Casting for the Title Role : Publishing: What’s in a name? A book called ‘Tote the Weary Load’ didn’t inspire much enthusiasm. But look what happened when it was renamed ‘Gone With the Wind.’

Six million softcovers ago, Judith Krantz’s first paperback publisher had scruples about the title of her new romance.

The hitch was that his secretary considered “Scruples” a lousy title for a book. After all, what on Earth were scruples ?

“I asked him if she knows what unscrupulous means,” Krantz recalls. “This was the Nixon era. He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Anyway, I’m not worried about your secretary’s understanding. That is the title that’s destined for the book. Nobody can make me change it.’ ”

Destiny? Maybe. If success is destiny’s watermark, Krantz’s subsequent cavalcade of monster bestsellers would indicate that fate--like many publishers--favors short and snappy titles.

More prosaically, a book’s title is where poetry, wit and commerce converge. It’s the first line of defense in the publishing industry’s war of the words. In a publisher’s fondest dream, it’s the distinctive snippet that will grab you by the lapels and prompt you to buy that one book among many, the catchy phrase that will dance to your lips when you ask if the book’s in stock.

“When you have a good name, you have a trampoline,” says Vickie Abrahamson, a Minneapolis-based product-naming consultant. “The marketing just takes off from there and builds on it.”

Remember that fine classic “Trimalchio in West Egg”? Or the legendary “Tote the Weary Load”? Those misguided early titles were scratched for the more mellifluous--and memorable--”The Great Gatsby” and “Gone With the Wind,” respectively.

“The key to a good title is, once you have it, you realize it was always the title, but you were too stupid to recognize it,” says New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen, who left the dirty work of titling her novel “Object Lessons” to the publishing pros.

“My attitude was, ‘I don’t do headlines,’ ” she says. “It was so bad that the catalogue copy for ‘Object Lessons’ said ‘Title TK’ (to come). ‘ “Title TK” is a superb debut.’ ”

Quindlen considers herself a prime example of the sort of author who drives a publisher nuts: “There’s an attitude from writers that if it’s a good book, it will find an audience. Publishers know you have to go out and find your audience.”

Most of the time, though, the author’s title sails through the publishing mill. A title may need to be approved by as many as 10 people in editorial, sales, marketing and promotion. And when the original title doesn’t fly, they may fire off memos or hunker down for brainstorming sessions.

For an author, “it’s like naming your baby,” says Stuart Applebaum, vice president of Bantam Books. “It may have a wonderful importance and resonance for you and your family but be a complete head-scratcher to the world at large.

“While the act of writing and naming a book may be a monastic one, the act of publishing it--which includes marketing--is very much a collaborative one. So you have a lot of different opinions, which may and may not conform to the author’s.”

That’s precisely what New York Post reporter Randall Pierson was up against when he handed in his investigative tome on Leona Helmsley’s tax woes. Pierson wanted to call it “Woman on Trial,” which his editors found lackluster.

“We were ready to pull our hair out,” says Applebaum. “It was in one of these brainstorming sessions where (Pierson) wasn’t present that my colleague Steve Rubin blurted out--How about ‘The Queen of Mean’?”

Voila .

“The Queen of Mean” met one above-and-beyond criterion that took it to the pinnacle of titledom: It entered the vernacular.

But not all publisher-author title bouts have such happy endings. In an October book-signing in Orange County, exasperated author Joan Hess was spotted crossing out part of the published title for her mystery “Mortal Remains in Maggoty” and scribbling in “Maggoty the Movie.”

While authors frequently get final approval on titles, either by contract or de facto, an unconventional title can be a hard sell for an unproven writer. When business strategist Harvey Mackay pitched “Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive: Outsell, Outmanage, Outmotivate, Outnegotiate Your Competition” as the title for his first book in 1988, his publisher had the clout to deep-six it.

“I had in my contract that the title had to be mutually agreeable to author and publisher,” Mackay says. “The vote was 11 to 1. One was me.”

The title was way too long, they said. It sounded like a book about deep-sea fishing, they said.

So Mackay hired Abrahamson’s naming firm for $6,000 to test his title. The firm collected 10 people in various professions, gave them the first 75 pages of the book to read and then asked them to rate 600 potential titles.

“ ‘Swim With the Sharks’ was head and shoulders above the rest,” says Mackay, who took his evidence to the bank. “Swim With the Sharks” spent 54 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

The title worked because it paints a mental picture, Abrahamson says. “A good title is like a meal that makes your mouth salivate. It almost makes your mind salivate.”

Despite the fairly recent vogue for incredibly long titles, short, pithy titles are still dear to many an editor’s heart. “Shorter is better,” HarperCollins Executive Editor Larry Ashmead says simply.

Other Ashmead do’s and don’ts for successful titling:

Don’t start with “The Wonderful World of . . . “ or “The Complete Book of . . . “ They’ve been done to death.

Do borrow from the Bible and Shakespeare. Except for the phrases that have been done to death.

Don’t use foreign words that a would-be buyer might mispronounce because “they’re shy about asking for it in a store.”

Krantz learned the last rule the hard way when she used a French word for wind in the title of “Mistral’s Daughter.”

“Nobody who interviewed me knew how to pronounce the word mistral . People constantly were saying, ‘Let’s talk about ‘Minstrel’s Daughter’ or ‘Menstrual’s Daughter’ or ‘Mistrial’s Daughter.’ That was the worst title I could have chosen,” she says. Fortunately for Krantz, her own name packs more commercial punch than any title.

Even English can be a minefield when publishers aim at the largest-common-denominator reader. Los Angeles literary agent and erstwhile editor Toni Lopopolo once wanted to title a book “The All About Eve Complex” after the Bette Davis classic; like the film, it examined competition between older and younger professional women.

“They changed it (to ‘Sisterhood Betrayed’) because they said, ‘That’s a dated movie,’ and the marketing department had never heard of it,” she says. Lopopolo’s catch phrase was relegated to the subtitle.

“It goes with cultural illiteracy, which is rampant in our country,” she adds. “That’s what you face with titles.”

Not surprisingly, a particularly clear and catchy title is likely to see the light of print on many different jackets, since titles aren’t copyrighted. When Shirley MacLaine was revising her latest memoirs, she learned that her working title, “Coming to Terms,” was also the title of two other books coming out the same year. Not wanting to get lost in the crowd, MacLaine changed her title to “Dance While You Can.”

It was easy for the actress to go with the publishing flow, says Applebaum. “You have to understand, Shirley’s books have more working titles than she has past lives.”

Then there are titles that revel in their common touch. That’s what dancer Ann Miller ended up with for her autobiography, after Ashmead steered her away from her chatty choice, “Tippy Tappy Toe Cha Cha Cha.”

“I said, ‘Annie, that’s a very catchy title, but I think it should be something a little more succinct.’ ”

Ashmead suggested the immortal “Miller’s High Life,” inspired by beer lore. Indeed, Ashmead speculated that the Miller beer folk would be so flattered by the imitation that they would help the performer promote her book. Sure enough, Miller was invited to be the guest of honor at a Miller beer convention in Minneapolis.

“She went up there and called me and said, ‘They want to give me a lifetime supply of beer, and they want to know how much I drink and I don’t.’ I said, ‘Tell them you drink three six-packs a week.’

“As far as I know, she’s still getting the three six-packs.”