This is the story behind the title of Death & Magic, the first volume of The Barefoot Healer series, and how it nearly ended up being called Harriet Potter and the Serial Killer of Camelot.

My view on titles is that they should give some clue as to what the story is about without revealing too much. I therefore try not to pick a title until the book is finished or unless I have a very clear idea of what I want to happen in it.

I learned this lesson with Death & Magic, which was my first published novel. Originally it was called A Wizard’s Daughter, a title that I picked a few chapters in, and my plan was for subsequent books in the series to be called A Wizard’s (Something Else). (I even thought the Something Elses might run in alphabetical order...) The “wizard’s daughter” was Adramal, the main character, the wizard was her famous father, and the book was going to be about how she got out from under his shadow and started to find her own way in life. It didn’t quite turn out like that. The story changed as I was writing, into something better – or at least, more interesting to me. There was also the fact that while the wizard of the first title was Adramal’s father, the wizard of the rest would be Adramal herself, which I thought might be confusing.

I kept the title for some time, even though I knew it was no longer really appropriate, because I couldn’t think of a better one. As I neared the end of my list of possible literary agents for the book and came round to the idea that I’d have to self-publish if I wanted a paying audience for it, I realised I needed a new title – preferably a less vague and generic one. (Is it just me, or have there been an inordinate number of books called The (something's) Daughter over the last few years?)

I’d toyed with calling it The Barefoot Healer. I liked this one because Adramal acquires it as a nickname in the course of the book – she’s called to heal someone when she’s resting at the side of the road, and doesn’t have time to put her boots back on. (I later decided to make a running joke of this, and have it happen at least once in every book.) It also works on a metaphorical level, because my wizards need little in the way of equipment or drugs to perform their healing. What stopped me was that it left me without a title for the second book, which I was editing at the time. The second book is also about Adramal (!), and she does much more healing there than in the first book.

I asked for suggestions on a writers’ forum and got a dozen or so, which prodded me to go back to the taglines or pitches that I’d devised for the book – “a magical murder mystery” and “a murder mystery set in a school for wizards”. Some people seemed to think that any story set in a school for wizards must be ripping off Harry Potter, so I picked a joke title for their benefit. A popular suggestion was Deadly Magic. The trouble was it was inaccurate – I can’t say more without spoiling a major twist. A couple of other suggestions I liked had the form Something and Something. I settled on Death & Magic as the title of the first book, which got rid of the lie and suggested a pattern for the titles of the rest of the series – all of them are, or will be, a one-syllable word and a two-syllable word.

That left the problem of what to call the series, especially since half of it wasn’t written yet, which could’ve meant going against the principle I gave at the start. But it seemed safe to assume that Adramal would feature prominently, and since The Barefoot Healer was no longer in the running for the title of the first book, I opted for that.