I’m not saying that the title of a book is more important than the words inside, but I’m not not saying that either. We all judge books by their covers and by their titles and rightly so, since you’d hope that the author and the publishers will have put some considerable thought into communicating instantly exactly what the book is all about.
However, sometimes somebody else has come up with a title that exactly sums up how you see your own book and how you want the discerning buying public to see it too. What does one do? In my experience, one simply pushes on (although if you’ve written a book about magic and want to call it Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone you might encounter a few hitches). Here, in a more pictorial newsletter than normal, are a few times when I’ve carried on regardless…
Woah! Great book, great title. Knock off the date, add a subhead, and the job’s a good ‘un. Out in October.
My book Shelf Life came out with the British Library in 2018. Terrific text, cracking cover.
This came out in 2003.
and this in 2009:
And of course sometimes other people are also in the same boat. Here’s a different kind of Shelf Life which came after mine from 2020:
In fact there are loads of Shelf Life books out there which I won’t bore you with. I was so delighted when I came up with what I thought was a fabulously original title for mine in 2017. Just goes to show.
The working title for my Rooms of Their Own (2022), a riff of course on Virginia Woolf’s lecture/book A Room of One’s Own, was Writers’ Rooms, not least because I’d read and really enjoyed Nino Strachey’s Rooms of Their Own (2018).
In the end though it was just such a perfect title that…