Maybe you’re ready to submit, but you’re still not in love with that working title typed across all your novel files. You might have even planned to change it all along, expecting the perfect title to fall in your lap one day, but those elusive words never did. Or maybe—and this can be rough!—you love your title, but your agent or publisher isn’t on board.
The trickiest thing about titles is that they don’t exist in a vacuum. What feels like the perfect fit alone in your writing room can lose its luster in the real world for a multitude of unpoetic reasons: Another book sounds too similar, it’s bringing up strange search results on Amazon, or it’s out of sync with the cover direction your marketing team is sure will pop off the shelf. If you’re self-publishing, the titling process can be even more fraught, because the marketing team is you.
I love hearing fellow authors’ stories of what their works were originally called and how they arrived at the end result. At the very least, they tell us we’re not alone—we really have all been there. At the most, they’re instructive: Teaching us how to be open to true collaboration with professionals who know the market inside out or how to look past a towering pile of discarded ideas to spot the magic one.
