Title: Now all we need is a title
Subtitle: Famous book titles and how they came to be
Author: Andrew Bernard
Editor: W. W. Norton and company
Date: nineteen ninety six
ISBN: 978-0-393314-36-6
I really enjoyed reading this book. I found it fascinating to read about some of the behind-the-scenes work on how many of my favorite books eventually made it to their title. It was a lot of fun to see the back-and-forth fights between publishers and authors over a book title. Although not a how-to book, this fun little book is sure to appeal to all writers and publishers.
The book looks at more than 100 different famous fictional books, including “Jaws,” “The Great Gatsby,” “The Maltese Falcon,” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and how their titles came about. One of my favorites is the “Gone with the Wind” story. It was first called “Pansy”, then changed to “Tote the Weary Load”, then “Tomorrow is Another Day”.
Bernard’s book also has excellent advice, sprinkled throughout the book, from authors and publishers on choosing a title. One of my favorites is a quote from Walker Percy: “A good title should be like a good metaphor; it should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.”
Some historical literary facts are also given for many of the titles. One of my favorites is the story of Lewis Carroll being the first to suggest to his publisher that the jacket bear the title of the book. Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark” became the first book to be published with a printed dust jacket.
In Bernard’s Introduction, he says that this book is “…an anecdotal account of how some of the best-known book and play titles have been created. It is not intended to be a complete compendium of all the catchy titles, but more rather a light-hearted look at a struggle that has plagued writers for centuries”.
As an author and publisher, I can really appreciate how important a title can be to the financial success of a book. Today, a title must not only be attractive, but also keyword-rich and search-engine-friendly, if you have any hope of being found on the internet. The right title is essential if you want your post to stand out from the plethora of posts being published every day. If you are an author or publisher, you surely know that a good title is an essential part of a successful marketing plan for any publication. In Bernard’s book, you’ll read about very famous authors going through the same harrowing process (but on a much less sophisticated level) that authors and publishers go through today. Developing the best title is even more important today than it was when most of the books discussed in Bernard’s book were written. But it was still very interesting to see how these famous authors and renowned publishers approached this important process.
