'Yaks, Yurts, and Yoga Pants' ???
Issue 10
It’s all about the title, the title, the title.
Fact: You need to provide your book with the very best title you can to arouse curiosity, interest, and an agent or publisher.
Fact: You might not get to keep it anyway.
BOTTOM LINE: when a publisher takes on your book, it means a big investment on which they want a big return. Their expertise will determine which title is the best bet for selling your book.
That said, there is more to it.
You are writing your book. You are pouring your heart and soul as well as every minute possible into making your book the very best you’ve ever written. You choose words with care, study story and sentence structure, build scenes, and create convincing characters. When you approach an agent or publisher, you want to show your best work—and that includes demonstrating it in the title.
A book’s title is the first opportunity the writer gets to impress an audience. Not only can it act as a hook to grab a potential reader, it is its own link by which the reader locates an actual book, be it at an on-line store, a brick-and-mortar bookstore, or the library. It can be searched and then found—often with blurbs and excerpts—at multiple locations at once. Title alone does that much work, so the sellers—the bookstores, the publishers, and YOU—want it to be strong enough to handle all that responsibility.
You want that title to grab the agent/publisher or any potential reader and make them take a look between the covers. Your ability to create a good title is all the more important if you are self-publishing, because then the marketing division consists of … well, you. If you are publishing traditionally, then you only have to get as far as the agent or publisher, because then the responsibility is over to them, but that is the all-important ‘get’.
So then, how do you create a really good title?
Some people are gifted when it comes to titles. They appear in the writer’s brain—sometimes unasked—and they work. Other writers have to struggle to create them. Regardless of how you arrive at your book’s title, scrutinize it closely to see how it fits the following guidelines.1
First, consider these characteristics of a good title
It should be easy to remember—short and pithy, a single word even, or something with a cadence or alliteration and still not too long—it’s suggested you don’t go over 5 words in length.
[in non-fiction particularly, subtitles are often used to expand on what the title references, but the title itself is short]
It should be evocative of the work—whether fiction or non-fiction. You want the reader to open the book or read the back of it and immediately get a feel for your style and the content. The title should be consistent with those and make the reader want to see how it connects with the book.
A title should be reasonably unique—you don’t really want your book confused with someone else’s, plus a unique title is easier to remember
It should also be easy to say, because readers don’t like stumbling over words when they are referring to a book they’ve read or want to read
Research
Look at how successful books have been titled and see how they demonstrate the characteristics of a good title
Check titles in your book’s genre—some genres have particular styles that are commonly used.
Mystery is a good example. You can find many books that start out with “The Mystery of…” or “The Case of…”.
Cozies in particular favor wordplay, creating titles that tie the detective’s hobby or day job with the book’s mystery.
For my own series, I used titles that mirrored the cadence of well-known song titles: Where the Bodies Lie Buried (hum “Home on the Range" for a minute, then think ’where the bodies lie buried all day’); Sweet Corn, Fields, Forever (“Strawberry Fields Forever”); and Flying Purple People Seater (that one’s obvious if you’re old enough). The songs themselves have nothing to do with my mysteries, but the titles refer to a situation, a person, and a vehicle in the respective book, and their cadence makes them easier to remember.
See what is already out there
You don’t want to copy a title; that’s been covered. You may, however, want to copy its style. Like my use of song titles to model an existing rhythm, you will find instances of authors modeling their titles after others’.
The simplest example is the setting, character, or event title. These are often one-word titles.
Michener’s books: Centennial; Alaska; Space. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. These titles point specifically to the subject of the books, and their very sparseness lets the reader know that the whole book is about that one topic.
Sometimes a title is patterned or contains a sequence.
Eats, Shoots, and Leaves by Lynne Truss. Dimboxes, Epopts, and other Quidams by David Grambs. Both have subtitles that zero in on the specific book topic, one about punctuation and the second about unusual words
…and the title of this post: “Yaks, Yurts, and Yoga Pants”, utilizing alliteration and containing a sequence along with some silliness.
Now stop and take a good hard look at your book, its subject, its content, and its style (your style).
Is there a special phrase you associate with this book? Do you want to sound poetic? hard core? clean-cut?
Start brainstorming. Ask trusted readers familiar with the manuscript (assuming you have shown it to at least a few people) if they think it works.
You may receive advice in pointing you in several different directions. You may have to claw your way through it to find what is best. Ultimately, however, you are the judge—just as you are the final judge of any of your book’s content.
That is, until you reach the publisher (see opening remarks), at which point I urge you to first defend your title selection, then take the publisher’s advice.