As a fiction author or a business owner who is writing a book for followers to download, your book title is one of the top three elements that can make or break your book’s success.
Since this element of a book’s success is so important, listed below are five steps for choosing your book’s title that hopefully will take away a lot of the frustration you have. Let’s look at each step individually.
Step One.
Your title should be easy to remember, simple, short, easy to say and understand, descriptive, indicative of your book’s genre, a title you are proud of and enjoy saying to other people, goes together with your cover image, and cannot be confused with any other book currently in the marketplace.
Step Two.
Create a list of title options; ideally you should create about 20 titles. Put each title on its own line on a sheet of paper. Then put the paper away for a day or two. The next time you look at the list of your title options, read through the list, and usually one title will most likely appear as if in 3-D as the best title for your book. Circle the title that you like the best.
Step Three.
Choose your top 10 favorite titles. Then send the titles to three of your best friends. Ask them to choose which title they like the best. Review the titles that were the most popular. Do you agree with your friends’ choices? Let’s look at the next step.
Step Four.
Choose the title that you feel meets all the requirements as noted in this article. Write the title on Post-it notes or places around your living environment where you can look at only that one title for the next eight hours. At the end of the day, if the title is still one of your favorites, then write it on a piece of paper and get ready for the next step.
Step Five.
Now it’s time to create a subtitle for your book. It doesn’t matter if you are writing a series of books, or if you are writing a standalone version of fiction or nonfiction. Most authors will always include a subtitle that further defines what the book is about and provides readers with several keywords that can be typed into a search engine to find your book if a reader forgets the actual title of your book.
After you have completed these five steps, your book will have a definite advantage for attracting more readers—especially more readers than your fellow authors who didn’t take the time to follow these guidelines.
If you have already written a book and it is published, please share with our readers how you chose the title of your book and how it impacted the sales results.
