Attack of the Subtitle Monster

Anyone who's ever written a book can tell you that it's a fairly jarring experience when your work - - the fruit of your labor, often created in solitude - - gradually becomes an entity shared with the publisher.

The book business is, to put it mildly, tough. Publishers have to find a way to make a profit in a business where, for instance, their very product is returnable by the stores that buy it. One of the big chains can stock 5000 copies of your tome, but they can then ship back 4700 of them and only pay for the 300 they kept. I read a story recently where a buyer for one of the chains explained that sometimes she needs certain colors on book covers for the upcoming season and will increase her order of certain titles on that basis. Amazing.

So it's quite understandable that my editor and I have had somewhat animated discussions about certain requests made by the sales and marketing people regarding EIGHTH WONDER. Our latest debate was one that I hear is common for many nonfiction books: What, exactly, will be the subtitle of the book?

Take a trip down the nonfiction aisle of your local Barnes & Noble and it quickly becomes clear that the subtitle of a reality-based book - - also referred to as the sales handle - - carries a heavy load. Your actual title can be as short and pithy as you wish, but you better load up after the colon.

William Germano, vice president and publishing director at Routledge and the author of Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious About Serious Books (University of Chicago Press, 2001), puts it thusly: "We've led authors to believe the way to make their book attractive is to start with something general or jazzy, then drop your guard and show what you really are writing about." (More here.)

So, EIGHTH WONDER is actually EIGHTH WONDER: THE AMAZING TRUE STORY OF CARL DENHAM AND THE BEAST-GOD OF SKULL ISLAND. "General and jazzy" followed by exactly what it is that I'm writing about.

Alas, after the contracts are signed my editor relates to me the gist of a meeting he's had with the marketing folks. "We have to get 'King Kong' in the title. Can you do that?"

Well, I explain, "King Kong" is not a name that the actual Carl Denham used for the beast he brought back from "Skull Island." It was a name created by RKO Pictures for their adaptation of Denham's story. In a book that seeks to, in many ways, rehabilitate the soiled reputation of a misunderstood figure, using the name created by RKO for a film that depicted Denham himself so poorly would be inappropriate.

“I understand,” my editor says. “Now, how will you work ‘King Kong’ into the subtitle? Let me know in the next couple days.”

So that’s that. Given the job that folks in publishing sales have to do, it’s understandable that they’d want the “big name” up front.

So, the title is now as follows –

EIGHTH WONDER: CARL DENHAM AND THE BEAST-GOD OF SKULL ISLAND - - THE AMAZING TRUE STORY OF KING KONG

Thank goodness for colons and em-dashes - - which, fortunately, do not actually appear on the cover design itself.

It's comforting to note that Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels was originally titled Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships.