Coming up with catchy titles for your book is something writers of all genres face. The good news is, the process of working through title options, for chapters as well as the book itself, is a great way to solidify your content focus, practice writing tight, and more. Plus, it can provide a fun break from the structural work and the line-by-line aspects of writing. In addition, a book’s cover – including its title – have been found to play an important role in driving book purchases. With all that in mind, here are four tips to creating compelling titles for your book.
Consider Genre Expectations
A potential way to gain more eyeballs is to follow the structure of books with titles that are currently popular with readers. For example, some historical novels rely heavily on settings, and may incorporate a descriptive nod to a place in the title that will become meaningful to readers as a result. Example bestsellers include Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah, and The Boy from Block 66 by Limor Regev.
You may find your genre has several title structures that are popular. Regardless of whether you feel comfortable with using one of those stylistic approaches, it is wise to understand general genre conventions. For instance, single-word titles are somewhat rare in fiction these days. But they crop up a lot in nonfiction, partly because there’s often a subtitle, which allows for more to be shared.
That was true back in the ’80s, when James Gleick first published Chaos: Making a New Science. It remains the case with bestsellers such as Susan Cain’s work in support of introspective achievers, titled Quiet, and her most recent bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club pick, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. Or there’s the ghostwritten memoir, Spare, from Prince Harry (where a subtitle perhaps was deemed to take the spotlight off the single word chosen, related to the emotional impact of the secondary status in his father’s eyes that it alludes to).
Find Ways to Pique Curiosity
One thing all good titles share is an intriguing aspect. For instance, who wouldn’t wonder about what’s in store with a book titled You’re on Fire, It’s Fine!, Katie K. May’s new work on raising teens with self-destructive tendencies. For a historical novel about a worker at an animal menagerie and citizens trapped during the Franco-Prussian war, Stef Penney chose the title, The Beasts of Paris. Meanwhile, classics with names that draw readers in include John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Sometimes the mood the words produce is part of what entices readers, such as with the harsh sound of the i in knife, and the heavy d’s and t’s of Salmon Rushdie’s new work, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. Or there’s the ominous sounding title and vague open-endedness of Tim O’Brien’s award-winning recap of the harsh realities of fighting in the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried.
The same approach can be used to opposite effect, when selecting words that trip off the tongue lightly, or have a soothing sound. Consider the magical fantasy by Sylvie Cathrall, titled A Letter to The Luminous Deep. Or Roman Castilleja, a memoirist I edited, titled his contemplative work that includes poetry with the smooth, solid sounding, title of Rowing Home (evoking the question of where home is, and why he would “row” there).
Regardless of the choices, title words usually riff off the work’s focus. In Castilleja’s case, for instance, his title ties to the life-changing moment when he got trapped underneath a rowboat, which caused him to reevaluate life – the content’s focus.
Draw In Readers with Telling Details
As with the memoir noted above, giving at least a clue to what’s ahead for the reader is part of the title’s (and subtitle's) job. The same holds true with many chapter titles. Yet I’ve evaluated one work about finding Mrs. Right in which every chapter was initially headed with just names like Joan, Sarah, and Margaret. For him, those names likely evoked a host of details, such as what the lady looked like, when he’d first met her, and their best and worst moments. But readers scanning the book’s Contents page would have no experiences to connect the names to, leaving them in the dark about what they’d learn from the chapters, and his work overall. A similar miss can happen if a writer unintentionally titles a chapter with the name of a place, or unclear words such as “Maxims” by itself (maxims for what purpose, or centered around what subject?).
In the case of Castilleja’s memoir, he had take-home messages from his life experiences to share with readers. So, the work’s subtitle started with “Lessons from” to make this How To aspect clear. For journalist Ryan Jacobs’s expose on the high-stakes world of truffle growing and sales, The Truffle Underground, he makes the overall focus of different sections of the semi-chronological work clear by dividing the book’s parts up by location, such as “The Field” for stories that happened out in truffle fields, and “The Market” for part III. The simplicity of those words is made up for by following them with a higher-octane word that relates to the the section's focus, such as "Seduction."
With some title decisions, you might benefit from thinking bigger, in terms of pegging a subtitle or chapter title to the larger story that you want to convey, rather than just recapping what happened. For example, if a chapter covers someone’s move from one country to another, and that move mirrors the larger search many immigrants from there have had for a better life, perhaps you would evoke that larger story with language such as “A New Beginning,” “Finding Home in France,” or something similar.
Mix Up Title Approaches
Variety spices up writings, just as it does with life. So, while it often helps to hint at the content related to titles, others may be firmly planted in mystery mode. For instance, in a memoir from a university press that I provided early input on, I recommended “Uncovering a Hidden Past” as the title for a chapter about the author’s early involvement in a nascent field of history whose development the book also covers. For Jacobs’s expose on truffle sales, he alludes to the intrigue and dangers involved in hunting for these mushrooms by using chapter titles such as “The Peasant’s Golden Secret” and “The King’s Betrayal.” Those titles appear alongside short, evocative ones like “Poison.” Meanwhile, a few other chapter are topped relatively straightforward monikers, including “Shaved” and “Middlemen,” which helps the spicier titles stand out.
Good titles won’t sell a work in and of themselves, though. In The Truffle Underground, Jacobs also uses stellar quotes (epigraphs) at the start of each section to encapsulate their focus, as one example. That is, the same need to be intentional about your writing in general applies to the titling process, when it comes to factors such as focusing on tone, clarity, and emotional impact.
By Barbra A. Rodriguez
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