Can I write a book, make the final draft, send to a publishing company, and have it made with no title? So it would just be known as 'the book by this author (me)'? Or do I have to have a title?
My guess is vanity publishers would maybe do it, but I doubt a traditional publishing company would do it unless you were 'The Beatles' famous.
Hah! The White Book. Yeah, today's publishing market isn't as free-spirited and willing to take chances as the 60's rock record world was.
You could propose it to a publisher, but even if you have a title the publisher might very well want to change it (if you look at a publishing contract, you may see a provisions that allows the publisher to do so--they want the title to be a marketing consideration).
And, of course, titles can't be copyrighted. But as Steerpike pointed out, a publisher has to think about how the book can be marketed, and that's really hard to do without a title. Wasn't there a book that actually had the word "Untitled" as its title?
Actually, that album did have a title. It was, simply, The Beatles. The White Album was its popular name, but not the official one as described in the Apple catalog.
Apart from anything else, these days a genuinely untitled book likely would wreak havoc among IT systems at every level, from publisher to bookshop.
My guess is that as @alw86 suggests, at some point in the marketing stage, a placeholder title will have to be keyed into a mandatory data entry field in a form. And as @JLT points out, this has been true from day one. I recall an anecdote that ELO's debut album was almost sold as titled "No Answer" because the printer wrote that down in the form, meaning, he had not received a response yet to the question: "What is the damn title of the album, I need to know asap." Related anecdote is that Yes decided to go with "90125" because it was the catalogue number, so they copied it into the Title field to keep it simple. So, with examples like these, your title could be the ISBN maybe. And Wondermark is on topic, as always: https://wondermark.com/c1521/
There have been some upcoming book releases that have "title yet to be announced" but have the author and synopsis and reading samples. Ive come across some that simply say "title unknown" and these are like big name authors who publish like 3 books a season! (I get advanced catalogues of books that are coming out but are public knowledge yet... Quite a bit are like that)
And Peter, Paul and Mary did the same thing. As Wikipedia relates, "Album 1700 was so named because its original LP issue was Warner Bros. Records catalog number W-1700 for the mono version and WS-1700 for the stereo version. "
So unless you are a big author it's best to submit at least a working title. If it's your debut most agents require a specific title written in all caps. If you don't have an official title yet just make a list of keywords from your novel and try to find a working title that fits your book. It can always be changed once you've been agented.
