The Floating Theatre does not interest me, but The Underground River does.Īuthors don’t necessarily hate the name changes. To someone who grew up in the American south like me, The Floating Theatre feels overly Victorian, but The Underground River screams this is about the underground railroad. The novel is about two female abolitionists smuggling slaves to freedom. With more than 3m books published in the US each year, titles have to yell: “Read me!” Take Martha Conway’s The Floating Theatre, renamed The Underground River in the US. “Sometimes,” she said, “a small change can make all the difference.” “There was a title clash in the US and we were worried about confusion,” she said, referring to Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Sourcebooks senior marketing manager Liz Kelsch said the change was strategic. After all, this is the country that slapped the title Little Women II on Louisa May Alcott’s Good Wives.Īgatha Christie’s Dumb Witness became Poirot Loses a Client in the US When asked about the change, US publisher Sourcebooks initially joked: “Our editorial team decided to supersize it.” We’re lucky Christie’s Three Acts wasn’t upgraded to 3¼ or – horror of horrors – Tragedy 3.0. Then there’s The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, a Stuart Turton novel renamed The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle in the States because, apparently, Americans die more frequently. I asked their publicity manager why, but she wasn’t sure and said the editor didn’t know either. For example, Hitler’s Scapegoat by Stephen Koch will be released by Counterpoint Press in the US next year as Hitler’s Pawn. Sometimes publishers themselves don’t know. Some localisation is to be expected: if you’re translating the text, why not change the title to match? But, with the UK and US sharing a language, why change titles? Altering the first Potter adventure to Harry Potter a l’Ecole des Sorciers in French is far less baffling than what was done to its American counterpart. Naturally, book titles change from country to country.
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