You’ve seen multiple covers with the same image – what about books with the same title

Two books with the same title from the same publisher just wouldn’t do, as the New York Observer reports. “Joanna Smith Rakoff had just turned in a major set of rewrites on her novel, Brooklyn, when her editor at Scribner broke the news to her over dinner that she would have to change its title. It seemed that Irish novelist Colm Tóibín, a Scribner author since 2000 who has been twice short-listed for the Booker Prize, wanted to use it for his forthcoming book, which was scheduled to come out this spring, just a month after Ms. Rakoff’s.”

Now if they hadn’t been with the same publisher, there might still be two Brooklyns. After all, there are two Cloud Atlases. I’ve even had a title doubled up on: Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box and my Heart-Shaped Box, a coincidence Joe and I had a brief discussion about on MySpace.