A tale of two titles

When I set up this website I included a page that I called Works in Progress. However, since everything I discuss throughout the whole site could be described as unfinished in one way or another, what this somewhat misnamed page turned into was an interactive Title Survey for one particular work in progress: my proto-Cold War spy thriller novel set in the aftermath of the German surrender in 1945.

I had two possible titles for it, one of them reminiscent of the kind of Robert Ludlum/Desmond Bagley/Anthony Price books I grew up reading (and of the Modesty Blaise novels that have provided a sizeable chunk of its inspiration), the other less generic and more suggestive of hifalutin 'literary' aspirations. For the record, these were The Borodino Sacrifice and Chasing Mercury.

But as I've indicated on the Works in Progress page, this isn't just a case of alternative titles. The two options are tonally so different that they change the whole look and feel of the book. You could, for example, use a whimsical cover design for Chasing Mercury - although it would be a bit disingenuous for a novel that begins with a sniper watching a secret handover and ends with an Alamo-style shootout - but The Borodino Sacrifice (to mix game metaphors) needs to lay its cards on the table.

There's also the question - clumsily addressed but by no means insignificant - of appealing, in an ideal world, to both male and female readers. In crude terms, I have a pair of protagonists with a mix of male and female motivations. It would be nice if the look and feel were able to reflect this in some way.

The point of the blind survey was to get an impression of which version of the book people - whoever they might be - would be more likely to pick up or click on, and to that end I mocked-up a couple of very different covers.

And now the results are in... Or rather, having taken bloody ages to get the form entries up to double figures, I've decided to call it, for the time being. Chasing Mercury got twice the votes of The Borodino Sacrifice. 

However, none of these respondees (and many thanks to all of you!) have read the book. Apart from the little bit of blurb/log-line above the survey, they didn't really know what they were voting on - it was always just an instinctive thing, a snapshot of changing tastes. 

But I do know the book. I know how it ends. And I've made a decision based on that. You see, it doesn't end, not completely - it opens the way for a follow-up, possibly even a trilogy.

So yes, as you preferred: Chasing Mercury is the overall title. But with The Borodino Sacrifice as the subtitle for this first volume. 

I feel another blog post coming on about the titling of novel sequences. Numbered books... Colons... Franchises... But I need to go away and think about that first.

In the meantime, thanks again for the input. The chase goes on!