More On Book Titles…

 
It occurred to me yesterday, thinking about what I said in my last entry here, that I can illustrate the kind of situation that authors and publishers encounter all the time, when it comes to the names and titles of books.
 
The first book in my series on "The Guardians" was published here in North America as "The Forest Laird," an arresting title for North American readers. It fizzled, though, in Britain, where "Laird" is a worn old cliche suggestive of "same old, nothing new". A swift search of alternative British possibilities quickly brought out the fact that there have been carloads of books–good, bad and appalling–written about William Wallace since the Movie "Braveheart" appeared, and among them they have used up almost every conceivable variant of Wallace, Braveheart, and similar names. And so "The Forest Laird" appeared in Britain as REBEL, for good and sufficient reason.
 
Switch to early 2013. At the very start of beginning to prepare "The Renegade", the second book in the series, for British publication in 2014, Ed Wood, my Editor at Sphere Books in London pointed out that a very successful UK novelist called Robyn Young had produced a novel about Robert the Bruce late in 2012. It was very successful and its Title was RENEGADE…
 
Ed pointed out that we needed to find another title, ASAP, and he was absolutely right. And so it was that we changed the name of the forthcoming British edition of the book from THE RENEGADE to RESISTANCE. We had no choice, other than to  create confusion and dismay by duplicating a title–and one by a successful and established British author, too.
 
So there will be a "NEW" Jack Whyte book called RESISTANCE on screen and available at Amazon et al on this side of The Pond in 2014, but it won't be new at all, and anyone who takes the time to check the Copyright Page at the front of the novel will see that it was originally published in Canada, in 2012, as "The Renegade".
 
I have absolutely no idea what the third book in the series will be entitled over there in Britain, but whatever it is, and whenever it sees the light of day there, it, too, will have the original Canadian Title listed as part of the Copyright Page information.