A book’s title is the first extremely important piece of book metadata you’ll be asked to provide. Your book’s title is how your book introduces itself and is part of a reader’s overall first impression of your work. However, coming up with a compelling book title can be arduous work. You’ll want to brainstorm several ideas and then test them with your friends, family, and reader audience before settling on the one that is original, memorable, just enough words, and easy for your readers to say and type for years to come. Here are four guidelines to help you craft a compelling title for your book.
PINC was created by Michael Hyatt (former CEO of Thomas Nelson and author of Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World). It stands for Promise, Intrigue, Need, and Content. In essence, your book title should do one of the following four things:
Titles cannot be copyrighted in the United States. Therefore, two or more books can have the same title. However, if you use a title that is the same or very similar to another book, it makes it hard for your title to stand out. Be sure to search any potential book title you are considering to make sure your potential title doesn’t already have an insane search volume or a negative connotation on the web in general, and also search it on Amazon to make sure other books don’t have the same title before settling on your final title. Having an original book title helps your book stand out.
While you want your book’s title to be original, it should still match its contents. Whether your book is fiction or nonfiction, the title should reflect what’s inside. Weighty books should not have cheerful titles, and conversely, funny books should not have grave titles.
Creating a memorable title is also important. If your title is too short or too long, people won’t remember it. One- or two-word titles often don’t convey enough information and are harder to remember than titles that make a statement. The book title Sing is actually harder to remember than Sing Your Way to Peace. Titles that are too long can lose a reader’s attention. New studies are showing that attention spans have dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds, so make an impression, but quickly.
Consider that many readers are looking for their next book on their tablets and phones, so make sure your book is mobile-friendly. That means you have to create a book cover and text format that translate to the small screen. Your book title should be no more than 80 characters long to help facilitate easy reading in this format.
Keeping your book’s title memorable and short makes it easy to say and type into search engines or as a URL. Remember, as an author—or anyone selling a book—you will say and type your book’s title hundreds to thousands of times over the lifespan of your book. You don’t want a title that is difficult to say or too long to type comfortably. If your title is long or difficult to say, it will cause issues when you are being interviewed by the media and when readers are trying to recommend your book to family and friends.
You also want people to want to type it into their search bars without having to fumble over what it was called or how long it is. By sticking to your book’s theme in the title, readers will be more likely to get the title right by just searching for the book’s subject matter. Ask any librarian or bookseller how many times someone asks them if they can help them find “the book about the purple cat who plays the banjo” and realize how much easier it would have been for the reader to find if the name of the book actually had those words in it. Keep your title to just enough words to convey your book’s theme. After all, you can always add a subtitle with more descriptors.
The first question with subtitles is: do you need one? This is your choice to make, but if your title doesn’t quite cut it, you may want to tack a subtitle on to help finish the job. Many nonfiction works have subtitles to explain the potentially more complex ideas within their pages. A good rule of thumb is to look at books similar to yours in your local bookstore or online to see if they have subtitles. If it’s not common practice for your genre, you should most likely avoid them so as not to make your book stand out in an unfamiliar way to those who frequently sell or purchase your type of book. Below are a few guidelines for subtitles.
A conversation about book subtitles should always start with genre, as best practices for subtitling vary from genre to genre. In almost all cases, the best subtitle choice for a novel is “A Novel.” The reason is that not all novels are obviously novels without that designation. Both memoirs and novels can lean poetic, and some self-help titles, too, especially spirituality titles. There seems to be an exception for genre fiction, and if you look for fiction series online you’ll see that almost all series are designated as such, so the series name takes the place of the subtitle, informing you that this is Volume 1 or Book 1 in the such-and-such series. You often see mystery novels, too, with more descriptive subtitles.
A memoir’s subtitle, more often than not, has one singular purpose: to explain the title. Here are two examples that do just that:
If your title is already super-descriptive, then sometimes “A Memoir” is all a book needs, and most memoirs opt for this simple option. You identify the book as a memoir and move on. The most popular trend in memoir right now is to identify your key theme or themes, and build a simple subtitle around that: A Memoir of Faith, A Memoir of Resilience, A Memoir of Love and Loss. Unless a subtitle is very clever or creative, use the theme theory instead because generally memoir readers are seeking out memoirs based on themes they’re drawn to, or exploring in their own lives.
Unless you have something truly funny or clever, steer clear of long subtitles and just keep it simple instead. Subtitles tend to get long when they speak to things that happen in the book rather than themes, or to random asides rather than the core ideas. Here’s one that works: A Bad Idea I'm About to Do: True Tales of Seriously Poor Judgment and Stunningly Awkward Adventure
Finally, there’s self-help (and other creative nonfiction). Here the book subtitle has a bigger job: to do the heavy-lifting. Subtitles in this genre have real work to do. They may explain the title, just like they do for memoirs, but there’s something more. A subtitle for a self-help book may nod to the book’s structure. For instance, No Excuses: Nine Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power indicates that the book is divided into nine distinct chapters to tell you something about women and power.
The Internet is a main sales vehicle for most authors with the popularity of online searches and Amazon as an online retailer, so you’ll want to consider incorporating keywords into your title and subtitle, but use them effectively. With an understanding of keywords and their purpose from Chapter 2, consider how you can incorporate them into your title and subtitle naturally to help your book appear in more relevant searches of prospective readers.
This chapter was compiled from the following posts on the IngramSpark blog:
“What’s in a Name? Choosing a Book Title” by Sarah Bolme, Director of Christian Small Publishers Association
“An Author’s Guide to Book Subtitles” by Brooke Warner, Publisher of She Writes Press
