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.
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? My publisher doesn’t seem keen.
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
Hello Harry
My novel’s MC is an orphaned 16 year old Mexican girl named Maria who falls for an older (late 20’s) man named Victor. He turns out to be a married gangster. When she becomes pregnant he decides to to eliminate her to keep her quiet. Maria survives and flees across the border to Texas. The rest of the book tells two stories: Maria’s odyssey to raise her child as an illegal immigrant and single mother in a foreign land, and Victor’s increasingly violent obsession with finding his lost son. The story is set in the 1970’s.
This is the first part of a planned trilogy. Each book represents a successive generation of this family line, about 20 years apart. Book 2 finds Maria’s son serving as a USA DEA agent investigating Victor’s burgeoning cartel empire. The MC of book 3 is Victor’s granddaughter who takes over the cartel and falls for a a young man who turns out to be Maria’s grandson. The name of the first book is Thicker Than Blood, though the title isn’t explained until the third.
The books deal with themes on illegal immigration and the ruinous drug war. I’ve struggled to pick a genre, but I think literary crime fits.
Billy
Hi Billy, hmm, yes, I don’t quite feel the genre in that title, or any sense of place or time. I think you need something more evocative. “Tijuana Farewell” or something like that. At the moment, your chosen title is trying to encapsulate the book, but that’s not the point of it! The point is to get a reader to click from the cover/title combo to your book page itself. (Or same general idea in a physical bookstore.)
I was worrying about the same thing. The project has changed quite a bit since I originally conceived it. I was thinking the title didn’t really fit anymore. Thanks for your comments
I agree with your publisher, I’m afraid! That title does nothing to convey genre or setting, and it’s colourless compared with your setting. Sorry!
Yes, that could work for me. As you say, the name is striking and bright. But you will need a cover image that does more to suggest the nature of the tale. Worth checking the appropriate genre bestseller lists on Amazon too, just to check you’re in the right ballpark.
The book I’m working on is called “Locked away”; the story in brief is a woman who has a child as a result of rape, and never bonds with her – but when her daughter disappears 15 years later she realises what she’s missed out on, and becomes the face of families impacted by missing children, campaigning in the media and a bit of a national treasure. Ten years later, her daughter returns – and she realises that she never really wanted her back.
I wanted ‘locked away’ because the bonds and relationships are locked inside broken people, the daughter is abducted and it encompasses that, and the reconciliation is always just out of reach.
Bit too on the nose for my taste. You never really want to highlight the issue; you want to suggest a story. I’d go on thinking probably. Titles are HARD!!!
and just to be clear – for everyone! – I’m not always right so feel very free to ignore me and do your own thing. These aren’t my books; they’re yours.
Hello Harry,
The proposed title for my anthology of short stories is Sweet Dreams.
The characters in these stories—like each of us—have dreams for a better life, dreams that rarely work out as desired. Individually, the characters experience romance, unrequited love, victory and defeat. Some are survivors. Some fall victim to the schemes of others, or to their own shortcomings.
The stories are set at different times and in different locations. They range from psychological suspense to historical romance.
The proposed subtitle for the print version is Thought provoking suspense with twists of the dark side.
I look forward to reading your perspective.
Sweet Dreams actually fights against your proposed subtitle … and again, I think feels a bit too obvious/dull for a collection like this. Just think how much more exotic/specific/alluring something like “Albuquerque Dreamer” would be. (Or whatever). Your title is a bit too general to really suggest story. But if there’s a little dark side twist to your stories, then I’d like to see that hinted at in the title.
Tendo – I like it. It’s memorable. Exotic. People who like that Japanese warrior stuff will instantly get interested. That’s a decent example of title-making, I reckon.
Hi Harry,
My novel is coming of age story of a desert nomad boy. It is an easy access literary thriller/adventure story.
A desert nomad boy, Asaph, is orphaned, then raised by his alcoholic uncle to make money, but finally escapes to face a harder journey. The story tells of his struggles with trading intrigue, violence and murder in a fictitious sub-Saharan country followed by an epic migrant journey to his dream country over the mountains.
I have considered lots of titles:
Curse of the Desert Wolves; Walking On; Finding the Fatherland; Trading Time; Trading/Treading Sands and Snakes; Selling the Sands of Time; Dry Wells, No Paths, Asaph the Nomad.
What do you think?
Thanks, Susan
I’m not sure you’ve nailed it yet. If your book is kind of serious / literary, then “Curse of the Desert Wolves” for example, sounds more horror. And something like “No Paths” feels both a bit unclear and a bit worthy. I do think you need to reference the landscape probably, but using something more specific than just “sands” …
The wording of the first 2 lines on the cover of my book is as follows:–
Murders or Accidents? (mainly in lower case on the first line)
MEETING THE GRIM REAPER (in upper case on the second line)
It appears to the readers, when they look at the front cover, that the title is MEETING THE GRIM REAPER, but the published title on Amazon includes both of the aforementioned first 2 lines. This is done for the sake of formatting the wording on the cover, and in order to attract more attention.
The novel concerns a series of mysterious deaths among a group of individuals working together and travelling together in various countries around the globe, as part of a Company team of Inspectors or Auditors.
That sounds a bit messy to me. Remember Amazon gives you a title and a subtitle. I would choose a proper title, then think about what subtitling could work in support.
Harry,
It sounds messy, but using Amazon’s own software to design the layout of the wording on the front cover, it was the only way I could get the front cover looking the way I wanted, with the words in the right sizes and in the right places, and I think the result is good, on the published cover.
If you looked on Amazon for my book, entitled “Murders or Accidents ? MEETING THE GRIM REAPER” and looked at the cover, I believe you would see what I mean.
regards,
Colin.
Uh, yes. OK. But honestly? ‘m going to say that no good cover ever came out of Amazon’s cover software. The cover is too important for you to use something just because you were hemmed in by some clanky software and your own skillset. This is an area where you have to invest …