The Big Bad Book Blog

A book’s title is important. It’s a crucial summary of the essence of the content inside, and one of the key ways a book pitches itself to browsers when it’s all alone on the bookstore shelf. Get the title wrong and a book is crippled from the outset. And there are all sorts of mistakes to be made in titling: genre-inappropriate titles, overly clever titles that don’t reflect what the book’s about, titles with strange formatting or cute intentional misspellings that make the book not show up in online search results.

If you’re trying to title your book and getting frustrated, you’re in good company. For instance, George Orwell almost called his dystopian masterpiece The Last Man in Europe instead of 1984. Bo-ring. And Moby-Dick was named after a real-life whale named “Mocha Dick.” It’s a good think Melville changed it up—can you imagine the cleverly named Starbucks menu items? (Starbucks got its name in part from Captain Ahab’s first mate in the novel.)

Those two title tidbits came from a website we recently came across called, quite appropriately, How Books Got Their Titles. Author Gary Dexter gives anecdotes and insights into well-known titles and how they were derived. Some—like Married Love as the title of a sex manual that very well could have been accused of obscenity upon its 1918 release—artfully spin the book’s presentation to appeal to its target audience while accurately representing the content inside. Read through these and perhaps you’ll gain a little inspiration for your own titling endeavor.

Dexter’s full-length book on the topic is called Why Not Catch-21?

Tip #1: Tweak Cover Design Conventions—But Don’t Discard Them Entirely

Business books don’t look like self-help books don’t look like fiction. This may seem obvious to some, but it is a common problem I see when we’re evaluating new books for publication or distribution. When consumers want to buy a business book, for example, they expect certain imagery, fonts, colors, and layout styles, whether they realize it or not. The best-selling business books often use large, simple fonts and bright colors to keep the focus on the title (like this or this).

If your book cover or layout doesn’t make sense for its genre, it could hurt your sales. continue reading

Ever wonder what happens to the unsold books sitting in the major publishers’ warehouses across the country once that publisher decides to call it quits on a title? In short, they get the hook. This hook isn’t the one that a roomful of people spend weeks devising to convince the media and public to pay attention to the title in the first place; it’s the one that unceremoniously pulls our featured performer offstage. continue reading