A Tale of Two (or More) Titles

The title of this blog post comes form this article from Minnesota Public Radio News: 

A tale of two titles: A girl, a train and thousands of confused readers

Seeing this reminded me of how I have been trying to find a title for my work in progress. I still haven't completed it, but have though of an ending before I even began to work on one last chapter or two before the ending. Has anyone ever done this?

But back to the title thing. As I've said in recent blogposts, trying to find a title has been challenging. One suggestion I got was Smile, but a pointed out that a graphic novel with that title exists. Even though titles cannot be copyrighted, it would be confusing to have two books with the same title with a similar plot line. I don't want to be accused of ripping off the one that already exists. But would that happen?

From the article linked above:

The Girl on the Train is a psychological thriller, set in contemporary London, with a female protagonist and a female author — Paula Hawkins. It was published this year, and received wide acclaim.
Girl on a Train is a psychological thriller, set in contemporary London, with a female protagonist and a female author — Alison Waines. It was published in 2013, and received almost no attention.
You might be able to predict where this is going.
"An incredible number of people were buying the wrong book," reporter David Benoit tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer.
Benoit revealed the case of mistaken identity in the Wall Street Journal — after he experienced it first-hand.
Benoit's mother read Alison Waines' book. Then she passed it to her son.
"I read it in its entirety," Benoit says. "It wasn't until after that that we realized, 'Hey, wait a second, there's another book out there that people are actually talking about."
After talking to readers of Girl on a Train and poring over Amazon reviews, Benoit concluded that most mixed-up readers had purchased the e-book.
"You go on Amazon, you click the first girl-on-a-train book you see on your Kindle, and maybe you never look at the cover again when you're reading, so you don't realize it's a different author," he says.
Not so his mom.
"My mother actually bought the book in a bookstore," he says. "So she didn't misclick. She literally picked up the wrong book."
In e-book and in print, the mistake has led to a boom year for Waines.
"Writing had always been a hobby for her," Benoit says, but this year she says she sold over 30,000 copies of her book.
And she's excited to see what happens when her next book comes out.
Several years ago, Stephen King published Joyland. A novelist named Emily Schultz published a book by the same name back in 2006.
Schultz got an immediate boost in sales (and documented how she spent that money on a website she called Spending the Stephen King Money).
"Now she has a new book out this year that's doing very well," Benoit says — it was featured in NPR's own book concierge, in fact — "in part because she had become a little bit famous with the Stephen King mishap."
Both Schultz and Waines published their books first, so it's not as though this were a cynical maneuver on their part.
And Stephen King and Paula Hawkins are doing just fine — Hawkins has sold over 6 1/2 million copies of The Girl on the Train.As for the readers?
"Many readers who admit they bought the wrong book liked it anyway," Benoit wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
"One woman I talked to actually liked Miss Waines' book better than Miss Hawkins' book," Benoit tells Wertheimer.
She made her book club, which had planned on reading the best-seller, pick up Girl on a Train instead. 

This reminded me of what happened recently at my book club. One book that had been selected for this year was The Silent Wife. On our Facebook group for the club, the title had been mentioned but not the author's name. One member asked for the author's name after she'd gone onto Amazon and found two books with that title:

The first one was the one that was selected as one of our reads this year, but at least two of the women in the book found and read the second one. "I read the wrong book," they each said. At our meeting in April, one of those who'd read "the wrong book" gave a synopsis of that one. I then got tempted to read that one (I borrowed a copy of the "right" book from another member), and sought a copy of the "wrong" one. It was pretty good. 

Coincidentally, The Girl on the Train was one of the books our club read when it was released in 2015. But no one mistook it for the other book mentioned above, which I'd never heard about until now. I liked The Girl on the Train, but haven't found out enough about Girl on a Train as of yet to consider looking for that one. 

Note that The Girl on the Train and Girl on a Train are both psychological thrillers set in London, but that the two books titled The Silent Wife are very different, and that one is psychological thriller. This being true, I now wonder how confused titling my WIP Smile would be since the book already existing with that name has a similar plot. Some kids might go looking for one book and then find the other one. Though I'm certain I will not use the title Smile. I currently have some titles in mind, many of which include the word "teeth."