This makes you want to read my post, doesn’t it?
Imagine just seeing the spine of this book.
I think most young writers go through a phase of selecting alliterative or punny titles for things, and that (hopefully) goes away. Maybe it morphs into plainly descriptive titles or titles based on the name of a character (The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman comes to mind, a book which someone I respect very much once described as “The most perfect book the world has ever known; if only the world knew about it.”)
But what makes for a good title? First, I think we have to step back further and define what we mean by “good.”
A good book title is probably something that gets attention. That’s a broad statement, and it has to be. A title has to do even more work than a book cover because sometimes a prospective reader/buyer won’t see the cover until after hearing about the name of the book, whether through friends or catalogs or whatever. So it’s got to be something that will pressure the reader to investigate further–picking the book off the shelf, looking it up on amazon, etc.
But this assumes that the ultimate purpose of your title is to get people to buy your book, or at least read it. No doubt a valuable and respectable end. But shouldn’t a title do a little more than that? The best titles are those that lend further meaning to a story or book, the ones that you read at first and go, “That’s interesting,” and then after reading the book you say, “Yeah, that’s right. That’s exactly it. Absolutely.” Often these are phrases from the text (or modified version of them), as in Too Loud a Solitude, one of my favorite books (and a title that just sort of occurs to me out of the blue once in a while, which must be a good sign). Or a title like Cloud Atlas. Maybe it’s this pressure to be profound (but not over the top), meaningful (but not sentimental), and descriptive (but not giving away) that frustrates me and makes the process so difficult.
There’s also the possibility that my work simply isn’t good enough (yet) to deserve and inspire remarkable titles, but let’s not get into that just now.
It seems logical that the best titles both get your attention and hold a level of meaning or authority that complements the writing within. But I don’t know what that means. Is The Night in Question a good title? Or is it merely better on a Tobias Wolff collection than when attached to a harlequin romance? Or is it simply a matter or taste, whereby I prefer it used for Wolff because I much prefer his writing? It’s possible that the title is quite fitting and useful for the romance book, maybe even more so than for the literary book.
And maybe that’s the real point. Maybe it’s (please forgive me) what’s inside that counts. The title’s important, sure, for marketing and being able to talk about your book/story without feeling embarrassed about how crappy it is. But the cover art is important, too. Very important. But in the end you want the words on the interior to supersede the title and cover design, because otherwise it means your work had little to offer. If a title and cover aren’t reduced to being ancillary, then what was the point in reading the book? The best covers and titles should only do as much as setting the bar higher for what’s inside. (Isn’t that why romance novels generally have such awful covers? To make sure our expectations for the prose aren’t too high?)
So you see, Mr. Workshop professor, a title only means as much as the prose allows it. If the story’s worthless, the title won’t matter. If the story’s good, the title will be remembered. If the story is great, however, the title will be important whether it’s effective/good or not. If it’s not, readers will remember it for not doing justice to the story; if it is, readers will remember how finely picked out it was. Either way, the story’s respected, and that’s what counts.
A quick link barrage:
Lulu apparently decided they know how to figure out if a title will be successful on the bookshelves. Unfortunately their study is incredibly skewed and the data are almost forced into submission. Also I don’t understand why a question with only two possible answers is assumed to be accurate only 30% of the time. (See article for what I mean.) The study’s biggest flaw, however, is that it’s based on the assumption that a title is the direct influence for sales, rather than, you know, the book itself.
Certainly there’s some truth to that, if you care to consider what’s at the top of Goodreads’ best book titles list.
Strangely, the #7 book on the best titles list comes in at #5 on the worst titles list. (But also, #1 also comes in at #8, and apparently Stephanie Meyer is worse than I am at coming up with titles. Or maybe her books suck. I don’t know.)
Have fun with government document titles. (Among them: Don’t be Brainwashed! and Squirrel Talk.) Here’s another government document title repository. Gems: Child Maltreatment: A “What to Do” Guide for Professionals Who Work With Children, and the Hill Bros. coffee can chronology field guide.
It's got a four-star rating.
Here’s someone who will tell you about long titles versus short book titles. It will be fake-exciting and somewhat irritating and not really applicable to fiction. Yay.
Finally, for those of you familiar with the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for worst first lines, there’s a similar contest for titles: the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year (or just the Diagram Prize). Last year’s winner: Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes. Past winners: Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality, and How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art.
Tags: book titles, diagram prize, titles
Sam crosses out my titles.
I know precisely how that feels…
I once ended up with a story entitled Bubbles because I was so bad at writing titles. (I am under the conceit that the new title is better, but I won’t post it here because I need my ego at the moment.) My favorite title story came from Sharyn Mccrumb. The main character of her novel is a scientist/author whose agent had him title his book “Bimbos of the Death Sun.” The author, embarrassed of the title, is still obliged to attend a convention to promote the book. The fun part, the actual author says the joke’s on her as she is now the author with a book entitled “Bimbos of the Death Sun,” actually a good read by the by. Curiously, the title is a clear sci/fi fantasy trope, but the novel is a mystery with literary tendencies. Wonder what that says about titles and expectations.