Friday, January 18, 2008

The Importance of Being Consistent

Gyles Brandreth's Oscar Wilde series has just been published in the US. Whereas the UK title was Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders the US title is Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance.

You can read an excerpt from book 1 at the Simon and Schuster site.

The second book in the series also suffers the same fate. Due out in May, the UK title is Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death and in September, the same book will come out in the US as Oscar Wilde and a Game Called Murder.

I really can't see why the titles need to be changed, both pairs of titles seem equally 'cozy'.

1 comment:

Peter Rozovsky said...

Based on Matt (Beynon) Rees' titles and the first of the Wilde books, I was all set to offer a tentative typology of title changes, to wit, that UK publishers insist that the word murder be in a title, whereas US publishers do not. Then the second Wilde book stood my hypothesis on its head.

It appears the number of reasons for changing titles when a book crosses the ocean are as numerous as the grains of sand on a beach or the stars in the sky.
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