To Change the Title?
Original Blog: http://wp.me/p4DeFG-5b
A few weeks ago I belatedly Googled the name of my book, Never the Sinner, hoping to be directed to my brand-spanking-new website (this one), at which point two things became apparent.
1) I need to learn about SEO in more depth (that’s Search Engine Optimisation for the non-webby types out there)
2) There is another book in the world called Never the Sinner.
This was problematic for me, since I thought I’d already done this, but I reaslised I’d actually checked originally for the first title I came up with, which was NOT the Sinner. Somewhere along the way, Never the Sinner sounded better and it just stuck.
Never the Sinner: The Leopold and Loeb Story is the true story of a pair of “thrill killers” operating in 1920s Chicago. They kidnapped and murdered a 14 year-old boy largely to see if they could get away with it.
So, I thought, I’ll revert back to the original name before publishing. But but but – that just didn’t feel right. "Never the Sinner" is more forceful, smoother on the tongue, prettier when written down. Never is all the things Not isn’t.
I asked a couple of forums and people were nice enough to try and help, but rather predictably I got the mix of “Yes, absolutely change it” and “Nah, it’s not that important.”
My first instinct was to change it. That’s what makes sense in my mind. Be different, be original. So I brainstormed ideas. I wanted to stick to similar ground, a Christian-sounding adage (since my protagonist is commited to that faith) but a titel that sounds like a crime novel (for that is what I’ve written). Never the Sinner jibed thematically with the content, with Detective Roland Recht hunting a killer, but with many other sins and sinners obstructing him.
Sins and Sinners! No, that sounds just too… I don’t know… religious. Too focused on judgement and people. This is a crime novel that features a Christian detective, not a Christian novel told through the medium of a detective. An important distinction.
I took a whole day to write down so many titles, so many ideas, and each one just felt WRONG for this. I don’t know if it’s simply because I’ve been too close to the project for too long, or if I’m being a stroppy artist who doesn’t like being told his ideas are lacking.
But then someone said to me, “Lots of books share titles. Don’t worry about it.”
“Huh,” I thought. “Maybe that’s right.”
It was the other half of that binary “yes”/”no” advice from a couple of forums. So I checked some generic titles on Amazon. On the front page only (UK site) I found:
5 x Kidnapped (9 if you include different editions of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel)
8 x Disappeared
3 x Killer
Note: I included in the count those with subtitles and with “The” and “A”.
How about other genres?
4 x Guardian
4 x Finding love
3 x Life
3 x Crusade (not including the pluralised “The Crusades” which pushes that up to 6)
So there are a lot of other books sharing titles, most of them also sharing the same genre. My Never the Sinner is crime fiction, while the other is True Crime and subtitled “The Leopold and Loeb Story”, so I think on that front I’m fairly safe.
I guess it comes down to how famous the other work is. If I wrote a novel about a bunch of prisoners refusing to eat, I couldn’t call it “The Hunger Games” or even simply “Hunger Games” even though it would be accurate and it would exist in a different genre.
The Leopold and Loeb Story is most famous as a play, one that is acted in high schools across America to this day, sometimes called “Thrill Me” but is also been performed as “Never the Sinner”, written by Samuel French (which is where, as far as I can tell, John Logan got the title for his book).
So how famous is the book? I think the answer is “not hugely”. It’s the sort of title, I think, many people will find sort-of, kind-of, maybe familiar, but not so much that they will aim a flaming finger my way and accuse me of riding the coattails of some classic auteur. After all, I came up with it myself, in isolation.
In conclusion, I’m keeping the title. It reflects the theme, hints at plot elements, matches the mood for which I am aiming, and does not infringe on an existing work in any meaningful way.
Do check it out. Purchase and sample options are on my novel’s main page http://wp.me/P4DeFG-p
A few weeks ago I belatedly Googled the name of my book, Never the Sinner, hoping to be directed to my brand-spanking-new website (this one), at which point two things became apparent.
1) I need to learn about SEO in more depth (that’s Search Engine Optimisation for the non-webby types out there)
2) There is another book in the world called Never the Sinner.
This was problematic for me, since I thought I’d already done this, but I reaslised I’d actually checked originally for the first title I came up with, which was NOT the Sinner. Somewhere along the way, Never the Sinner sounded better and it just stuck.
Never the Sinner: The Leopold and Loeb Story is the true story of a pair of “thrill killers” operating in 1920s Chicago. They kidnapped and murdered a 14 year-old boy largely to see if they could get away with it.
So, I thought, I’ll revert back to the original name before publishing. But but but – that just didn’t feel right. "Never the Sinner" is more forceful, smoother on the tongue, prettier when written down. Never is all the things Not isn’t.
I asked a couple of forums and people were nice enough to try and help, but rather predictably I got the mix of “Yes, absolutely change it” and “Nah, it’s not that important.”
My first instinct was to change it. That’s what makes sense in my mind. Be different, be original. So I brainstormed ideas. I wanted to stick to similar ground, a Christian-sounding adage (since my protagonist is commited to that faith) but a titel that sounds like a crime novel (for that is what I’ve written). Never the Sinner jibed thematically with the content, with Detective Roland Recht hunting a killer, but with many other sins and sinners obstructing him.
Sins and Sinners! No, that sounds just too… I don’t know… religious. Too focused on judgement and people. This is a crime novel that features a Christian detective, not a Christian novel told through the medium of a detective. An important distinction.
I took a whole day to write down so many titles, so many ideas, and each one just felt WRONG for this. I don’t know if it’s simply because I’ve been too close to the project for too long, or if I’m being a stroppy artist who doesn’t like being told his ideas are lacking.
But then someone said to me, “Lots of books share titles. Don’t worry about it.”
“Huh,” I thought. “Maybe that’s right.”
It was the other half of that binary “yes”/”no” advice from a couple of forums. So I checked some generic titles on Amazon. On the front page only (UK site) I found:
5 x Kidnapped (9 if you include different editions of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel)
8 x Disappeared
3 x Killer
Note: I included in the count those with subtitles and with “The” and “A”.
How about other genres?
4 x Guardian
4 x Finding love
3 x Life
3 x Crusade (not including the pluralised “The Crusades” which pushes that up to 6)
So there are a lot of other books sharing titles, most of them also sharing the same genre. My Never the Sinner is crime fiction, while the other is True Crime and subtitled “The Leopold and Loeb Story”, so I think on that front I’m fairly safe.
I guess it comes down to how famous the other work is. If I wrote a novel about a bunch of prisoners refusing to eat, I couldn’t call it “The Hunger Games” or even simply “Hunger Games” even though it would be accurate and it would exist in a different genre.
The Leopold and Loeb Story is most famous as a play, one that is acted in high schools across America to this day, sometimes called “Thrill Me” but is also been performed as “Never the Sinner”, written by Samuel French (which is where, as far as I can tell, John Logan got the title for his book).
So how famous is the book? I think the answer is “not hugely”. It’s the sort of title, I think, many people will find sort-of, kind-of, maybe familiar, but not so much that they will aim a flaming finger my way and accuse me of riding the coattails of some classic auteur. After all, I came up with it myself, in isolation.
In conclusion, I’m keeping the title. It reflects the theme, hints at plot elements, matches the mood for which I am aiming, and does not infringe on an existing work in any meaningful way.
Do check it out. Purchase and sample options are on my novel’s main page http://wp.me/P4DeFG-p
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