54. Creatively Smart Ways to Come Up With Your Book Title

Welcome to the Book Marketing Show Podcast, where each week we'll show you exactly how to sell more books and have fun doing it. And now, your host, Dave Cheson. Hey guys, I'm Dave Chesson of the Book Marketing Show podcast and welcome back.

Here at the Book Marketing Show podcast, I want to be able to help authors to learn advanced book marketing so that they can take control of their books, get it in front of the right readers, and hopefully make enough money to be able to keep writing and do what they love.

Now, today's episode, we're going to focus on different and creative ways of coming up with your book title. Now, I get it. A book title is sort of like one of those where a lot of authors feel as though it's just kind of comes to them. I'll just sit down and I'll come up with it. But having sat in a bunch of publishing meetings with publishing companies, I assure you, they don't just sit there at the desk and say, hey.

You think of something and they do. No, they have a process because book titles are huge. They can be a major difference maker. As we learned back in episode 24. There is absolute proof that a title can make all the difference. A man by the name of Hattleman ran a publishing company back in the 1900s, and he had this method that if a book didn't sell at least 10,000 copies a year, he'd send it back to his quote-unquote

hospital. And there he would tweet the books. Now he had major changes. All he did was just change the title and sales quadrupled. in many cases and tripled. One particular example was one that we talked about in that episode, which was Gautier's Fleece of Gold. The original title only sold 6,000 copies a year. And originally they named it because...

French writing was the rave at the time, so they wanted to kind of fit into it. But the problem was that the title didn't actually tell you what the book was about. So Haldeman took that title and changed it. to The Quest of a Blonde Mistress. And that's all he did. He didn't change the cover. He didn't change any of the marketing. He just changed the title and put it back out there as if it was a new book. And guess what? It went from 6,000 copies a year to 50,000 copies a year.

Apparently, Fleece of Gold or the Blonde Mistress, well, that resonated with the 1900s crowd at the point, and they made major bank from it. Now, there are lots of examples where Haldeman made these changes. just to a title. But the point of this is to show you that publishing companies, okay, the ones that are really thinking about the market, don't just sit back and come up with a title. It's an art.

and a science now in this episode we're going to talk about a couple of ways that you can have a better idea of titles that sell now the first way of doing this is just doing some market research. Go to the library or go to the bookstore and look at the best-selling books. If you actually spend enough time looking at them, you'll see they're almost rip-offs of each other.

One thing you're gonna notice is there are a lot of books that use a one-word title. It seems to be in. But maybe in 10 years, that might change. It comes and goes. But right now, one-word titles are in. You also see things like girl on a train or girl rising or something like that. It seems to be like the girl thing is in. Now... You might say, okay, you know what the girl thing that might be romance or it might be thriller based off of which girl on a train or girl on whatever. Gone girl.

The girl thing's in, I guess, right? It may be a different genre. But when you go and you start looking at all the titles, you're going to notice that there are repeats. There are certain templates. There are certain sentence structures. And those things can help you to generate an idea. don't worry about copying. I mean, don't rip off a title completely. But as someone famous once said, good artists...

copy, but great artists steal. I don't know if it was Picasso or maybe it's just Austin Kleon and his amazing book that's called Steal Like an Artist. But the point though is, is that you can go there and find out what it is that these publishing companies that have lots of money and do a lot of research, what exactly are they using? Now you can start off with your foot in the right step.

going in the right direction right from the get-go. All right, so after you've gone to, say, like a Barnes & Noble or a library, and you've looked at the bestsellers or the top books, and you're starting to get an idea of some of the sentence structures, Sit down with a pen and paper and start analyzing your book and fitting it into some of those sentence structures that you've seen. If you're in fiction, go ahead and start listing out character, character qualities, settings.

genre words that you can think of that fit yours, all right? And then once you've developed that list, go ahead and apply it to the template that we talked about. If you're in nonfiction, start looking at the pain points.

What are the words that your target market would use when they're thinking about the book? What kind of results do they want? What kind of life do they want to live once they've done this? What is it that they truly want to develop because they read your book? What do they want to learn?

a bunch of sentence fragments and pieces of the sentence all laid out in a list. Now, once you have those two lists, again, apply it to some of the formulas that you've seen on the bestseller list and see what you can come up with. All right.

Another way of coming up with a great book title is using something called book title generators. Now, back in the day, a book title generator was this kind of chart and it would be like, okay, what month were you born?

What's the first letter of your mother's maiden name? Oh, there's your book title. No, these things are so much cooler today. If you type into Google book title generators and you click on the Kindlepreneur article there, you'll find a list of all of the really cool book title generators that are out there. that are specific to genres or subject matters. That's a big thing. There are a lot of book title generators that only specialize in say like science fiction or specialize in fantasy.

we've done all the work for you so you can access the best book title generator lists based off of your style of book. But here's the thing. Some of the really, really good ones are ones that have used kind of that bestseller tactic we just talked about.

They have gone through and looked at the sentence structures of a bestselling book title. They have looked at the type of words or the grammar structure of some of the best titles out there. And they've created this giant database of hundreds, if not. thousands of potential book titles you can use. So go ahead and check some of those out and see if they provide you with an opportunity, if they can either spark a little bit of creativity or give you the exact book title you need.

But some of the ones that I highly recommend checking out, though, that are just a bit different are ones like Lulu's title score. You'll find the link to this in the show notes. But what's really awesome about this is once you think you have a great... book title, go ahead and put it into Lulu's title score. I have to say that very clearly because I almost want to always over the words. Lulu title score.

and it will go through its database and it will actually give you a grade. It will say, hey, based off of all of the best-selling books we've ever seen throughout the past 50 plus years, we think... that yours has this much of a chance of being in that bestseller title list. So come up with your book title, whether or not you're looking at books and coming up with your own or using a book title generator, and go to Lulu Title Score and check it out.

See what they have to say. Another thing that I think is really important is also going to picfu.com or any other. survey service. PicFu.com specializes in allowing authors to be able to test ideas. You can go there and for a certain amount of money, you can...

have different book covers and they'll have people judge and tell you which one's the best or titles or book descriptions. I specifically used it when I was trying to test two different book descriptions for the book Battlefield Earth and it was clear that one was by far the best and the old one was terrible same thing with titles so you can use that for titles and actually see which one it is in case you're stuck all right so let's recap on this

Titles are very important, okay? They can make a huge difference as we learn from Haddleman's experiences. But the way we go about it isn't about sitting back and just coming up with a title. We can use data from the market and do research and see what's really working. We can go to amazon.com and see the best books. We can go to Barnes and Noble. We can go to the library. But if you take the time and really look at them, you'll see that at this moment.

There's a certain style, sentence structure, or theme that the big publishing companies are using when they're trying their next book. We can take advantage of that. Then once you have kind of that understanding, go ahead and start listing and applying that to the formula that you just found. Or you can also go to a book title generator and check out some of what they have to offer.

Let it be a little bit of serendipity and help you to come up with something. Once you have your titles though, be sure to go to something like Lulu title score and check out the score they give you and see if you can improve it there. You can also use picfu.com to try to see what... strangers have to say about your title and whether or not you've got the right one. That way you can choose the best one and apply it to your book.

So we've covered some of the creative ways of coming up with your book title. And again, it's not about just sitting back and coming up with something. There truly are some formulas out there to help you have a better book title. And with this, I hope you now have a great idea of being able to systematically come up with something that'll give your book a better chance of a best-selling title. And with that, I'm Dave Chesson of the Book Marketing Show podcast, signing off.