More on Titles

It's been nearly a year since I wrote about how I was deciding on a title for my novel. Eventually I arrived at the title You Can't Hide From the Teeth, after toying with a number of other possibilities, including a title using the phrase "Behind Bars" (this phrase is in the title of one of my chapters). And before I ever I arrived at my title, I got some suggestions, including Smile, which as you can see in my linked post, is the title of a graphic novel that has a plot similar to my WIP. I can just see the two getting confused, should my book ever come to light. And if my book ever does come to light, I can also see myself getting accused of ripping of the aforementioned graphic novel. Incidentally, a title search on Goodreads for "smile" brings up all titles that contain that word, not just those with just the word itself as the title. But confusing titles like this might not be so bad, in fact, there have been some such confusions  with much worse consequences.

This all came to me when I picked up a copy of Between Shades of Gray from the library this week. It shouldn't surprise many of you that it has been confused with a certain erotic romance novel. Even weirder is that the two books came out in the same year and that the opening line of Between Shades of Gray was enough to cause confusion between the two books. From an interview with Ruta Sepetys, the author of Between Shades of Gray, on the upcoming film version, which has been titled "Ashes in the Snow":

“The first line of my book is, ‘They took me in my nightgown,’ so people would read that and think, ‘This is it,’ and it went right into their carts,” she said, referring to the erotic bestseller, Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James, which was also released in 2011. “I had adults who came to my events wondering, ‘Why are there seventh graders here?’ and parents who were outraged at the school for inviting the Shades of Gray author. Maybe changing the title will actually be a good thing.”

But it's not just this YA novel that has suffered from such mistaken identity. Just year after the erotic novel was released, this self-published book from a Miami author was released about a dropout prevention teacher, titled Shades of Gray. The author received calls, emails and Facebook messages from people thinking she wrote 50 Shades of Grey. And then there are these titles. And this one, and this one.  And read the comment at the end of this article. I bet I can go on all with a search like this. 

The phrase "shades of grey" might have seemed less cliched if the erotic novel had never existed. Its popularity seemed to have help boost sales of some of the other books mentioned, namely Between Shades of Gray. So what might happen if another book called Smile with a nearly identical plot came about? You don't know what will happen for sure, but a situation like those described above could be in the cards. Who knows?