Finging the Title of Your Book: Excerpt From My Book: A Friendly Guide to Writing and Ghostwriting
We don’t have to think up a title till we get the doggone book finished.
- - - Carl Sandburg
The title of a book is like a window, hopefully a clear one, into the alternate world that you’ve fashioned on the page. It’s a sneak peek into a new reality. Your title might describe a defining moment in the book, a mood that dominates the story, or a lesson that informs the reader. It might be a name or a great line, a metaphor or a hint of a hidden meaning that will be revealed later.
Never underestimate the importance of a good title. When author Naura Hayden chose the title, Astro-logical Love, her book tanked. When she changed it to, How to Satisfy a Woman Every Time, and Have Her Beg for More, she sent it back out into the marketplace and her otherwise remote book quickly rose to #1 on the bestseller lists. The title intrigued people and when they read the book, it delivered what it promised.
This is a crucial point. It’s a good thing to get your reader’s attention with a provocative title. But if you promise something like revealing a secret, teaching a lesson or inviting the reader into a magical realm, make sure you fulfill their expectations so they don’t feel tricked or cheated.
I wrote a book for an award winning movie star some years back and she wanted to have the word “Secrets” in her title. A highly sought after celebrity, she hoped to lure readers with a promise to share some hidden truths about herself that she’d never told before. She set out to do just that, our interviews went well and I liked what we came up with. There was an affair no one knew about. A child was born out of wedlock. She’d had a public falling out with another celebrity who smeared her all over the Internet. But she got cold feet during the last read-through and hastily removed the very things she was promising to reveal.
I sympathized with her dilemma. She’d been demonized by the press and she was paranoid. Still, she needed to give her readers what her title promised if she wanted them to feel satisfied. I urged her to either reveal her secrets or change the title of the book, but she ignored my advice. People initially bought it and it landed on the bestseller list because of her name and the secrets that readers were eager to discover. But when they finished the book and had learned nothing more than they already knew, they felt cheated (they were cheated) and they didn't recommend it to their friends. It dropped off the bestseller list in one week because it turned out to be a promise that the author did not deliver.
The moral of the story is to choose a title that accurately reflects what you’ve written and what your readers can take away from immersing themselves in your story. A title must remain true to its word. It’s meant to attract, not repel, and if it turns off readers instead of drawing them in, it isn’t doing its job. It’s meant to be an invitation but don’t get cutesy or confusing. Don't make your reader have to work to understand you. Instead, make sure your title is inviting and indicative of your genre. It should be memorable, captivating, and match the essence of what you’re writing. When it does, chances are your audience will be intrigued, buy your book, and feel satisfied when they're finished reading it.
So how do you choose a good title?
Sometimes it’s obvious. I wrote a book for a woman, Jami Goldman, who got lost in her minivan during a blizzard. Stuck in knee deep snow, she was so far off the beaten track, the search helicopters couldn't find her. She languished in the van for ten nights and eleven days with no food, she melted snow for water, and she was nearly dead when a man and his son on Sno-cats spotted the van and found her. She survived but she lost both legs below the knee to frostbite. Jami’s story was powerful, not because she was a victim, but rather because she went on to become a champion runner on “cheetah leg” prosthetics, breaking speed records and winning a gold medal in the Paralympics.
When I finished writing her book and she and I met with her literary agent, he came up with a great title:
UP AND RUNNING: The Jami Goldman Story
He had chosen a title that referred to her victory rather than her victimhood. He had nailed it. We didn't need to look further because we all agreed it was perfect. It met the criteria for the publisher and she was on board, too. We had high hopes for this book, people love to read about rising above adversity, but we got a bad break. Her publicity tour was set to begin on September 11, 2001, and the World Trade Center terrorist attacks wiped out any publicity she had scheduled. Things like that can happen, even when it looks like all the bases are covered.
The point here is that her title came easily but they aren't usually that clear. I was working with a CEO on a book about making it in the corporate world and he and I agreed that his current title didn't have much punch. We labored over finding one that would get the job done and we kept coming up short. It was like a game of hide and seek. The title was hiding and we were seeking. The search kept coming up fruitless, until one day I was reading through the manuscript and the title jumped out at me like it was written in bold letters. It had been right there all along, embedded in the text.