2019t know what the word shiftless<\/em> meant.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Abroad, books sometimes take on new names to suit national tastes; hence Merritt Tierce\u2019s Love Me Back <\/em>in Italy became Carne viva<\/em> (\u201craw meat,\u201d an idiom for \u201cpainfully exposed\u201d), while the Canadian novelist Lawrence Hill\u2019s The Book of Negroes <\/em>was released stateside<\/a> as Someone Knows My Name<\/em>. Surely no one had to tell Karl Ove Knausgaard that My Struggle <\/em>wouldn\u2019t fly in Germany<\/a>, though it\u2019s amusing to note that even Hitler himself lost out with his original title: Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The F\u00fchrer may have found more luck in today\u2019s nonfiction climate, where blunt, foolproof subtitles are near mandatory\u2014for Andrew Solomon\u2019s depression memoir, The Noonday Demon,<\/em> his publisher requested the subtitle<\/a> Non-Financial Depression.<\/em> Jean Garnett, an editor at Little, Brown, told me that \u201cwith nonfiction there can be less room for mystery and poetry,\u201d and that the subtitle must do \u201cthe unglamorous grunt work of saying what exactly the book is,\u201d which \u201ccan feel sort of like Mad Libs: The Adjective Story of Noun<\/em>.\u201d The subtitle can become a second front in the editorial war. The journalist Justine Sharrock\u2019s book on wartime torture, Tortured<\/em>, had its original subtitle\u2014How Our Cowardly Leaders Abused Prisoners, American Soldiers, and Everything We\u2019re Fighting For<\/em>\u2014changed to When Good Soldiers Do Bad Things<\/em>, though her publisher told her the main consideration was length, not politics.<\/p>\n

So what kinds of titles do publishers prefer? For starters, according to Garnett, they naturally favor \u201ctitles that are memorable and striking and, of course, that manage to communicate the flavor or feel of the book\u2019s content and writing and sensibility,\u201d though these are subjective criteria\u2014both she and my own editor, Margaux Weisman at William Morrow, concede that the titling process amounts mainly to a gut feeling, informed by trial and error. (And it\u2019s hard to imagine that they aren\u2019t influenced by the desire for Google-friendliness or e-retail \u201cdiscoverability\u201d\u2014think of the Twitter-friendly #GIRLBOSS<\/em>\u2014though nobody I spoke to claimed these were heavy considerations.) Titles are hashed out in biweekly meetings with the publisher, editor-in-chief, deputy publisher, digital and paperbacks publisher, and managing editor, and later in the process, marketing, design, and publicity departments, as well as the author and their agent.<\/p>\n

Every literary generation has its naming conventions, and it\u2019s as hard to imagine the sixty-five-word original title for Robinson Crusoe<\/em><\/a> passing muster today as it is to imagine a nineteenth-century novel called Never Let Me Go<\/em>. It\u2019s easy to spot the fashions of our publishing moment: short-story collections are named after the collection\u2019s centerpiece practically by default. Titles for longer literary works are often staked to a central relationship\u2014The Time Traveler\u2019s Wife<\/em>, The Abortionist\u2019s Daughter<\/em>, The Orphan Master\u2019s Son<\/em>\u2014or a group in a setting: The Swans of Fifth Avenue<\/em>, The Mystics of Mile End<\/em>, The Dogs of Littlefield<\/em>. Publishing favors the memorable, the concrete, and the vivid; it also has grammatical preferences, like solitary adjectives (Mislaid<\/em>, Thrown<\/em>, Wild<\/em>, Lit<\/em>), rousing imperatives (See Me<\/em>, Find Me<\/em>, Find Her<\/em>, Lean In<\/em>), and quirky pleonasms like Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever <\/em>or What\u2019s Important Is Feeling<\/em>. (My friends and I like to overhaul the classics: Everyone the Bell Tolls for Is Thee <\/em>or War and Peace and Everyone We Know.<\/em>) And for whatever reason\u2014maybe a surge of interest in young women\u2019s lives, maybe Lena Dunham\u2014we may soon hit Peak Girl<\/a>, with The Girl on the Train<\/em>, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing<\/em>, Girl Through Glass<\/em>, Girls on Fire<\/em>, Girl at War<\/em>, Gone Girl<\/em>, The Girls\u00a0<\/em>…<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t to imply that publishers willfully goad authors into using trendy titles, or that they always have the last word. My editor assured me that \u201cthe most important thing is that you are happy with the title.\u201d And the author may find that the simplest way to resolve a dispute is to invent a different title. The publisher of Jos\u00e9 Ordu\u00f1a\u2019s memoir,\u00a0The Naturalization: Notes on the Browning of America<\/em>, was concerned that the term naturalization<\/em>\u00a0wasn\u2019t widely known; Ordu\u00f1a told me he ended up preferring his alternative, The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration and\u00a0Displacement<\/em>. The publisher of Tanwi Nandini Islam\u2019s Bright Lines <\/em>considered the title somewhat abstract (their suggestion: Girls on the Move<\/em>), but approved it anyway within a few days.<\/p>\n

But when authors and publishers reach an impasse, things can drag on, as in the case of Private Citizens<\/em>. I\u2019d chosen that title for its etymological connotations\u2014privacy, privilege, privation\u2014its suggestive tension, even its sharp-angled letters and doubly appropriate acronym. At my agent and editor\u2019s behest I\u2019d already ripped dozens of pages from the book; the two words on the cover seemed like a reasonable booby prize. But when marketing and sales disagreed, my editor negotiated between us. \u201cI fully understand your position and I definitely don\u2019t want to land on a title that\u2019s template-y or hollowly catchy,\u201d she wrote me. \u201cI DO, however, want a title that will grab readers. And while your rationale behind PRIVATE CITIZENS<\/em> is smart and complete I don\u2019t think a person glancing at the cover and title will come to the same conclusions.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was offered thirty more reader-grabbing alternatives, each of which I deflected. I said The Gold Stars<\/em> gave a misleading LGBT connotation, and that How to Cook a Life<\/em> came too close to an existing cookbook<\/a>. I nixed I Am Precious (And So Are You)<\/em> for its preciousness and Citizens in the Square of Opposition<\/em> because it sounded like it was about Tiananmen Square. I argued that vague titles weren\u2019t a bar to success: The Corrections, The Rocks<\/em>, The Notebook \u2026<\/em> and do they come any vaguer than The Group, <\/em>one of the book\u2019s direct precursors? None of the alternative titles I came up with (halfheartedly, I\u2019ll admit) thrilled anyone either. One of them was just the word Ugh<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What saved the title wasn\u2019t my own eloquence or indignation but the design department, which cooked up a cover<\/a> everyone agreed flattered the title. So in my case, the most purely superficial concern of all, by which my book would be inevitably judged, ended up preserving my intentions. Whether that boosts sales, improves critical reception, or resonates with readers now and fifty years hence has yet to be seen, but the fight is settled, with no losers.<\/p>\n

Tony Tulathimutte\u2019s novel\u00a0<\/em>Private Citizens<\/a> is now available.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who gets to name an author\u2019s book? When I was readying my first novel for publication, it struck me that writers have far more control over what\u2019s in their books than what\u2019s on them\u2014the cover art, blurbs, jacket copy, but especially the title, where the author\u2019s concerns overlap with marketing ones. Deciding on a name […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":931,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[22512,5759,22509,22511,8542,1619,19149,15321,15320,8543,16046,22510,22508,10478,22513,10148,21156],"class_list":["post-98591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-girlboss","tag-adolf-hitler","tag-book-titles","tag-jose-orduna","tag-karl-ove-knausgaard","tag-lena-dunham","tag-little-brown","tag-love-me-back","tag-merritt-tierce","tag-my-struggle","tag-naming","tag-perils-of-publication","tag-private-citizens","tag-susan-orlean","tag-the-orchid-thief","tag-titles","tag-tony-tulathimutte"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTitle Fights: Who Gets to Name an Author\u2019s Book?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Tony Tulathimutte on the extensive politics between authors, publishers, 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