Embarrassing book titles

[lizbee]

As a bookseller, I'm at the lower end of the publishing foodchain.  However, I'm going to punch above my weight for a moment, and offer a bit of advice to the aspiring author:

If you can possibly avoid it -- if it is in any way achievable -- for the love of squid, don't use offensive language in the title of your book.

"But," you say, "I'm a cutting edge author of hip, in-your-face literature.  My target audience isn't going to be put off by a curse word.  Stop trying to compromise my artistic vision, peon!"

That is all very well, but it's not necessarily the target audience who's buying your books.  Offhand, I'd say about 40% of the books I sell in a day are being purchased as gifts, and that increases hugely around Christmas.  Instead of picturing your pierced hipster readers, take a moment to envision a sweet, sheltered grandmother, coming into a shop, examining the print-out of their precious adult grandchild's email and approaching the counter.

"Excuse me, miss," she'll say, "my granddaughter has asked for a book for Christmas.  It's called The Fuck Up."

Or, more likely, she'll just push the print-out towards the sales assistant, looking faintly ashamed of both herself and her descendants, while the bookseller maintains a perfectly neutral expression and makes a mental note to share this anecdote online one day.

Even if your cover is cunningly designed to disguise a four-letter-word -- The Fuck Up's cover, for example, makes it look like a novel titled Uck Up -- people are still going to ask for your book.  Ideally, they're going to buy it, read it and love it enough to tell all their friends about it.

"Excuse me," said a well-dressed lady a few weeks back, "I'm looking for a book -- I read about it in a magazine -- it's a diet book, it's called, um, I'm so sorry, it's called Skinny Bitch."

"I'd like to order a book, please," said another customer recently, "it's called -- here, I'll just write it down for you."  Bitch Rules by Elizabeth Wurtzel.

"Can you recommend any good books about sailing?" asked a middle-aged lady last year.  "I'm looking for something my husband will like."

"Aquatic sports books are over here," I said, "probably the best one about sailing is this one," I pulled All Piss and Wind off the shelf.  The customer and I looked at it, mutually blanched, and moved on.

And, although it should be obvious, racial and homophobic slurs are best avoided if you want to actually sell your book.  The worst example is on shelves now.  It's an interesting-looking biography by an Chinese-Australian journalist, recounting her experiences growing up as the only Asian kid in her suburb.  I'd love to read it, and I'd love to be able to recommend it for others.  Unfortunately, it's titled Ching-Chong China Girl.  Which is, obviously, the taunt that followed the author through primary school, and she has every right to reclaim it for her own use.  However, the average browsing customer sees it, becomes embarrassed, looks away, and any possibility of selling the book is gone.  (Generally, if a customer has asked for a book in that genre, I recommend Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung instead; it covers similar ground, but is cheaper and has a less problematic title.  Or her anthology, Growing Up Asian in Australia.)

The problem is that if customers are put off by your title, they're not going to buy your book.  And if people don't buy your book, your publishers will stop giving you money to write them, and then your artistic vision will really be compromised.

Comments

[peace-bloom.livejournal.com]

lol. i just choked on my toast.
♥

[lizbee.livejournal.com]

Don't choke! *administers Heimlich*

I am assembling Ikea furniture. It is very intimidating.

[peace-bloom.livejournal.com]

never lose sight of your allen key.
(unless you have a time lord there with a laser/sonic screwdriver)

[lizbee.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, suburbannoir has a handy-dandy keychain with allen keys of all different shapes and sizes. On the other hand, I'm a bit worried about the part where it says I need a hammer. A Doc Marten will do just as well, right?

(And iTunes and WMP won't play the DW audio play I want to listen to. THEY ARE STANDING BETWEEN ME AND CREEPY TIME LORDS!)

[peace-bloom.livejournal.com]

that's what docs were designed for! the footwear thing is just an added bonus.

I HAVE MAGIC ALEX SONGS TO LISTEN TO! lost_her_sway uploaded them for me because she is WIN. i've listened to one so far and it is REALLY GOOD. and i'm not even just saying that because the guitarist is HOT.

[lizbee.livejournal.com]

HOMG YOU ARE GOING TO SHARE THEM WITH ME AREN'T YOU?

[peace-bloom.livejournal.com]

yes. in exchange for cuddles! ;)
do we have a 'project runway' date tomorrow night? i will bring my lappy.

[lizbee.livejournal.com]

You can have MANY cuddles. And yes, we do. Hurrah!

[peace-bloom.livejournal.com]

goodie! ♥

[melengro.livejournal.com]

Something tells me that Skinny Bitch was not written with artistic vision in mind. Really was not.

However, the same applies to books in any genre, written for any reason: the title is the second thing most people notice about a book, after the cover art (if you're a famous author already, it might be third, after the cover art and your name).

Ching-Chong China Girl is a phrase that should've been deployed within the book. Maxine Hong Kingston gives her books innocuous titles like The Woman Warrior and The Fifth Book of Peace. It's when you get several pages in that she starts talking about how the fact that her middle name is Ting-Ting got a lot of slurs thrown at her while she was growing up.

[bentleywg.livejournal.com]

If you're a famous author, sometimes it's hard to *find* the title, especially on the book spine.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

The US equivalent to Ching Chong China Girl is American Bento, which gets the point across without freaking anyone out.

Although I did like the series that included If You Can't Live Without Me, Why Aren't You Dead Yet? and Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth, I'm Kissing You Goodbye.

PS - would you be willing to unlock this? I've got enough authors and trying-to-be authors on my flist that I think it would be of interest.

[lizbee.livejournal.com]

Sure, I'll unlock it now. I'm just in the habit of locking off anything about work.

America Bento is a great title, not to mention that it makes me hungry.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

It's a great title, but a bit of a disappointment because I found it when I was looking for a cookbook on the same subject. I'm even more disappointed that Zombie CSU (What a name!) isn't a novel.

[infiniteviking]

WORD. Always remember those middle-aged grandmothers!

In many cases, it comes over like a low-level form of verbal abuse -- people trying to show how tough they are by being all YOU NEED MY COUNSEL, YOU WORM, SO YOU'LL TAKE THIS LANGUAGE FROM ME AND LIKE IT. I don't let people do that to me in real life, so why should I pick up their books and give them remote access?

[neadods.livejournal.com]

YOU NEED MY COUNSEL, YOU WORM, SO YOU'LL TAKE THIS LANGUAGE FROM ME AND LIKE IT

Ah, like the "Skinny bitch" books, wherein the authors have exactly that attitude while their only qualifications are being emaciated and having both agenda and attitude.

[infiniteviking]

Precisely. If people can't advance their agenda respectfully, well... meh.

[tangledaria.livejournal.com]

I had a man come in once looking for a book by Christopher Moore.

"Excuse me," he said. "I'm looking for this book. Please don't take any offense when I tell you the title."

"Okay?"

"It's called You Suck." And then really hurriedly he said, "That's the name of the book, I'm not saying that you suck, but that that's the name of the book."

[airie-fairy.livejournal.com]

Awwww, that poor guy.

[isabeau.livejournal.com]

One wonders if he's just cautious or if he actually ran into trouble earlier:

"Hi, I'm looking for a book."

"Yeah, what's the title?"

"You suck."

".......right, there's no call to be rude, get out of my store *glare*"

"But--"

"NOW. Or I call security."

(*snicker*)

(and as a comment to the original post: here via neadods, and I'm kind of glad I wasn't drinking tea while reading it. heh. poor books.)

[onomatopoetry.livejournal.com]

Hah. Reminds me of my parents-in-law (through they weren't yet that) asking me to please put 'that book' back in my bag (Inga Muscio's lovely Cunt) because my SO's fifteen years old sister might see it. I didn't want to smash all their illusions, so I just did that I was told to. (semi-appropriate icon, I has it)

[harmonyfb.livejournal.com]

That was the book I thought of when I read the post - yeah, I was really happy about my seven year old reading that word at the bookstore.

Bookstores, if authors use a particularly foul curse word as their title, could you not make a frigging END CAP DISPLAY of it? Thanks ever so.

[ladyvivien.livejournal.com]

Heh, awesome. Mind if I link to this on the bookblog?

[lizbee.livejournal.com]

Go right ahead!

[dancing-moon.livejournal.com]

We've got some science fiction book with a really innocent name (my brain says Lilith, but I think that's wrong. Whatevah) and a with back with the title in silver and the author's name in smaller black font. Very innocent, yes?
When I turned the books around - we tend to front-face them when possible - I blanched at the naked women spreading her leg and showing off her reproductive organs. From a quick look at the blurb, I think it's your typical gender dystopic sf, but the front looks like the artsier type of porn magazine.

[--kali--.livejournal.com]

as an ex-Librarian I know exactly where you're coming from.

[nixwilliams.livejournal.com]

i kind of disagree. mainly because if people avoided somewhat controversial/edgy/whatever titles, we wouldn't be able to tell stories about the people who have to write the names down and are so embarrassed. and i get GLEE from this, and did when i worked in a bookshop!

also, so what if the 'average customer' gets flustered. who wants to be average, anyway? i'd be much more inclined to read 'ching-chong china girl' than 'unpolished gem' if i was going merely on titles!