How To Title a Book
Of all the writing habits I have, one of the worst – the worst from good financial sense point of view – is that I like writing LONG books.
My first novel was a spine-breaking 180,000 words. Not one of my novels has ever been less than 110,000 words. The first “short story” I wrote was 8,000 words, which is to say miles too long to be an actual short story. Heck, even this email is likely to be far longer than any other email you get in your inbox today.
Ah well. There are some things you can’t fight, and my addiction to length is one of them.
But that also means that when it comes to short-form copy, I’m at a loss.
I’m not especially good at book blurbs, which want to be about 100-120 words (depending a bit on layouts and where you’re expecting them to appear.) Since titles need to be short and punchy, I’m not especially good at those either.
In a word: I’m pretty damn rubbish when it comes to coming up with titles … and this email is going to tell you how to write them.
Which means if you want to ignore the entire contents of what follows, on the basis that I obviously, obviously, obviously don’t know what I’m talking about, then I have to say that the evidence is very much in your favour.
That said, I think it’s clear enough what a title needs to do. It wants to:
- Be highly consistent with your genre
- Offer some intrigue – for example, launch a question in the mind of the reader
- Ideally, it’ll encapsulate “the promise of the premise” in a few very short words, distilling the essence of your idea down to its very purest form.
The genre-consistency is the most essential, and the easiest to achieve. It matters a lot now that so many books are being bought on Amazon, because book covers – at the title selection stage – are no more than thumbnails. A bit bigger than a phone icon, but really not much. So yes, the cover has to work hard and successfully in thumbnail form, but the title has more work to do now than it did before.
Genre consistency is therefore key. Your title has to say to your target readers, “this is the sort of book that readers like you like”. It has to invite the click through to your book page itself. That’s its task.
The intrigue is harder to do, but also kinda obvious. “Gone Girl” works because of the Go Girl / Gone Girl pun, and those double Gs, and the brevity. But it also works because it launches a question in the mind of the reader: Who is this girl and why has she gone? By contrast, “The Girl on the Train” feels a little flat to me. There are lots of women on lots of trains. There’s nothing particularly evocative or intriguing in the image. I don’t as it happens think that book was much good, but I don’t think the title stood out either. (I think the book sold well because of some pale resemblances between the excellent Gone Girl and its lacklustre sister. The trade, desperate for a follow-up hit to Gone Girl, pounced on whatever it had.)
The third element in a successful title – the “promise of the premise” one – is really hard to do. I’ve not often managed it, and I’ve probably had a slightly less successful career as a result.
So what works? Well, here are some examples of titles that do absolutely nail it:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Brilliant! That title didn’t translate the rather dour and serious Swedish original (Man Som Hatar Kvinnor / Men Who Hate Women). Rather it took the brilliance of the central character and captured her in six words. She was a girl (vulnerable), and she had a tattoo (tough and subversive), and the tattoo was of a dragon (exotic and dangerous). That mixture of terms put the promise of the book’s premise right onto the front cover and propelled the book’s explosive success.
Incidentally, you’ll notice that the title also completely excludes mention of Mikael Blomkvist, who is as central to that first book as Salander is. But no one bought the book for Blomkvist and no one remembers the book for Blomkvist either. So the title cut him out, and did the right thing in doing so.
The Da Vinci Code
Brilliant. Dan Brown is fairly limited as a writer, but it was a stroke of genius to glue together the idea of ancient cultural artefacts with some kind of secret code. Stir those two things up with a bit of Holy Grail myth-making and the result (for his audience) was commercial dynamite.
And – boom! – that dynamite was right there in the title too. The Da Vinci part namechecks the world’s most famous artist. The Code part promises that there are secret codes to be unravelled.
Four words delivering the promise of the premise in full.
I let You Go
This was Clare Mackintosh’s breakout hit, about a mother whose young son was killed in a hit-and-run car accident. The promise of the premise is right there in four very short words … and given a first person twist, which just adds a extra bite to the hook in question. A brilliant bit of title-making.
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So that’s what a title wants to do. A few last comments to finish off.
One, I think it’s fair to say that it’s quite rare a title alone does much to propel sale success.
Because there are a lot of books out there, and because everyone’s trying to do the same thing, there’s not much chance to be genuinely distinctive. My fifth Fiona Griffiths novel was called The Dead House, but there are at least three other books on Amazon with that title, or something very like it. That didn’t make my title bad, in fact – it did the promise of the premise thing just fine – but I certainly couldn’t say my title was so distinctive it did anything much for sales.
Two, if you’re going for trad publishing, it’s worth remembering that absolutely any title you have in mind at the moment is effectively provisional. If your publishers don’t like it, they’ll ask you to change it. And if they don’t like your title #2, they’ll ask you to come up with some others. In short, if, like me, you’re bad at titles, you just don’t need to worry too much (if you’re going the trad publishing route, that is.) There’s be plenty of opportunity to hone your choice well prior to publication.
Three, you don’t want to think about title in isolation. There should, ideally, be a kind of reverberation between your title and the cover. That reverberation should be oblique rather than direct. Clare Mackintosh’s I Let You Go had for its cover image a butterfly trapped against a window – a metaphorical reference to the anguish of the book’s premise. If instead it had shown a mother obviously distraught as a car struck her son, the cover – and title – would have seemed painfully clunky and ridiculous.
If you get a great cover image that doesn’t work with your chosen title, then change the title. If you have a superb title and your cover designer’s image is too directly an illustration of it, then change the image. That title/cover pairing is crucial to your sales success, so you can afford no half-measures in getting it right.
That’s all from me.
My kids are making elderflower cordial and singing as they do so. They are also wearing helmets for no reason that I can possibly understand.
Till soon
Harry
PS: Want to know what I think of your title? Then I’ll tell you. Just pop your title (plus short description of your book) in the comments below. I’ll tell you what I think.
‘Valley Child’ is the story of an artist born in a Welsh valley and abused as a child.
She and her mother flee, and the novel opens as our lead character returns as an adult to work in the valley of her birth.
Here she falls in love with a man who – once again – abuses her, as history repeats itself. She – once again – flees abuse, and… I’m only two thirds of the way and there are two possible outcomes.
The first is based on the concept that those – once abused – will often be attracted to similar abusers because they are seen as ‘strong’.
The alternative ending recognises that with with friendship and reconcilation, a new way forward can be found. Hence the title has a degree of ambiguity.
Yes, I think maybe that’s OK. Again, how you hint at your theme in the cover is going to matter a lot. When misery memoirs were huge, there were a lot of soft-focus 7-year-old-kids on the cover. You probably want something like that, but a bit less corny and a bit more 2019-y.
Thank you very much Harry, that is really helpful… hopefully, it will turn out as a happy book with a contemporary feel, currently 60,000 words in and at a bit of a crossroads. But the dialogue is driving this one, and I’ll be fascinated to see where it takes me! Many thanks, John
Not comment on the title, but on the possible endings; have you looked into the freedom programme and the book “living with the dominator”? It covers the patterns you’re exploring, and whether those who are abused subconsciously return to familiar patterns and might be helpful research.
This post could not be more apt for me. I am really struggling with a title!! 😣
My book (part one of a trilogy) is about a 40-something woman who comes to the horrifying realisation that she is living the wrong life. The conventional trappings of marriage, motherhood and suburban stability are making her fundamentally and deeply unhappy. The story catalogues her journey towards her decision: leave, and devastate her husband and 9yr old daughter, or stay, and betray her own soul.
The current working title, which I really hate because it sounds so cheesy, is “Life, Another Way”.
The extra tricky element is that I want to have the same title for all 3 parts of the trilogy: Part 1 is sub-titled The End (where the MC puts an end to the life that really wasn’t right for her), part 2 will be The Middle (where the MC pursues what she presumed is the appropriate alternative life-path for herself but encounters some bumps), and part 3 will be The Beginning (where the MC settles on a brand new way to live that will appease and work for herself as well as her family).
I like Alice’s suggestion of a metaphorical title… I will give that some thought!
Yeah, something a bit more indirect will help. “Life, backwards”. Or really indirect: “Jumpstarting” – and there you’d need to make sure you had a clearly woman’s fiction cover – a woman in a red dress on a green path with her back turned to you. That kind of thing.
Oh, and the same title for three books? A terrible idea. Sorry!
I have an ms to be scrutinised by the editor assigned it by my publisher. Personally, I really like the title (it’s also the fourth or so so far) which is: Witness outside the circle. What do you think?
Synopsis is this:
‘Ailsa Mullins is caught between a colonial past, with its British heritage, and the upheavals of a new world. She and her husband Robert, have arrived in Saigon as part of the Australian diplomatic corps in the 1960s. After years in far-flung settings of the world, this is the one that takes over their lives, and pose impossible questions to which there are no answers for Ailsa – and indeed for Vietnam itself – as the war unfolds.
A country vicar’s daughter, Ailsa has a naïve loyalty to her husband Robert. Yet she develops an intense relationship, a hovering close to love and sensual desire, with Jack Maloof, a disillusioned journalist. Robert and Jack, too, develop a closeness and a shared obsession with this doomed war. The bond between the three is ambiguous but somehow enchanted; the bond between the men and the war is its own story of deadly fascination.
This novel follows the logic of disintegration – of South Vietnam; of the high hopes of the bullish West; of the elegant yet peripheral life of the diplomatic corps; of Ailsa’s own certainties.
This is an intimate epistolary novel of a woman’s innermost thoughts as the world she knows – or thought she knew – collapses around her.’
– Judy Crozier
“Sunlight at Midnight” about a woman learning to live again while suffering from PTSD as the result of abuse and a man who is trying to maintain the life he has fought for after achieving sobriety.
“Midnight Sun” – works better maybe? But that kind of title is OK. Got to get the cover right …
Hi.
My book is entitled: I Am My Mother’s Voice.
The book centres around my Mothers life at a young age into adulthood and takes the reader on a journey through the good and the bad she dealt with from losing her Father at a young age, to the tragic loss of her youngest Son in his adult life and her long, hard-fought battle with Frontotemporal Dementia being diagnosed at 57 years old. It also chronicles the early signs, the progression and what to expect with this cruel disease and the 14 years of care her family provided until her sad passing in July 2018.
Um – a bit too direct for me. “Talking of Mother” – something like that hints at the themes/genre, while leaving a bit more room for intrigue
Thank you for your time and feedback. That was my main title, but I do have a few more if you have the time? They are I See Myself In Your Eyes, A Lady of Courage and Simply Beautiful. Thanks again.
I think you’re 50% there. The word “presence” is OK, but the overall phrase seems a bit colourless. But the basic concept feels strong, and I don’t think you’re far from a title
I like Red Terror 1919, or just Odessa 1919. I think those are strong and it would be easy to build a cover that complements those very well … Great you had a good experience with Diana!
It wouldn’t put off my kids! They’d love it. I think publishers – except maybe very timid ones – would feel likewise.
Neither the cover idea nor the title are quite yet working for me. I think you’re heading in a slightly too direct way. The Coldest Place to Die? North Face? Eiger 52? I think you need to riff a bit more and see what comes along …
My new novel has the working title ‘Golden Truth.’ It is the first of a two part fantasy series. It is based in an alternate world. I’m not particularly good at writing blurb and descriptions (or titles). I find it hard to condense my ideas into so few words but here is my attempt.
A dark queen made a pact with evil to save her life. She didn’t realise that by allowing evil into her she opened the way for it to control her. A self exiled woman wishes to stop the queen and end the unspeakable acts that she has ordered but the womans mind is clouded by a desire to avenge her murdered family. She has been set onto a path that will lead her to the queen but only if she comes to term with the truth about her nature that she has hidden for so long.
I just thought I’d add that I had two other titles I was considering but was uncertain about them. They were ‘The Black and Gold’ and ‘Hidden Path’
For my money, Golden Truth and Hidden Path feel a bit too obvious. “The Black and The Gold” feels stranger, more interesting, and more genre-focused. That’s what I’d go for (but with two “The”s not one.)
Thank you, the title The Black and The Gold does work well with the overall story. I appreciate the feedback.
OLivia: one girl’s story of resistance.
Olivia has caught the worst disease ever: Adulthood. Will she ever recover? Does she even want to? The deeper she goes into growing up, the more complicated it gets and she tries desperately to grow down. The key is in finding the balance between resistance and acceptance (and perhaps a little magic).
Middle grade, coming-of-age style narrative. Perfect as a gift for your 9-13 year-old daughter, Harry (if you have one ;-))
Does it pique your interest as a parent? Would you go for that title?
I don’t think the title works for me, but I think you’ve already unearthed the idea that could work. something around “Adulthood, the worst disease” is eyecatching and memorable. That exact formulation is a bit weak, but play with that idea – I think you have something there.