I Stopped Writing Terrible Titles Once I Learned THIS

your title is one of the most important things about your book it can sometimes be the difference between you selling 50 copies a year and 5,000 copies a year and most of the time the best title is not the very first thing that you thought of or like the title you called it when you were working on it usually not so what we're going to do in this video is go over 13 strategies that you can use to find the absolute best title for your book not just in terms of a title that represents your

book well but also a title that helps you sell copies of the book The first strategy we're looking at is use a loaded word so take a wild guess on what you think the loaded word is in this title how to escape from a leper colony by timony yique so if you guessed leper or leper colony that is a word or phrase that just Springs out to you from this title and you're immediately interested in it as a reader and another word that helps this title is the word Escape because it gives action to this

title now we're wondering oh like how are they going to escape like what is escaping from leopard Colony look like another great example of a loaded word and a title would be in this one my sister the serial killer by o yenin braithway so the word or phrase that jumps out immediately to you is serial killer and it lets you know right away what this book is going to be about and it promises ooh there will be murders not just one murder multiple murders but I think the word that helps Elevate this title is sister

because now there's a familial connection like what do you do when your sister is the serial killer do you turn her in do you protect her I mean there are so many more questions raised by just adding the sister to the title just make sure your title actually describes your book like you can't use leper colony in the title if there is no lepr colony in your book I mean obviously don't don't fake the reader out and my second piece of advice would be to run a poll on social media where you tell people what

the title is and have them guess what it's about that'll let you know whether the title accurately reflects your genre and the actual content of your your second strategy is an emotional word plus a concrete word look at A Book Like The Secret Life of Bees by Sue monk kid so the concrete word here is bees right I mean you can see a bee it's you can hear a bee buzzing it's very conrete the emotional word is secret life so obviously secret is a very loaded word and it makes you intrigued like okay what is

the secret life how do bees have a secret life another example of the strategy would be the bone Setter's Daughter by Amy Tan the concrete word triggers the senses in our brain and then the emotional word triggers our heart and for our third example let's look at the Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan this one's a little bit more complex but I would argue that the emotional word is probably Forest although it's a little bit concrete as well but I think we have a lot of positive emotional feelings about a forest it's calm

it's peaceful it's green like you go there for rest bit I mean it's very positive emotional feelings and then we get to very concrete words that make us extremely worried what are individual hands and individual teeth doing in this Forest something is not right here a third strategy is to contrast your title now this strategy is very easy you just choose two opposite words look at a title like George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire ice and fire opposites or Dan Brown's Angels and Demons or if you want to go old school go

back to Tolstoy War and Peace but I think that are some more complex examples of contrasting titles as well so let's look at two of those first the sisters brothers by Patrick dwit so if you have two brothers and their last name happens to be sisters then you can have a title like the sisters brothers and this next one is actually one of my favorite examples of a contrasting title it is the Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barberry if you think of descriptive words for Hedgehog probably the very last one that would ever come

up would be elegant but I think that's what makes the title so effective a fourth strategy would be to create mystery this title the seven and a half deaths of Evelyn Hard Castle by Stuart turton what really gets me is that half right if you're like the seven deaths you're like oh okay I get it like he comes back to life okay but the half you're like what do you mean what do you mean he died halfway like how does that happen and so it makes you want to read the book just from the title

itself or look at this example if On a Winter's Night a traveler by Italo calino this title works so well because you want to finish the phrase right it is only half of the sentence and it's like you're leaving the reader with this unresolved chord and the reader's like if On a Winter's Night of traveler what I want to know or look at the lake of dead languages by Carol Goodman so we have this really evocative word with dead right so you sort of get a sense of the genre here but then you have combining

of the lake with dead languages and it creates this where you don't quite know what this book is about but you sense that there are some Mysteries that you're very curious about and now we're to the fif strategy which is to pick a single word sometimes it doesn't need to be complex right sometimes a single word is the right title for your book look at Stephen King how many of his books are simply the name of one of his characters carry it misery Kujo now if you're considering this I would say that the danger of

having a one-word name is that it is not very googleable if people know the name of your book and try to search for it and can't find it that is going to radically impact sales so if you can pick a single word which is a little bit easier to find then that's usually a best option now the second thing you should do is to test your title Google it and see if there are similar or identical names out there now usually this isn't a legal issue you can't actually copyright a title so feel free to

use whatever title you want to but it's more of a Google issue right if someone searches for your book and another book comes up with the same name are they going to buy that one by accident though I will say if you title your book Berry hotter and it's about a wizard going to a magic school I mean yeah you're probably going to get sued another example of one word titles comes from Jonathan fransen who often titles his book with One Singular word that's very symbolic and sort of weighty look at books like Freedom Purity

Crossroads now if you want to be like hey my books are ambitious so take it and read it I mean this could be a good strategy for you uh but it's pretty ambitious and you don't want to get too far ahead of yourself and promise something that the book actually doesn't fulfill by talking something about the nature of Freedom like that's what your book is promising with a title like that so use caution when picking a title like that but hey it might be the right title for your book the sixth strategy is theme plus

metaphor equals title so how about the heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers I've always loved that title it makes you feel slightly wistful like oh the heart is a Lonely Hunter you get this theme with loneliness and you also have this personification of the heart being a hunter or check out this one love is a dog from Hell by Charles Bukowski that is such a Bukowski title I mean if you've read Bukowski you know that is like the essence of a Bowski title right there so hey give it a shot maybe a metaphor

title is the right one for your book if you can come up with original one that really strikes at the emotion the seventh strategy for titling your book is to concentrate on the concrete and not the abstract so here's a quick question do you have at least one word in your title which is a concrete word and by concrete I mean something that's like physical that you could pick up or hold or see so let me give you some terrible examples of this Steinbeck once had a book that he wanted to title something that happened

that is the worst title I have ever heard in my entire life what do you know after a title like that I literally feel Dumber just after saying those three words who would want to read a book called something that happened obviously something happen something happens in every book but then Steinbeck wised up he read a Robert Burns poem and titled that Book Of Mice and Men two concrete words right mice men here's another Abstract title that really didn't work then we came to the end uh it is a novel by Joshua Ferris guess what

nobody could remember that title it was the biggest book of the season and everybody came into independent bookstores asking hey can you tell me about the office novel because the whole novel takes place in an office and the reason nobody could remember that title is because there was not a single concrete word in that title then we came to the end what does your mind have to latch on to there's nothing there's nothing in that title oh but I have to say it's actually a great book you should probably read it now if you need

help coming up with a good concrete word for your title I would recommend trying this take 10 of your favorite books in the genre that you're writing in and see what concrete words they use in their titles it'll give you a sense of what's being used out there and the sort of tone you want to go for for your concrete word in order to tip the reader off like oh hey this is the genre that I'm writing in now it's time for strategy number eight curiosity creators there are some titles that are so good they

work as marketing engines and they're going to make two or three times as many people buy your book I think David Wong is an absolute Master at this let's look at three of his titles johon Dies at the End great anticipation right that is a title that gets you right away this book is full of spiders seriously dude don't touch it okay this is fantastic because using reverse psychology and it's also got a meta level you're talking directly to the reader and lastly what the hell did I just read this is a great title that

invokes Curiosity because it makes you wonder like what exactly is in this book another great example in this category is everyone in my family has killed someone by Benjamin Stevenson uh one i' think about joining a new family very quickly and then two how why and what the heck and the last example in this category is a Dave vager book a heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius I love the air of arrogance that that comes off from this title but then you also know it's kind of like tongue and cheek titling your own book a heartbreaking

Work of Staggering Genius so it's funny at the same time I mean so there are multiple levels that this is working on but it's the type of title which can sell a book all on its own now we're going to look at sort of a classic strategy to title your book it's one of the most common ones it is number nine allude to popular sayings so you could just use a straight up idiom for the title of your book like a phrase that most people know look at something like Finders Keepers by Steven King or

motor mouth by Janet Ivanovich or partners in crime by Agatha all of those are phrases that we know as English speakers that are very commonly used but I think it gets a little exciting when you decide to take one of those typical phrases and then just do a little little twist or a little variation on it look at this book from Douglas Adams the long dark tea time of the Soul obviously playing on The Long Dark Night of the Soul right but by substituting the dark word night and instead saying tea time which is so

lighthearted it's a funny substitution and you get the sense right away oh this is going to be a funny book another place where you see this a lot is in the mystery genre so you get titles like murder most foul by Donna Andrews so you get a sense oh there's going to be chickens in this chickens and murder the 10th strategy of how to title your book is a simple adjective noun look at something like dark places by Jillian Flynn or Cold Mountain by Charles Frasier or White Noise by Don Dilo when you are using

the strategy don't don't forget that the title has to reflect your genre it should tip the reader off to what kind of book this is Jillian Flynn is writing suspense Thrillers so a title like Dark Places definitely reflects that do not try to write a romance novel with a happily ever after ending with the title Dark Places it you're just not going to sell anything look when it comes to titling your book you want it to stick in the genre and stick out of the genre at the same time and here's what I mean by

that you wanted to stick in the genre in the sense that you want the readers to know what sort of genre it belongs to but you also wanted to stick out from the genre because you want to promise readers that this is going to feel fresh this is going to feel original it's not something that they've read 10,000 times you want a title that will still bring attention to itself while belonging in a firm genre the 11th strategy is to draw from poetry now I'll say right off the bat like this is not a technique

that you can fake like you actually have to read poetry to be able to pull this off thankfully I love poetry I love Mary Oliver and wendle Berry and Jack Gilbert and Poets like that and as I read poetry sometimes I will make marks in the margin saying like you know what this would be a really good title and actually a lot of authors have used this technique like in The Lovely Bones by Alice seabold that's a title that comes from the poem I knew a Woman by Theodore retka another example would be For Whom

the Bell Tolls by Hemingway this is a title from John dun's meditation 17 or dying of the light uh which which was a George RR Martin title a Sci-Fi novel before he got into all the fantasy genre that comes from Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle into that good night 12 strategy you can use when titling your book is to squeeze in ambiguity so Clare massud has this wonderful book called The Emperor's Children and we read it for a book club at an Italian restaurant in Pasadena California and I think we spent gosh probably at

least 30 minutes debating about the meaning of this title for starters we were like well who is the Emperor does it refer to the patri AR Murray and all of his children or does it refer to Han Christian Anderson tale The Emperor's New Clothes and it's sort of like a metaphor commentary on the story and there were several other even Wilder theories about what this title could mean so if you're trying to use a strategy you want a title that opens up after the book is finished where people can debate what exactly did that title

mean and they can find multiple good interpretations for what that title is maybe at this point you're like listen John I watched this whole video you have some great ideas but I still don't have a good title for my book okay well this last strategy it's for you it's number 13 try title mapping what I want you to do is write down on a sheet of paper a whole bunch of words that you would associate with your novel it could be the mood of your novel it could be concrete things inside of your novel could

be characters it could be conflict it could be themes whatever words you associate with your book then what I want you to do is simply cut those all out so they're individual words now we're going to play the game of of refrigerator magnets and what I want you to do is mix them up and look for strange or unusual combinations between those words and I'll just give you an example of a title that I think might have used this strategy I don't know whether he did but but it seems to have followed this strategy the

raw shark texts by Steven Hall I love how none of these words seem to match up with each other one we have this power word of like shark okay I love shark in the title that's a good start but then you combine that with a word like text which is very like literary and you're like huh how do those two things match up and then you combine those to with the word raw and you know I don't think I've eaten any shark Sushi lately you don't think of raw sharks it's such an unusual combination maybe

you combine three of those words that you wrote down in a very unusual way and hey that becomes your title if it grabs the attention and if it describes your book in some way it might be the right title for you so I hope through watching this you either found a good title or you revised your title and made it even better