Changing The Title Of Your Novel

Michael Caine. Cliff Richard. That other fella.

They've all changed their names and found success. So why not a book, I ask you?

It can't be a good idea, can it?

Not a year after its release.

In fact, it's so far from being a good idea that I can barely see it from where I'm standing here on the shoreline of Good Idea Land.

And yet that's what I did. The novel in question is my debut, The Money Star.

Sales were sluggier than a sluggish slug, and although that was not all down to the title I suspect (I was naive back then, and wrote the thing without a genre in mind, so marketing it has been tricky to say the least) the title wasn't doing it any favours methinks.

The title that I thought might do it a bit more of a favour is The Diamond Rush. That's what it's about, essentially a 21st Century space version of The Gold Rush.

And the title sat well with the cover artwork, so what's to lose apart from sales that I'm not getting?

Dear faithful, solitary reader, I have to say it's impossible for me to measure whether it made any difference at all to sales.

I should have done some A/B testing and left the original up and running, but I just wasn't that clever in those days.

Ah well.

If you've changed the title of a book after publishing it, what were your results like?