Hey, That's My Book's Title!
By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 10/19/2007 10:00:00 AM
In November, St. Martin's Minotaur will publish Person of Interest, a mystery by Edgar Award-winning author Theresa Schwegel. In February, Viking will publish A Person of Interest, a novel by Pulitzer Prize finalist Susan Choi. Schwegel and Choi aren’t the only authors to title their books Person of Interest; last year alone saw two novels, A Person of Interest by Ernest Hill (Dafina) and Person of Interest by Debra Webb (Harlequin).
PW got both authors on the phone together to talk about the coincidence. (Incidentally, the phrase "person of interest" is used by law enforcement when announcing the name of someone involved in a criminal investigation who has not yet been arrested or formally accused of a crime.)
PW: Where did the title of your book came from? How did you chose it?
Susan Chang: I was playing around with an idea that had germinated because my father was a classmate of the Unabomber back in the ’60s. [I was wondering] what would happen if an aging, quiet, unassuming math professor discovered later in life that a person from his past had become a notorious criminal? I was interested in the idea of suspicion and what will it do to a normal, innocent person who’s not guilty of a crime but who’s subject to scrutiny. I was interested in the term "person of interest" and how the term seems a relatively recent term in our vocabulary.
Theresa Schwegel: Mine’s a bit different. The titles of my previous books [Officer Down and Probable Cause] have all been geared toward crime fiction. I suppose Person of Interest came from there. For this particular story I was looking at changing the term in a different way, so that it’s a person of interest, someone a character would be interested in.
PW: Was it your original title?
SC: This was the first title I came up with for this book, and the first time in my career that I had a title as I was conceiving of a book [Choi's previous books, American Woman and The Foreign Student, were largely written without titles]. I think the excitement of having come up with a title all by myself prevented me from doing an Amazon search [and finding other books with that title], which would’ve taken the wind out of my sails.
TS: It was the first title I came up with for this book, too. After I did an Amazon search, I wasn’t too surprised to find another book with that title, but I have become increasingly more surprised that there hasn’t been another book with the title of my first book, Officer Down.
PW: How do feel about the coincidence?
TS: It doesn’t bother me. I think if anything, maybe the title will be more recognizable across the board either way. People may say, "I’ve heard of that book!" Maybe they’ll pick it up either way.
SC: I think they’re really different books. I don’t think our books are in danger of being mistaken for each other. A book called American Women came out the same time when [Choi’s first book] American Woman came out. That didn’t cause my book any difficulties. They’re not books that are going to be elbowing each other in sections in bookstore or in the mental space of readers. I hope there will be some sort of harmonic convergence and both of our books will do really, really well.
