Welcome back to Book Break! We recently made a video on
US versus US book covers, and loved hearing you guys debate about which ones
you liked better. And then we received a request to make a
video on book titles that changed between countries, which I
thought was such a cool idea. This doesn't happen as often but it's so
interesting when it does, to think about why the different titles
might work better in different countries. So I've grabbed as many books off my
bookshelf that I know have different names in the US. We'll start with an
obvious one: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
Philosopher's Stone was changed in the US version to Sorcerer's Stone,
because I think publishers there worried that philosopher sounded too academic,
and not magical enough. Now even the movies have
different names, and the actors even had to record any
line where they said the words "philosopher's stone",
they had to record it twice so they had an alternate version saying
"sorcerer's stone". And another children's book that changed its title was Northern
Lights by Philip Pullman which was published in the US as The
Golden Compass. I like Northern Lights best for
nostalgic reasons. It just sounds so dreamy and magical and
also the elethiometer is not a compass, but I think I'm fighting a losing battle
because the movie was named The Golden Compass. Though the
recent TV show was called His Dark Materials
after the overall series name. I still like Northern Lights.
More recently we have The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton.
This was published in the US as The Seven and a Half
Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, most likely to avoid confusion
with the very similarly named The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
by Taylor Jenkins Reid, which was very popular in the US around the time that
this came out. The Man Who Didn't Call by Rosie Walsh
was a very buzzy read last summer. This is a summer romance with a twist.
It's great fun. And this one was published in the US as
Ghosted. They're both great names actually.
This is a mystery about a woman getting ghosted, but only she knows that
something more mysterious must be going on.
Gillian McAllister's thrillers also get different names in the US.
So over here her first four thrillers are all named after
legal phrases. We have Everything But the Truth,
Anything You Do Say, No Further Questions, and The Evidence Against You.
Maybe those phrases don't translate as well in the US because
Anything You Do Say was given the title The Choice in the US,
which is very fitting because it is a Sliding Doors-esque thriller
about the implications of a particular choice that our main character makes.
And No Further Questions was published as The Good Sister,
as it's about a sister accused of murdering her sister's baby.
But the changes do happen both ways. When Outlander was first published in the UK
we called it Cross Stitch. It has since been changed back as the TV show
Outlander was so popular that of course readers were looking for it under that
name. More recently, Bette Howland's short story collection The Calm and Prosperous
Voyage was published here as Blue in Chicago.
And definitely as a UK reader I am more drawn to the title Blue in Chicago,
so I would love to know what any of our American viewers think,
and why the different titles work better in different markets.
Both of these titles are taken from titles of stories in the collection.
Or going back to when Little Women part 2 was first published in the UK,
it was given the title Good Wives, which is a title that Louisa May Alcott would
probably have hated. She did not like the public
obsession with who the March sisters were going to marry.
These days you do tend to find both parts one and two published together
named Little Women. And then there are the titles that are translated
differently when they're translated into English. So for example, the French book
Lullaby by Leila Slimani. Its original title is Chanson Douce, which
literally means "sweet song". We translated this as Lullaby
but in the US it was published as The Perfect Nanny.
And this is a story about a nanny who murders the two children
in her care, so a very good, very dark book.
And both the UK and the US renamed the book that we now know as The Girl with
the Dragon Tattoo. Its original title in Swedish is
actually translated as Men Who Hate Women. And it is interesting
that it does seem to be thrillers and mysteries that most often
have their titles changed, so there must be a really big difference
between what UK and US readers are looking for in that genre.
And this isn't a new thing. Agatha Christie's books have loads of title
changes. So for example, 450 from Paddington was
published in the US as What Mrs Gillicuddi saw,
Murder on the Orient Express was originally published in the US
as Murder on the Calais Coach, and of course there's And Then There Were None,
I'm not going to say the original UK title because it contains a very
offensive word, so the US made a good decision to
change the title to And Then There Were None,
and the UK did then follow suit. And another author who has loads of title
changes between the countries is PG Wodehouse.
Almost all of his books seem to have different titles in the US,
but my personal favourite is when they published the book Over 70 as
America, I Like You. So brilliant and so American.
So I would love to know any more examples you've come across of these
title changes, whether it's between the UK and the US,
or books that are translated differently out of other languages because I love
those too. And I will link to the video I mentioned
about our book covers between the UK and US. So you can go and join the debate
over there. See you next time!