What's in a Title?

When Christine and I were getting ready to publish Tom and the Dragon to Amazon, we checked everything—or so we thought.

• Spelling and grammar throughout the manuscript;

• Whether the page numbers for the beginnings of chapters matched what we had in the Table of Contents;

• Whether the page margins were good and consistent;

• The bleed on the front and back covers;

• and so on, ad infinitum.

The process, seemingly endless, eventually came to a merciful end. Because I wrote and edited Tom and the Dragon myself, I didn't have an outside editor to check my work. Even though I'm a professional writer and editor with decades of experience—or indeed because of that background—I knew that mistakes can creep in even after the most diligent effort. I wanted to leave nothing to chance and end up with a published book as close to perfection as possible.

So with a mixture of joy and trepidation, with my blessing Christine pressed "publish." And we were thrilled: the cover popped, the typeface was clear and beautiful, and we found no obvious errors.

That night, however, as I went to Amazon to admire our work, I typed in "Tom and the Dragon" and with a sinking feeling realized I had overlooked something important—the title. Right next to my book was another one with the same title: Tom and the Dragon. I hadn't even thought to check!

This other book was written for even smaller children and had some features to help readers with dyslexia, so it was unlikely to be confused with mine. But still, I stewed for a bit.

Christine, who is nothing if not encouraging, pointed out that this was no big deal—that there are lots of books that share the same or very similar titles. And indeed we thought of a few. Here are some that my AI tool pulled up for this blog post:

1. Twilight

• Stephenie Meyer — the blockbuster YA vampire romance (2005)

• Elie Wiesel — Twilight (1988), a philosophical novel about memory and identity

• William Gay — Twilight (2006), a Southern Gothic thriller

2. The Stand

• Stephen King — the apocalyptic epic (1978)

• Joan Didion — The Last Thing He Wanted originally had the working title The Stand, but more relevantly:

• Graham Greene — The Stand (short story, 1929)

3. Beloved

• Toni Morrison — Pulitzer‑winning novel about memory, trauma, and motherhood (1987)

• Robin Lee Hatcher — Beloved (1994), a Christian historical romance

Anyway, there are lots more of these pairings (which demonstrate the fact that you can't copyright a title), but you get the idea. Also to reassure myself that I hadn't totally screwed up with the title, I made up a bunch of plausible random titles and found books that had these titles throughout Amazon. Try it. You'll be amazed at how hard it is to come up with a unique title. Most of the good ones have probably already been taken.

So I decided Christine was right and stopped worrying about it. And even if I had known, I probably wouldn't have changed the title anyway. Tom and the Dragon is a good title, and it's the one the story had when I started telling it to Peter so many years ago.

Happy reading!