Do you prefer book titles within series to "match"?

HareBrain

HareBrain

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It seems to me that more book series now are using a matching style for the individual volumes. Here are two relatively recent series:

Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, Michelle Paver
Wolf Brother
Spirit Walker
Soul Eater
Outcast
Oath Breaker
Ghost Hunter

A Song of Ice and Fire, George R R Martin
A Game of Thrones
A Clash of Kings
A Storm of Swords
A Feast for Crows
A Dance with Dragons
The Winds of Winter
A Dream of Spring

Contrast this with two well-known classic series, where no effort has been made to tie the titles together:

The Chronicles of Narnia, C S Lewis
The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe
Prince Caspian
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Silver Chair
A Horse and his Boy
The Magician’s Nephew
The Last Battle

The Dark is Rising Sequence, Susan Cooper
Over Sea, Under Stone
The Dark is Rising
Greenwitch
The Grey King
Silver on the Tree

This isn't hard and fast -- many new series don't, and a few older series do -- but it does seem to have become more common. I'm assuming this is a marketing thing. But does it actually work, or does the practice risk making the author/publisher choose from a narrower range of options, ending up with less attractive titles? You wouldn't expect a book to have aligned chapter titles, after all.

In the above examples, I much prefer the variety of the older ones. The risk of using a formula is that it seems formulaic. But is this outweighed by there being a firmer sense of the series as a whole?
 
To me, it seems to be more of a case of an author writing several books that happen to fit together in some way or an author planning to write a series of N book from the outset.
Pratchett wrote 40[?] Discworld stories but not in a series [although there are arcs within those books] so the titles are all over the place.
Eddings wrote 5 series of books [20 in all?] and used a common theme fo the titles within each series...
For me, the title should fit the story and not some other purpose. That feels like "Marketing" to me... ;)
 
I slightly prefer matching, providing it's done well. It is a limitation, and I like to see people use limitations cleverly, so it appeals to me. Something like Codex Alera where it's Cursor's Fury, Princeps' Fury blah blah, that's nothing much, who cares (and one is Furies of Calderon and the fact they couldn't stick to it galls me). Which also means Bry's examples gall me too.

But the way they've done it with the Dresden Files... Summer Knight, Grave Peril, Skin Game, etc.etc. That's super cool. It's a loose theme, but it's an obvious and distinctive one. Even if they depart from it with Changes, but Changes is so awesome and justified that nobody cares.

If you can't do it well, just give me random though. There's no obvious theme to Wheel of Time, but its titles are evocative and awesome as hell.
 
David Weber has an interesting variation on this, where every other book in the main sequence Honorverse series has a title with the word 'Honor' in it.
His other major series, the Safehold books, all have titles that sound like quotes from religious tracts: By Schism Rent Asunder, By Heresies Distressed, Hell's Foundations Quiver, etc.
 
pyan said:
Another set that makes it easy to identify as a series is Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser sequence set in and around the city of Lanhkmar - they all have 'Swords' in their titles:
Click to expand...

I think that points up the main disadvantage -- they're (to me) pretty dull titles, and it's possible that's part of the reason I've never felt like picking them up. The same would have gone for the Michelle Paver books if the first hadn't been called "Wolf Brother", and would have also gone for ASOIAF if they hadn't had such a reputation.

.matthew. said:
I was recommending a series to someone the other week and this came up (copy/paste job incoming).
Click to expand...

It's possible I'm biasing my response to fit my argument, but to me, the first three titles there, taken together, are way more interesting than the rest. And as a list, it begins to lose my interest because rhythmically, it becomes repetitive.
 
Yea, the sameness of the titles gets boring to me as well, and makes it hard to keep the order of books in your head too (hence the list I sent to a friend).
 
As a reader, it doesn't bother me one way or the other if the names of the novels in a series follow a pattern.

As for examples where the titles do follow a pattern.... The titles of the novels (but not the novelettes) in the Charles Stross Laundry Files series have a common thread (which you may or may not have noticed):
  • The Atrocity Archives
  • The Jennifer Morgue
  • The Fuller Memorandum
  • The Apocalypse Codex
  • The Rhesus Chart
  • The Annihilation Score
  • The Nightmare Stacks
  • The Delirium Brief
  • The Labyrinth Index
Now that Stross is (in parallel) writing a separate series in the same universe (i.e. the Laundyverse), the pattern is not continued (e.g. the first novel is called Dead Lies Dreaming.)
 
Ursa major said:
As a reader, it doesn't bother me one way or the other if the names of the novels in a series follow a pattern.

As for examples where the titles do follow a pattern.... The titles of the novels (but not the novelettes) in the Charles Stross Laundry Files series have a common thread (which you may or may not have noticed):
  • The Atrocity Archives
  • The Jennifer Morgue
  • The Fuller Memorandum
  • The Apocalypse Codex
  • The Rhesus Chart
  • The Annihilation Score
  • The Nightmare Stacks
  • The Delirium Brief
  • The Labyrinth Index
Click to expand...

That format, "The [noun] [noun]", is I think pretty effective (but I would -- I've used it myself in The Goddess Project and The Empyreus Proof). It's also used in every episode title for The Big Bang Theory. I would say it's a fairly loose "theme", and so allows more creativity than some of the others. I think he's also done well to use combinations of nouns that make no immediate sense, and so might draw prospective readers in to find out what they mean. (Unlike e.g. A Clash of Kings, whose single meaning is obvious.)
 
Once I'm enfranchised into a series I prefer that the title of a book give me a clear idea of what to expect from that particular book rather than fit into a predetermined mold for the titles. However, if the title can do both then I have no issue. An easy example of this is YA novels like Harry Potter where the ongoing pattern is "Harry Potter and the" but beyond that each book is free to adjust the pattern to fit its goals. The Shannara novels are a bit iffy for me, mostly because they are actually spread across multiple series but each book still holds to "The [Blank} of Shannara" so if I come upon the title "The Accountants of Shannara" I have no idea what subseries it's a part of. So I would say that my biggest problem with titles holding to a pattern is if that pattern gets too much weight the names of the books within the series will sound so similar it would be difficult for anyone getting into the series to tell them apart.
 
HareBrain said:
That format, "The [noun] [noun]", is I think pretty effective (but I would -- I've used it myself in The Goddess Project and The Empyreus Proof). It's also used in every episode title for The Big Bang Theory. I would say it's a fairly loose "theme", and so allows more creativity than some of the others. I think he's also done well to use combinations of nouns that make no immediate sense, and so might draw prospective readers in to find out what they mean. (Unlike e.g. A Clash of Kings, whose single meaning is obvious.)
Click to expand...
I think you have missed the common thread (one that is easily missed), perhaps misled by the use of the word "morgue" in the title of the second book in the series. In that book title, "morgue" is not being used as the name of somewhere where bodies might be stored.

Besides, Charles Stross admits that the common thread in the names is present, so I haven't made it up.
 
I find it dull myself.
Foundation; Foundation and Empire; Second Foundation; Foundation's edge, Foundation and Earth and then the prequels.
Dune, Dune this; Dune that; Dune the other
It hardly makes you want to continue.
Oh and then all those ruddy Abendaus.
If they weren't all such good books, I'd probably wouldn't have bothered reading them.

Give me a nice straight-forward, stand-alone name like Inish Carraig any day.
 
I like ones where's there a subtle link. F'ex, the Rigante series:

Sword in the Storm
Midnight Falcon
Ravenheart
Stormrider

There's no super obvious link, not the sort you can use for marketing, but they're all the soul names of the main characters. Afterwards, it adds a certain level of theme to it.

Or the Fionavar Tapestry

The Summer Tree
The Wandering Fire
The Darkest Road

All in book supernatural-esque conceits. Bonus points for actually vaguely linking together too.


An example of where it's pretty meh is the Deverry Cycle... Daggerspell, Darkspell, Dawnspell, Dragonspell... which are, intriguingly enough, UK only. In the US, one of them was called The Bristling Wood and another something else. I feel like I'd scream if I was an author and the books had different names in different English speaking countries. Or Age of Assassins, Blood of Assassins, King of Assassins in the Wounded Kingdoms - I nearly didn't read the first because of the title.

I'm actually struggling to think of any recent series that don't have this sort of style.
 
I think I'm ambivalent, but if you're going to use a common titling method, then I'd rather it was clever and genuinely germane to the plot, not just concocted to fit in. Many of my favourite 'series' do not follow a naming method, e.g. Humanx Commonwealth by ADF, or McDevitt's Benedict books. Discworld would lose something if they were named in a strict manner, I think. That said, it works for the Book of the New Sun novels.
 
If this is done for marketing purposes, it's totally counterproductive with a reader like me. I'm very unlikely to pick up, or even skim through, a series with matching titles.
 
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