Mao’s Head: The Quest for the Perfect Title

“What’s in a title?” the former Durango author David Petersen riffed in Writing Naturally, his down-to-earth guide for aspiring nature writers. A good title, he answered himself, must grab a browsing reader’s attention, foreshadow what is to follow, and prompt you to flip over a book for its back cover text or, more likely nowadays, click on its link for a synopsis.

Titles have long been considered to be the single most important piece of advertising for a book, from Daniel Defoe’s sixty-five-word tapeworm summarizing The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York … to the iconic, minimalist, then-still futuristic 1984 of George Orwell’s masterpiece. Abbie Hoffman’s counter culture-primer Steal This Book (rejected by at least thirty publishers before he self-published it) sold more than a quarter million copies within the first six months, largely promoted only by word of mouth. It is unknown how much in royalties Hoffman lost because of the title’s incitement.

Nonfiction book titles in particular are nowadays influenced by search engine and keyword optimization, even auto-fill functions, read: discoverability. And this is where the vision of writers and that of editors and their sales teams frequently clash. Vague, metaphorical, or misleading titles, like the tongue-in-cheek A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, for a novel, can attract the wrong kind of bibliophiles, or none. Lengthy ones—hard to memorize for an overwhelmed book-buying public—can even fall prey to a graphic designer’s concerns.

“Writers have far more control over what’s in their books than what’s on them—the cover art, blurbs, jacket copy, but especially the title,” bemoans Tony Tulathimutte in a Paris Review piece gloriously captioned “Title Fights.”

Neither the illustrious nor the infamous are exempt. Susan Orlean’s The Millionaire’s Hothouse—a title she loved dearly, though no one else seemed to—became The Orchid Thief. She had every single one of her original book titles changed. Hitler’s Mein Kampf was at first Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. And Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex inanely disguised as The Birds and the Bees.

Authors seldom see such meddling as improving their goods. “An editor’s habit of replacing an author’s title with one of their own,” John McPhee effervesces, “is like a photo of a tourist’s head on the cardboard body of Mao Zedong.” McPhee got away with Coming into the Country, which, lacking a subtitle specifying its subject or geography, still rose to the rank of an Alaska classic. (Without further information, it could be about pioneers, smugglers, immigrants, or invading soldiers.)

I, too, have my tales of renaming woes besides serious doubts: a publisher trusts that I can deliver 90,000 publishable words but not a mere ten that sum those up pithily? We’re wedded to our titles. They’re our business cards, the equivalent of the movie industry’s elevator pitch. Still, “Authors, as a rule, are poor judges of titles and often go for the cute or clever rather than the practical,” as Nat Bodian states in How to Choose a Winning Title.

Easy to say for him, a writer in the self-help genre.

Adepts of creative nonfiction have a row much harder to hoe. We seek to appeal to the literary minded, kin to the lovers of short stories and novels. We defy an anonymous Little, Brown editor’s verdict that “In today’s nonfiction climate … blunt, foolproof subtitles are near mandatory” or Tulathimutte’s that “with nonfiction there can be less room for mystery and poetry.”

The second half of my memoir’s title, Arctic Walkabout, smacked of cultural appropriation, according to the editors, though the contested word crops up in dictionaries outside its Australian context and seemed to capture the initiatory nature of my thousand-mile trek and my sense that by walking and writing I was singing a landscape into existence, much as Bruce Chatwin described in Songlines. Under pressure, it morphed into the somewhat bland Arctic Traverse.

I’d also subtitled No Walk in the Park, a collection of Grand Canyon essays, A Redrock Guide’s Quests, Misadventures, Obsessions, and Odd Observations, alluding to 18th- and 19th-century exploration accounts while hoping to introduce a note of mild humor and self-deprecation, which color my writing voice. The editor felt it was too much of a mouthful and selling short the book’s lyricism and depth. I also heard from a fellow author in Flagstaff that I should have “Grand Canyon” somewhere on the cover if I wanted the book to sell well there, so I changed it again.

We adventure / travel / nature writers all dream of hook-and-sinker doozies like Tim Cahill’s Pecked to Death by Ducks and Pass the Butterworms, and of publishers signing off on those. To gear myself against rejection, I now sometimes test title alternatives in mini focus groups consisting of readers, fellow writers, and booksellers. Alas, they seldom agree on a standout favorite. Mao turns out to be a many-faced son of a gun.