Hallelujah… you’ve finished your first draft. A complete book. Well done. And from the outside you’ve probably had a working title in mind. And now — probably — you know it isn’t going to work.

Working titles are useful because they give you something to call the thing while you write it, a handle to grab hold of in the dark. It doesn’t matter one bit if you find they don’t work as the title for the finished book. You usually come up with them before you have a fully-formed idea of what you’re going to write; by the time you finish, you know the book very well indeed, and what it needs is usually different from what you thought at the start.

Here’s how it works for me. As I write, I note down title possibilities along the way. Usually I’ll have a good stack in the book notes by the time I reach the end. The first thing I do is whittle them down to five or six favourites, then check whether anyone else has used them recently. There are a lot of books in this world, and a good many share the same title. Ideally yours will be unique, but it doesn’t have to be. If an obscure book used the same title several years ago, you’re probably fine. Just don’t pick The Godfather or any other obvious and well-known title.

A few observations on what tends to work and what doesn’t. Very long titles occasionally succeed — Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, for example — but they’re harder to remember and harder to sell in conversation. Single-word titles can be striking but will usually have been used elsewhere, so you’ll need to check for competitors. Titles that play off other books — The Vermeer Code — are best avoided unless you’re deliberately making a point or taking the mickey.

The title does several jobs at once. It tells the reader something about the book’s tone and genre without giving anything away. It lodges in the memory. In an ideal world it has a slight ambiguity that only becomes clear once you’ve finished reading — so that looking back at the cover you think: ah, so that’s what it meant.

The best titles feel inevitable. They sound as though the book could not have been called anything else. That feeling usually arrives quite late, often after the book is finished. Be patient with it. And don’t agonise over it too much. In truth, if you sell the book to an editor they will tell you if your title works or needs replacing. And very likely come up with what they think is a better one. So listen to them and learn.

Don’t sweat it. They’re just words. We can always change them.