Something I’ve had the “privilege” of taking part in while working at the Press is the titling process. The quotation marks are there for a reason. While it’s definitely exciting to have a major hand in deciding what a book is called, it can also feel like the most nakedly destructive, commerce-over-art part of publishing.

Does that sound excessive? I would’ve thought so too, but it’s a pretty ugly feeling telling an author who has spent two years (or more) working on a book, “That name you’ve been calling your creation? We think, after reviewing the matter for fifteen minutes, that it should be called something else.”

I exaggerate a little bit. The editor who acquired the book is (usually) a bit more intimately familiar with the work and has spent some time thinking about it, but they’re one person in a room of five or six, the rest of whom are usually thinking about this book for the first time in their lives. 

From a marketing and sales standpoint, this is generally the best way to go about it: after all, the book is above all else a product that needs to be sold. So the experts in how to sell books should determine the first thing people will see and/or hear about the book. This is why all our book contracts state that the Press retains the right to final determination of the book’s title. (For the most part, the only reason we run proposed titles by the authors at all is to maintain good relationships with them.)

Then there’s the artistic, and dare I even say the moral, standpoint. From this perspective, having the publisher title the book is obviously an infringement, and an outrageous one at that.

This is case in point about how traditional publishing prioritizes commerce above all other considerations. On one level, this is obvious, but when you stop to think about it, it seems disturbing — all the more so for how much we take it for granted.

I’ve sat in several titling meetings where we decide the author’s proposed title is judged to be too esoteric. The titling committee then browses the introduction to the book, plucks out an especially poetic phrase, and decides that this is what the book ought to be called. A few days later, the author objects, but not strongly enough, and we move forward, slapping that more-or-less-random-but-pretty title onto the front cover.

I know certain online- and self-publishing avenues are beginning to provide ways around this distasteful part of the publishing process. But I think the most troubling part of all this is that there is in fact money to be made in the act of hijacking a title from the author of the book, and that it’s an accepted part of the process. This raises the question of how, when the title and other marketing-oriented parts of the book (foreword, endorsement, cover design) are the prerogative of the publisher, what does that mean for the book as work singularly attributed to the author(s)? How should that affect how we read books? I’ll reflect on these and related questions next week.