The other week, I muddled up the titles of two of my books. A novel called Happy Endings was mentioned at the end of a review I'd written, when what it ought to have been was Happy Ever After. Serves me right for giving these two very different stories almost interchangeable names.
I've always had a problem with titles. For a long time, I was given to grandiloquent, poetical things like The Green Behind the Glass, or The Girls in the Velvet Frame. Then I discovered the joys of the one-word title and that was great: Yesterday, Voyage, Troy, Ithaka ... and the one that's coming out next week, which is called Cleopatra.
This last, I hope, will do well, because it's my belief that people will always be drawn to certain celebrity names and Marilyn, Diana and Cleopatra are time-honoured draws. I've been told, on the other hand, that enigmatic titles (except in the case of thrillers) rarely make it on to the bestseller lists. It seems you should go for something that does what it says on the tin. I pooh-poohed the notion, but it turns out very often to be true. Think of Labyrinth, About a Boy and even the more exotic but still informative Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. You know exactly what you're about to read.
The Richard and Judy success The House at Riverton did enormously well and I'm left wondering whether my own first novel for adults, Facing the Light (gosh, how I love that title! It's so exactly right, when once you've read the book!) might not have sold more copies if it had been called something more prosaic. It is a fact that my second, Hester's Story did better and perhaps its straightforward name accounts for that.
Sometimes I've made an obviously wrong decision. A collection of spooky stories called A Lane to the Land of the Dead (from WH Auden) should have been entitled The Dracula Mask which would have allowed the cover artist an opportunity to indulge in dripping fangs and embossed silver lettering. Then there's a novel for young adults called silent snow, secret snow. The lower case is deliberate, and meant to show that the phrase is a quotation, but it's very hard to say, and in our house it's known as several s's, surplus s's.
I keep trying. I'm back to the one-worders again with Dido, which I'm writing at the moment. If only I could come up with a story I could call Drug Bust on Broadway, or some such, I'd be thrilled. But you can only write the kind of books that you can write ... and you can only give them the titles you think they need. But still, it is a good idea not to confuse one book with another.
