As you can imagine, publishers consider titles carefully. Many hold titling meetings to arrive at the best decision. This care is well placed. Avid readers rarely say, “Who cares about a book title?”
Granted, fame might allow an author to publish under any title. I remember perusing library books to find no plot summary or any information other than the author’s name and book title. The author’s photo consumed the entire back cover. That’s it. Certain readers will buy any book by some authors, but offering no information doesn’t attract new readers.
What Should the Title Say?
Regardless of the author, for a novel, I want to know about the plot; and for nonfiction, I want to know the topic before I invest time and money. To wit, here are a few titles from my personal library:
The Meaning of Life
Discovering the Character of God
Real Christianity
Mary Magdalen
Billy Graham in Quotes
Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales
Heaven Awaits
The Tales of Guy de Maupassant
Mrs. Dunwoody’s Excellent Instructions for Homekeeping: Timeless Wisdom and Practical Advice
The Price Was High: Fifty Uncollected Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Names through the Ages
These titles immediately reveal each book’s contents and intent. Admittedly, titling your book may not be as straightforward. Most readers will still need context to discern a book’s intent.
A Title May Not Tell Everything
I own a copy of Sin and Temptation. Oops! Maybe I shouldn’t have told you. That’s a racy romance novel, right?
Sure isn’t.
Additional information on the cover tells a different story. How about the sidebar touting Classics of Faith and Devotion. On top of the title, From the works of John Owen. Then the subtitle, The Challenge of Personal Godliness.
Granted, the design sacrifices eye-catching artwork. Because most publishers want to present pleasing and impactful cover art, most authors don’t have the luxury of including several boxes of written information on their covers.
Selecting Your Title
In light of most authors’ restrictions, what can we do?
- Choose few words. This makes the title easy to remember and allows the most room for fascinating artwork. Not to mention, your byline!
- For a novelist, capture a place, characters, or essence. Arizona Sizzle denotes an entirely different feeling than Vermont Cocoa.
- For nonfiction, reveal the topic. When I’m searching for nonfiction, I’m on a mission to learn and discover so the topic’s prominent appearance is helpful. To narrow my search, subtitles help even more. A Comfortable Home says a lot. A Comfortable Home: Welcoming Elderly Parents says more.
Is the Title Taken?
After you’ve chosen your title, search the internet to see if it’s been used in the past few years. Perhaps your book is nonfiction, and your chosen title is that of a novel. But many people search by title on the internet rather than perusing physical bookstore shelves where the books have been sorted by category. Thus, a recent title appearing in a search will only serve to distract your potential reader.
Steer away from classic titles. Gone with the Wind might be a great title for a storm chaser’s memoir, but difficult to market.
By the way, I searched online for titles to use in this post to be sure I didn’t make a misstep. To my amazement, I found an independently published novel titled A Comfortable Home: A Pride and Prejudice Variation.
Be Flexible
Please know that unless you’re publishing independently, the title you choose for your proposal is meant to attract agents’ and editors’ attention only. The marketing team at your publisher may decide to change your beloved title. And that’s more than okay. Trust them. They know what they’re doing.
As a reader, I pay more attention to title for nonfic than fic. Recently I saw a bizarre novel title that made no sense. I’m not sure if the author was gambling that the confusion was going to cause the reader to be curious & inquire further, but if that was their hope, their plan failed because I just said “That title doesn’t even make any sense” and moved on.
I agonize over titles for my own books. But when searching for fiction, what is more important to me than title is being able to have at least some idea of the time period and setting of a book. This is frequently NOT a part of back cover copy. And I skip over a lot of books because of it.
I hope book cover artists everywhere read your comment. Great artwork can convey, among many elements, a book’s time period, mood, setting, and plot linchpins. When you’re curious about a novel, perhaps you can tell from the first page or two. If the novelist doesn’t state a year at the start, then perhaps a mention of a car model, fashion, or phone could help. I agree that I don’t enjoy having to recalibrate my thinking when I begin a book believing it’s, for instance, contemporary, only to realize several pages in that I’m reading about the 1800s. All this to say, I hope you’re not missing great books because of poor first impressions!
Deciding on titles can be difficult, but that doesn’t mean we carelessly slap a title onto our novels, knowing it is likely to be changed. Our titles must be relevant to the story, short, and catchy. Thank you for sharing, Tamela.
Thanks, Tamela! And may I suggest writers NOT write a book called Faith Over Fear? When I was recently doing research for a teaching workshop, out of curiosity I did an Amazon search on that title and found 82 of them. Figure out a different spin and a different title and subtitle.
82! WOW! Talk about the potential to get lost in the weeds!
Thank you for the advice, Tamela. I found that, because of my scholarly articles and textbook publications, I had to write “A Novel” on the front of my novels because I didn’t want folks to think my novels were scholarly tomes!
Titles are so hard! For my YA fantasy, I chose “Fairyeater.” Like “The Wizard of Oz,” the book is not really about the witch who eats fairies. Although, she’s prominent in the story. BUT!! If not for her, there would be no story. No reason for the protagonist to do anything.
I also thought it would be a memorable title.
And the cover is dark and creepy, like the title!
I spend a lot of time brainstorming titles for my children’s books, chapter books, MG, and even my short stories! Titles catch our potential reader’s attention. We want that, right?