Unbearable wrongness of a bad title

YOU can see why Anna Funder won the Miles Franklin this year. With a title like that. All That I Am. Deeply spiritual and sexy at the same time. Read on.

There has been some consternation about Alex Miller's wonderful Autumn Laing not even making the shortlist for the prize but the critics seem to have missed an obvious point - that the title is so confusing. Autumn who? Autumn what? We get that he couldn't call it Sunday Reed after the renowned art patron it is based upon, but surely the publishers could have done better. Anyway, it shows how a title can potentially make or break a book. Gone with the Wind was originally to be called Pansy, which, frankly, would not have done.

Getting it right is craft and art and not always straightforward. I once co-authored a book with a title so comprehensive no one actually felt they needed to buy a copy. Better than sex: How a whole generation got hooked on work, said it all. Too much information. The title was, well, sexy, but the sales were, well, not.

These days, non-fiction titles are vaguely out of control. The colon is no longer enough. Titles droop their way through commas, full stops, parentheses and inverted commas. So complicated, so long. There's something to be said for not leaving room for doubt but there has to be a crisper way than Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe.

Still, non-fiction titles have a certain instrumental quality. What you see is what you get and whether or not they scan is not so important. In contrast, a good fiction title that sings can roll around your head for years.

Think Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time or William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow or those truly well known ones: Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. They are so seductive and rhythmic that we think we have read them even when we haven't.

Those books date from another time but Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending shows the skill of creating a good title is alive and well. It's a great novel but the title didn't do it any harm in last year's Man Booker Prize. Against Jamrach's Menagerie; Half Blood Blues; Pigeon English; Snowdrops; The Sisters Brothers , it was no contest.